Tisdall compares Trump's Ukraine policy with Chamberlain's 1938 Munich strategy

Tisdall calls the approach “shameless appeasement” and lists four steps

The Guardian published a bylined opinion column by Simon Tisdall on October 22, 2026, under the headline “Donald Trump has sold out Ukraine. He makes Chamberlain look like a man of iron principle.” Its standfirst says “Europe’s leaders can no longer trust a word that comes out of Washington” and calls for “concrete steps to punish Trump.” Tisdall, described in the piece as a Guardian foreign affairs commentator, writes in the Comment is Free section. An accompanying photograph shows Vladimir Putin and Trump in Alaska in August 2025, credited to Kevin Lamarque/Reuters.

The column’s central claim concerns the state of US-Russian diplomacy. Tisdall writes that talks on agreeing terms for Ukraine are at “an advanced stage,” after meetings in St Petersburg that week, and describes those terms as the “shoddy terms” of what he calls a “precedent-setting American sell-out of Ukraine.” He says Trump has zigzagged over the war ever since returning to office and, “panicked by record-low poll ratings,” appears “determined to scapegoat Ukraine and force its de facto capitulation.”

To support that claim, Tisdall lists four recent steps: Trump’s “shocking decision to fund Putin’s war machine by buying Russian diesel”; his “waiving of tougher sanctions”; what he calls “mysterious, lethal interruptions in US satellite and intelligence sharing with Kyiv”; and a “renewed attempt to oust Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.” He describes Trump as “the skulking Judas, the craven Brutus of the modern age” and writes: “He makes Chamberlain look like a man of iron principle. All that’s lacking is an umbrella.”

The historical comparison runs through the column, and Tisdall opens by cautioning that historical comparisons are always inexact and that no conflict precisely mirrors another. He nonetheless calls Trump’s policy toward Putin “shameless appeasement” that carries more than “a noxious whiff” of Chamberlain’s failed 1938 attempt in Munich to head off war with Nazi Germany. Tisdall argues that Chamberlain’s peacemaking efforts had the enthusiastic backing of most people in Britain and France who, like Chamberlain, were desperate to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the first world war, and that history largely has not been fair to the former prime minister. He writes that Trump “enjoys no equivalent public support for his treachery” and does not face the prospect of a US war with Russia, and he calls the betrayal of Ukraine “cynically self-interested, globally dangerous and utterly contemptible.”

Tisdall then asks why Trump acts this way and offers three explicitly partial explanations. The first is personal: Tisdall writes that Trump “doesn’t like Zelenskyy” and says it is obvious why. In an explicit comparison to Trump, Tisdall calls Ukraine’s leader “everything he is not: courageous, principled, morally unimpeachable, hard-working and politically savvy.”

The second explanation is “money and power.” Tisdall says Trump has set his “shrivelled, grasping heart” on normalising relations with Putin’s “repressive rogue regime,” “opening the way for lucrative deals on energy, raw materials, and control of the Arctic and outer space.” He says Trump likes the idea of a world dominated by three all-powerful blocs and authoritarian leaders: himself, Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

The third is what Tisdall calls the “unexplained, sinister hold Putin appears to exercise” over Trump, whom he describes as a “former society playboy, New York real-estate developer and serial bankrupt.”

Tisdall writes that, whatever Trump’s motivations, the short-term consequences of the policy he describes could be fatal for Ukraine’s bid to repel the Russian invaders and survive as a sovereign democratic state. On the ground in Ukraine, he says Ukraine has been “winning, or at least holding its own” for much of the year in the contested lands of the Donbas and along the Black Sea littoral. He credits homemade missiles and drones with taking the fight to “Russia’s industrial heartlands and oil refineries,” “significantly undermining Putin’s ability to fund his war,” and says Zelenskyy “has also been winning the battle for international opinion, particularly in Europe,” which he says is itself under escalating Russian hybrid attack. Amid what he calls Trump’s “egregious backsliding,” Tisdall says European nations “have taken the lead in supporting Kyiv militarily, financially and diplomatically.”

