Memo to Europe: Remember Neville Chamberlain
You cannot appease a tyrant. You must hit back hard.
To: European leaders
From: Robert Reich
It is impossible to appease a tyrant.
You struck a trade deal with Trump last year. He is now threatening to rip it up and apply economic coercion and even military force if you do not allow him to annex Greenland. He is also on the brink of allowing Russia to annex part of Ukraine.
Today, on his “Truth Social,” Trump reposted a comment saying, “China and Russia are the boogeymen when the real threat is the U.N., NATO and [Islam].”
This is madness.
Most Americans are as opposed to Trump’s wild and illegal actions as you are. But we have no means of expressing our opposition because Trump’s Republicans control Congress and, in effect, the Supreme Court. You do have means.
I urge you to activate your so-called anti-coercion instrument, colloquially known as the “trade bazooka,” which will block some of America’s access to EU markets or impose export controls, among a broader list of potential countermeasures.
I need not remind you of Neville Chamberlain’s interactions with Adolf Hitler in 1938. Chamberlain met Hitler three times, culminating in the infamous Munich Agreement, which allowed Germany to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler’s promise of peace. Returning to London, Chamberlain waved a signed Anglo-German declaration and famously declared “peace for our time.” Instead, Chamberlain had merely emboldened Hitler’s aggression. Hitler soon broke his promise, leading to World War II.
The time for appeasing Trump is over.


At this point, I worry that our media, election, and education systems have been so corrupted by money, the people so demoralized by the disappearance of law and decency, that the only thing that can save us is the EU banding together to put this lunatic in his place. They must crush our markets and upend our way of life to an extent that the donor class running all this has no choice but to give up on Trump and let him be ousted.
Save us EU, you're our only hope!
By gum. Just yesterday I asked my supine Dems whether they wanted to go in history as Chamberlains or as Churchills.