Working out what a world leader actually means when they deliver public statements has always been core to the art of diplomacy. Traditionally, this has been a subtle art: what does it mean when a president or prime minister who usually says “serious” says “substantial” instead? Does calling a crisis “severe” suggest an escalation versus “acute”?
It is safe to say Donald Trump has changed the game on this front.
So what, then, should the UK Government take from Donald Trump’s decision to liken Sir Keir Starmer to Neville Chamberlain at his Easter Monday press conference? Saying the UK has “a long way to go”, Trump said: “We won’t want another Neville Chamberlain, do we agree? We don’t want Neville Chamberlain.”
It is now the job of the UK’s diplomatic service to work out what the hell Donald Trump thinks he means by this, and how much that matters. Chamberlain was the UK prime minister in the last years before the Second World War, primarily remembered for his policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Most notoriously, Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler in September 1938, promising to allow Hitler to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia without any reprisal from the British Empire. Chamberlain stood in front of the media and announced the deal would secure “peace for our time”. Less than a year later, Europe was plunged into devastation.
There are nuances to Chamberlain’s story, though few would expect Donald Trump – not exactly known as a scholar – to know them. While Chamberlain did at least seem to partially believe Hitler could be bought off, or appeased, most historians agree he was also playing something of a double game.
Britain was not, in the late 1930s, ready to fight a full-scale war in Europe. Public sentiment, still heavily influenced by the horrors of the trenches in the First World War, remained strongly against a further major conflict. The UK also needed time to rearm to have any hope of matching Germany’s forces.
Chamberlain talked of peace while funding the UK’s preparations for war. Crucially, when Chamberlain did step down in 1940, he urged the King to send for Winston Churchill, rather than for Lord Halifax, one of the most vocal proponents of appeasement, who might otherwise have led a unity government. History may have been harsher on Chamberlain than he deserved.
The difficulty of playing a double game in diplomacy is that you can’t say that you’re doing so publicly, or it doesn’t work. That’s surely a position eerily familiar to Keir Starmer at the moment. Donald Trump’s analogy to Chamberlain might not be a bad one. It’s just incredibly obvious that Trump hasn’t stopped to think which role he himself might be playing in the story.
Starmer is taking serious political flak for his constant appeasement of Trump. Any UK involvement in Trump’s Iranian conflict is unpopular with the UK public, as is Trump himself. A majority of the British public do not want the King to go ahead with his State Visit to the US later this month. Many Brits are sick of seeing their Prime Minister play nice with a US President who constantly belittles both him and Britain itself.
But Starmer is stuck in a similar position to Chamberlain. Nato without the USA is, at present, a largely empty proposition. Ukraine might no longer receive financial support from the USA, but it still needs to be able to buy US munitions, albeit with European money. The UK and US intelligence agencies are so closely integrated that they don’t function independently.
On defence, on trade, on intelligence, and on numerous other matters, the UK is not in a position to tell America to go screw itself, however cathartic that might be – at least not yet. Starmer might indeed be playing the role of Chamberlain, but if he’s appeasing anyone, it’s the US President.
Trump himself was almost certainly imagining Iran as the bad guys when he made his analogy. There is little sign the President ever thinks more deeply than that. But since his second election victory, Trump has “joked” about annexing Canada or Mexico, and seriously threatened to seize Greenland. He has said he runs Venezuela now, and said he will seize Iran’s oil.
He is openly seeking to expand America’s dominion, and has even suggested doing so would be essential for his “America First” project. Against that backdrop, perhaps Donald Trump should be a little more careful before he draws analogies to the Second World War.
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