If Trump’s goal in opening peace talks with Putin is to end the current Ukraine war and ensure Russia doesn’t begin a new chapter a few years down the road, he has a strange way of going about it. Instead of presenting Putin with a list of actions the U.S. will take unless Russia agrees to workable guarantees of Ukraine’s borders, Trump’s Secretay of Defence announced NATO membership for Ukraine is off the table. Then, his Vice President infers the right-of-center German Christian Democrats should hook up with the pro-Russian Alternative for Germany (Afd).

If this wasn’t bad enough, Trump chose to denigrate Ukraine’s President as a Dictator responsible for the continuing war. Trump demands President Zelinsky hold an election. According to Trump, he has little support in Ukraine. (The latest poll has Zellinsky’s popularity at 57%),

Trump proposed that Ukraine pledge its natural resources for U.S. development to secure any more U.S. aid, and no U.S. forces will ever be involved in maintaining Ukraine’s borders. What is strange is that many of the resources are in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine,

Putin must be dancing a jig over his good fortune. He can visualize sharing a Nobel Peace Prize with Trump while waiting to devour the rest of Ukraine for dessert. He doesn’t have to give up a thing.

What caused Trump to denounce the Ukrainian President? He dared complain about his exclusion from the talks that would decide his nation’s fate. One of the few remaining columnists, George Will, whose first memories were of World War II, reminds us of a similar circumstance on the road to that horrible war. The leaders of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany gathered in Munich to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia. The one excluded was the leader of that nation.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain claimed the agreement reached there promised “Peace in our Time.” Seven months later, Germany completed the takeover of the doomed nation. History gives Zelinsky every reason to object to Trump and Putin deciding the life or death of his country. Trump even excluded friendly European nations from the talks. The U.S. President’s anti-involvement stance echoes Chamberlain’s observation about “a quarrel in a faraway land between people of which we know nothing.”