Neville Chamberlain Lives

Alan Cohn

Alan M. Cohn is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist, former Democratic Nominee for Congress in FL-15, and a member of the Hillsborough County Democratic Party Jewish Caucus.

We live by the motto “Never Again,” a lesson ingrained in our consciousness by the Holocaust. There’s also Winston Churchill’s famous quote, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

But here we are.

Neville Chamberlain has gone down in history for his tragic miscalculation that if you appease an aggressor, you can keep the peace. His sin was naivety. Today, the miscalculation and sin are more ominous.

For 80 years, NATO has saved the world from the Soviets and their successors. It was NATO that came to our defense after 9/11. “An attack on one is an attack on all,” says Article 5 of the NATO Charter.

But now, we’ve given our allies the shaft and hitched our wagon to Russia. Why Trump is so deferential to Putin remains a mystery, But the implications are clear. We’ve abdicated our role as leaders of the free world. It’s not that Trump and Vance have failed to learn from history; it’s because they mistake authoritarianism for strength.

Ukraine isn’t part of NATO, and Americans are understandably tired of endless wars over dubious claims like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

We don’t have boots on the ground in Ukraine. All Ukraine has ever asked for are the tools it needs to fight for themselves.

We support Ukraine because it’s the right thing to do and because it’s in our self-interest.

The character assassination of President Zelensky is grotesque. He’s a Jew. His grandfather fought the Nazis. His relatives died in the Holocaust. He’s trying to save his country, damn it. The fact he’s being impugned by those who’ve never served, fought, or accomplished much of anything is a reflection on them and not him.

We support Ukraine because Putin has made it clear his goal is to re-assemble the Soviet domination of Europe. So, where do you draw the line? Poland? Which is a member of NATO, and we are bound by treaty to defend it with our boots on the ground and our sons and daughters sacrificing their lives to prevent the march of authoritarianism from reaching our shores.

Democrats get that. So do Republicans. For 80 years, despite the country’s deep political and partisan divisions, Presidents from both parties have realized this is the existential threat that requires our fidelity to the NATO alliance and, by virtue of it, to our own defense.

Yet, there are those, including members of Congress, that don’t get that. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) recently posted on X: “Have you ever noticed how for decades now Hollywood always made Russia the bad guy in their movies. It’s like Americans have been programmed to believe Russia must be the enemy at all times.”

Our relationship with Russia thawed after the end of the Cold War and refroze after Putin invaded Georgia, Chechnya, Moldova, and Ukraine.

But Marjorie believes Russia got a bad rap.

The outrage here at home and across the world is lost on many Trump supporters who contend he’s playing four-dimensional chess, and it’s all “art of deal” stuff. I don’t know if they actually believe that, don’t know any better, or are saying that because any divergence from orthodoxy is fatal under current circumstances.

So, we speak out and stand up because when we stand up for Ukraine and NATO, we stand up for ourselves.

As the saying goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Alan Cohn