Like US wartime presidents before him, Donald Trump made a priority of, and has succeeded, in attaining air superiority over Iran. Unfortunately, he has failed to acquire even the slightest control over his own mouth. He has now sprayed just about all of his natural allies with friendly fire. His latest jibe yesterday was to compare Keir Starmer to Neville Chamberlain.
That is grossly unfair – to Chamberlain. Unlike the current prime minister, the one who led Britain between 1937 and 1940 could at least make a decision, and held mass support among the public for most of his time in office. True, his behaviour in and after Munich looks naive in hindsight, but at the time the Great War was just 21 years in the past. It was an all-too-fresh memory for millions of Britons who had lost sons in the trenches. Another devastating war was the very last thing that anyone with wisdom wanted, and Chamberlain was right to pursue peace for as long as he possibly could.
Moreover, in 1938 Britain was in no fit condition to wage a war against Hitler. Does anyone really think the second world war would have turned out better for Britain had Chamberlain made his solemn announcement about Britain being at war with Germany in September of that year, rather than flying off to Munich? I see an alternative reality in which Churchill becomes prime minister a year earlier, blunders into conflict with Hitler all – inadequate – guns blazing and the country gets rolled over just like France and most of the rest of western Europe eventually did. We would now be talking, possibly in German, about Churchill being the author of our greatest ever national humiliation.
Chamberlain may have talked peace, and uttered some foolish things about faraway countries, but he was no sandal-wearing pacifist. He rearmed the country. Where do you think the Spitfires came from to fight the Battle of Britain? They were not conjured up by Churchill in his first few weeks in office; the government ordered the first batch in 1936 and oversaw the construction of a factory to building them in 1938. Unlike the present government which talks about increasing the defence budget but has so far done little, as Chancellor Chamberlain really did pour more into armaments and also, crucially, the civil defence which enabled the country to withstand years of bombing raids. The barrage balloons were in place in London on the very day Chamberlain declared war.
But Trump won’t be interested in any of this; to him and to many others Chamberlain is just a byword for feebleness. He doesn’t really want to know much about the real man. Nor, in his unsubtle mind, does it seem to have occurred to him that bringing up the subject of appeasement towards malignant dictators might invite unfavourable comparisons about Trump’s own dealings with Vladimir Putin. Trump is far more guilty when it comes to abandoning Ukraine to Putin than Chamberlain was about surrendering the Sudetenland to Hitler. Trump has the military means to make a real difference in Ukraine; there was nothing that Chamberlain could have done militarily to stop Hitler trampling over Czechoslovakia.
Churchill may have turned out to be right leader for Britain in 1940, but no-one should forget that he didn’t exactly free Czechoslovakia – or Poland for that matter. In the end Britain took on and helped defeat Hitler, but only at the price of appeasing that other monster of the time, Stalin. That is the real world of global politics: it is grubby and requires democracies to do deals with aggressive powers which we might really wish we didn’t have to do. Chamberlain has been unfairly demonised for doing what nearly all prime ministers would have done had they been in his shoes.
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