He raises, without settling, a possible connection between Trump’s “sudden, divisive, decisive lurch towards unabashed support for Putin” and the condition Tisdall attributes to Russia: unsustainable battlefield casualties, severe economic damage and deepening international isolation, leaving it at “increased risk of regime-toppling humiliation.” “Whatever the truth,” he writes, Trump’s “Putin bailout” — which he calls a “duplicitous Russia rescue act” — “could turn the tide.”

The consequences Tisdall warns about extend beyond Ukraine. He calls Trump’s “perfidy” “the shame of the world” and argues that the world, not only Ukraine, will pay the price over the longer term. The calculated attempt to force Kyiv’s submission, he says, imperils everyone, and Ukraine, if it is allowed to fall, will haunt Europe and “the wider geopolitical biosphere for decades, as was the case with Czechoslovakia after 1938.” Tisdall characterizes Trump’s policy toward Putin as a “Molotov-Ribbentrop-style pact” with “a warmongering dictator, an indicted war criminal, a smirking, bigoted mass murderer,” and warns that it may fatally compromise the western alliance and spell the end of NATO as an effective defence against eastern totalitarianism. He asks whether democratic governments in western Europe — those in the Elysée, the German and Polish chancelleries, in Brussels or in Downing Street — can now trust a word that comes out of Washington, and says the alliance’s “bond is broken” and its “honour in shreds.”

Tisdall places the Russian policy within what he calls a pattern of “lesser treacheries”: arbitrary tariff wars “waged against trading partners,” the “traducing of loyal allies,” threats against Canada and Greenland, the abandonment of a two-state solution in Palestine and, most recently, “his disastrous war against Iran.” He argues that the Iran war is “the real reason why US midterm voters, facing inflated fuel prices, are turning against him and his Republicans,” while “his Russian folly may be the most egregious and consequential.” Citing an MI5 warning, Tisdall says Britain and Europe are under daily attack from Russia, its spy networks, saboteurs, cyber warriors and paid agents, and he says reports that week suggest it is menacing western space satellites as well. His warning is blunt: “Don’t look to turncoat Trump for help. He’s on the other side.”

Uncredited Guardian item urges concrete action against Trump

A separate Guardian item published alongside Tisdall’s column, without a byline, makes a parallel case under the headline “Trump’s Munich moment is a disaster in the making for Europe’s security and defence.” The item says a Putin victory “accepted and facilitated by the US” would fatally damage respect for international law and sovereign borders, and that untold numbers of war crimes and crimes against humanity would go uninvestigated and unpunished in “a partitioned, fractured Ukraine.” It adds that China and others might soon follow “the precedent established by successful Russian aggression.” The item concludes that Britain and its European allies “can no longer afford to hold back,” and that indignant speeches at the UN, off-the-record murmurings and carefully calibrated verbal slaps on the wrist “will not suffice, if they ever did.”

The item names the leaders it says must act: Britain’s Andy Burnham, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Friedrich Merz and Canada’s Mark Carney “must lead the way in confronting Trump head-on, even at the cost of a definitive break with Washington.” It urges them to “Tell Trump publicly to knock it off,” to “Take concrete steps to punish him for rewarding Putin” and to prove that the world’s democracies “will not be bullied and sold out.” It warns that if Trump wants to be remembered as the US president who “shattered the western alliance and ensured the triumph of authoritarianism,” then keeping “on licking Putin’s boots” would leave him on his own, and it notes that the UK, EU and NATO member states, Japan, South Korea and other like-minded countries are “far from powerless, economically, militarily and in numerous other ways.” The item also claims that, despite what polls may suggest, healthy majorities of their citizens reject “the hateful far-right lies and sick populist myths” on which Trump and his “pitiful emulators” feed.

The item closes on how the western alliance is bound: “The US ultimately leads the west by consent, not by right. Consent can be withdrawn.” It suggests Burnham could start by ordering the closure of US military bases in Britain, which it calls “offensive symbols of a hostile occupying power,” and ends: “At all costs, Trump’s treachery must not stand.”

Neither the column nor the linked item is a news report. The column carries a single byline, the linked item carries none, and neither supplies independent corroboration for its claims about the state of the US-Russian talks, the administration’s actions, the course of the war in Ukraine or Russia’s condition. Both pieces make an argument for allied leaders to act.