Where is America’s Churchill?

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Columnist

Once upon a time, a leader of a great nation wished to avoid war at all costs. He thought it was absurd to prepare armies for combat “because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

As one of the only UK Conservative MPs voicing opposition to his own party’s prime minister, Winston Churchill replied to these words uttered by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with a damning indictment: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

The Munich Agreement was supposed to render to the English-speaking world what Chamberlain bragged of as “peace in our time.” It sought to satiate an aggressive dictator pursuing what he described as “minor” territorial changes. After all, Bohemia had been part of German-owned lands once upon a time, and all Adolf Hitler wanted were the border territories whose inhabitants spoke the same language as he and his countrymen. Surrendering the Sudetenland would end all danger of war. Less than a year later, however, Czechoslovakia was no more, and Nazi troops poured across the border into Poland.

History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes, of late. Donetsk today and Poland tomorrow? Vladimir Putin makes empty promises to America’s Chamberlain as the Slavic autocrat’s own words in a manifesto published three years ago profess a desire to subsume Ukraine and Poland as historic territories of the Russian empire.

Naively, Donald Trump thought he had the beginnings of a peace agreement after he and Putin spoke on the phone for nearly three hours on Tuesday, March 18. Reportedly, the Russian president agreed to a pause in attacks on energy and infrastructure targets in Ukraine, as long as Kyiv pledged the same. Trump hoped that his telephone diplomacy would trigger the first negotiated truce in fighting in the three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s campaign promise of ending the war trumped reality, however.

Just hours after Putin and Trump’s call, Russian troops conducted an airstrike on the energy infrastructure of Slovyansk, a city of 100,000 people in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Much of that city was left without power. Hopefully chastened, In the wake of the Russian attack, Trump telephoned Volodymyr Zelensky. The U.S. president called the conversation with the Ukrainian president “very good” and claimed “we are very much on track” for peace.

The Spectator’s Owen Matthews noted how “Putin has played Trump like a fiddle.” The desire for peace at any cost has rendered the U.S. president into little more than a pawn for the Russian dictator. Absent firm security guarantees for Ukraine, each concession will lead only to future battlefields.

In 2014, this newspaper ran an editorial to which many of our readers disagreed. Vladimir Putin had seized Crimea from Ukraine, and our editors noted that aggression unchecked only will lead to more aggression. We proposed putting the U.S. Seventh Fleet off the coast of Kaliningrad until Russia returned Crimea to Ukraine. We predicted that conquest unanswered would lead to further war.

As it was with Chamberlain, so it shall be with Trump, and eventually, American young men and women might have to pay the blood price for our current inaction. Let us pray that America finds a Churchill capable of carrying us through that “Gathering Storm.”

This article originally published in the March 24, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.