Trump Revives the Ghost of Munich Past

In a SpyTalk interview, former US envoy to NATO Lt. Gen. Doug Lute decries JD Vance insults of allies, Trump's Ukraine sellout, warns of more Putin threats

British Prime Minister shaking hands with Hitler in Munich in Sept. 1938 after agreeing to Germany’s annexation of the Czech Sudetenland. A year later the Nazis invaded Poland, touching off World War Two. (AP)

Two days before Christmas, retired U.S. Army Lt. General Doug Lute penned an open letter to then President-elect Trump about how he could bring Russia to the negotiating table and end the war in Ukraine.

A former high ranking national security official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, including a tour as U.S. ambassador to NATO, Lute argued the U.S. needed to end the “incremental” aid policy of the Biden administration and immediately give Ukraine the full panoply of weapons— most significantly, long range Army tactical missiles—that could actually make a difference on the battlefield. 

“It is not too late to do the right thing and give Ukraine what it needs,” Lute wrote in a piece for The Cipher Brief. 

To put it mildly, Trump didn’t take his advice. Perhaps that’s not a surprise given Trump’s claim on the campaign trail that he would magically end the war in a day.  But what Lute never expected, and can now scarcely believe, is that in a few short weeks, Trump would reverse 75 years of U.S. foreign policy, cozy up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, deride Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” and pressure him to accept a deal for the dismemberment of his country on Moscow’s terms, not to mention turning over half its mineral wealth to the U.S. as “payback” for military support.