The headline of this editorial is taken from Winston Churchill’s famous speech of October 5, 1938, in which he condemned the Munich Agreement. French historian Françoise Thom compares the abandonment of Ukraine by the Trump administration to those agreements between Hitler’s Germany on one side and France and England on the other, which left Czechoslovakia at the mercy of Hitler’s appetites and paved the way for the Second World War. By refusing to deliver weapons to Ukraine, the United States stains itself in infamy that will never be washed away.
“Us first!” This is the motto of totalitarian propaganda to flatter the selfishness of each voter whilst pretending to glorify the nation’s.
Georges Bernanos, Le Chemin de la Croix-des-âmes, in: Scandale de la vérité, Editions Robert Laffont, 2019, p. 683
Every nation has pages of infamy in its history that it remembers with shame. For France and Great Britain, it was, amongst others, the Munich Agreement of September 1938, which allowed Hitler to begin the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, a prelude to the invasion of that country in March 1939. The French committed this fault out of weakness, the British out of blindness. The French leaders were guilty of treason, abandoning an allied country to a predator, while harboring no illusions about Hitler’s intentions. The British leaders sinned because of wishful thinking, believing Hitler would behave “like a gentleman” once the “legitimate” security interests of the Reich were taken into account by London and Paris.
The United States is now writing its own page of ignominy. At a time when Ukraine is subjected daily to deadly bombardments and Russian forces are trying to advance along the entire front, the US has suspended the delivery to Ukraine of air defense weapons and artillery ammunition already prepared in Poland for shipment—arms of vital importance to this beleaguered country, attacked day and night. This is the second time the US has openly aided Putin’s armed forces : the Russians “liberated” the Kursk region because the Americans stopped transmitting intelligence to the Ukrainian army during the Russian offensive.
People often compare this abandonment of Ukraine to that of Czechoslovakia by France and the UK in 1938. But they forget the aggravating circumstances of American behavior. Paris and London only abandoned Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich conference. By suspending without warning long-planned deliveries at a critical moment for Ukraine’s very survival, the United States makes itself an active accomplice of the Kremlin. It stabs Ukraine in the back, as if it had conspired with Moscow to finish off their victim together. In 1938, the British were guilty of credulity, imagining Hitler would stop at the Sudetenland as he had sworn he would. The French were clear-eyed but paralyzed by a sense of their own powerlessness. Yet it would never have occurred to either of these two countries to assist Hitler in murdering a European nation. Since 2022, the Russians have never hidden their genocidal project toward Ukraine. Clearly, the Trump administration makes no bones about associating itself with this vast criminal undertaking in the 21st Century, as long as it receives a tip. It is therefore infinitely more guilty than the French and British were in 1938. The stain on the reputation of the United States will never be erased, as the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands.
Until now, the United States has been spared the tragedies of history, and this is what sets it apart from Europeans. It has never known defeat on its own soil, nor foreign occupation, nor a collaborationist government. It does not understand the devastation wrought by nationalism and ideologies. This absence of historical depth explains America’s incredible insensitivity both to Ukraine’s martyrdom and to Europe’s concerns. You have to pinch yourself when you hear Trump compare the atrocious Russo-Ukrainian war to a playground spat between children, or Vice President JD Vance actively campaigning to install Kremlin puppet governments in European democracies.
We learn about our duties either through our own misfortunes or through the misfortunes of others. The former is more effective, but the latter is gentler.
Polybius, Histories, I, 7
It is the former that Trump’s America has chosen, blithely tolerating an administration infiltrated by Russia, the only power in the world that has plotted for more than a century the destruction of the United States. But Trump’s America is beginning to pay the price. It has lost its allies, broken its trade, sabotaged its prestige in the world. Chaos is taking hold in the country, elite clans are tearing each other apart in public, civil war and the collapse of the state no longer seem an abstract prospect. Perhaps one day the betrayal of Ukraine will be seen as the first milestone on a descent into hell.
She has a degree in classical literature and spent 4 years in the USSR from 1973 to 1978. She is an agrégée in Russian and teaches Soviet history and international relations at Paris Sorbonne.