Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister (1937-1940), holds up a copy of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, which he signed with Adolf Hitler.
The Munich Agreement was agreed in Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, the French Republic, and Fascist Italy.
At Munich, Chamberlain got an international agreement that Hitler should have the Sudetenland (Sudetenland was a region in Czechoslovakia that was predominantly German-inhabited. It was located in northern and western Bohemia and northern Moravia. In exchange for Germany making no further demands for land in Europe.)
Chamberlain said on his return home from the pact with Hitler, it was: "Peace with honour, Peace for our time."
Hitler said he had "No more territorial demands to make in Europe."
The pact was also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal (Czech: Mnichovská zrada; Slovak: Mníchovská zrada), because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
"On 1 October 1938, German troops occupied the Sudetenland: Hitler had got what he wanted without firing a shot."
On March 15, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia in the rump Czecho-Slovak state, in flagrant violation of the Munich Pact.
By the 23 of August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany announced a pact to slice Eastern Europe between. Even though enemies their pact was for ten years.
The pact also secretly divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.
An explosion of a drone and tracers are seen in the sky over the city during a Russian drone strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine February 17, 2025. REUTERS
In Helsinki in 2018, the president of the United States stood onstage alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and accepted the former KGB officer's denials regarding interference in the 2016 election campaign.
Trump was asked directly which one he believed: his intelligence community or Putin. In so many words, Trump gave the answer: Putin.
In a strongly-worded statement, US House Speaker Paul Ryan said "must appreciate that Russia is not our ally". "There is no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia, which remains hostile to our most basic values and ideals," he said, adding that there was "no question" Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election.
Senior Republican Senator John McCain said it was a "disgraceful performance" by a US president. "No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant," McCain said.
Today the Russian dictator is the senior in the bromance.
Trump was asked by BBC News journalist, what his message was to Ukrainians who might feel betrayed, to which he replied:
"I hear that they're upset about not having a seat, well, they've had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily."
"You should have never started it. You could have made a deal," Trump added.
Trump did not mention that President Vladimir Putin took the decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.
Then on the 19th of February 2025, President Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv: "We are seeing a lot of disinformation and it's coming from Russia.
"With all due respect to President Donald Trump as a leader... he is living in this disinformation space."
He added that he believed "the United States helped Putin to break out of years of isolation."
Later in the day, the Ukrainian leader said the world faced the choice to be "with Putin or with peace."
Ukraine didn't start the war. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014. The annexation came after Ukraine's pro-Russian president was ousted by popular demonstrations.
Senator Durbin said in the US Senate:“Trump and his fledgling Defense Secretary publicly gave away huge concessions at the start — signalling they would not insist on a return to Ukraine’s sovereign 2014 borders or future NATO membership.
It’s also not clear from the Administration’s bewildering Munich Security Conference remarks if Trump plans to even include Ukraine, or our European allies, in the negotiations over its own future. It is no wonder that in the UK — where they remember Chamberlain’s folly all too well — Donald Trump’s early pronouncements were lambasted for their misreading of history by leaders across the political spectrum.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, in its first decision on President Trump’s use of executive power in his second term, ruled on Friday 21 2025 that he cannot, for now, remove a government lawyer who leads the watchdog agency that protects whistleblowers.
"The United States and Europe must invest in resisting Russia now or pay a far greater cost later. Russia is likely to walk away from the war (in Ukraine) emboldened and, once it has reconstituted its military capacity, spoiling for another fight to revise the security order in Europe.
Because changes to defense spending, procurement, and force posture require significant lead times, Washington and its allies must think beyond the current war in Ukraine and start making investments now to prevent Russian opportunistic aggression later on.
At every turn — the war in Georgia in 2008, Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and its deployment of troops to Syria in 2015 — Putin has grown only more willing to take risks as he comes to believe that doing so pays off. The Kremlin will look to pocket any concessions from the West for ending the current war, such as sanctions relief, to strengthen its hand for the next one."
Trump has a weakness for admiring Dictaars and wealthy people:
A 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada “will blow a hole in the US industry that we have never seen,” Jim Farley, the Ford CEO, recently told an investor conference in New York.
The Bad Economics of Bullying Why; the schoolyard tactic doesn't make sense as a foreign-policy strategy.
Why theschoolyard tactic doesn’t make sense as a foreign-policy strategy.
"U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened a wide range of countries with punitive measures, especially tariffs, to achieve goals in areas as diverse as gaining more access to foreign markets, controlling flows of people and drugs, and taking over territory.
But how widely can this tactic succeed in foreign policy, and can it succeed so well that it can be repeatedly employed? Does bullying, in other words, rise to the level of a strategy? Answering that question requires understanding the economics of bullying (Foreign Policy Magazine)."
John Bolton who worked in the first Trump administration.
Bolton said foreign leaders called him a "laughing fool."
On a visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war, Donald Trump insisted to his then chief of staff, John Kelly: “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.”
Nightmare Scenario Review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma read more. The remark from the former US president on the 2018 trip, which reportedly “stunned” Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was reported in a new book by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal.
Kelly said that, in his opinion, "Mr Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.
He discussed and confirmed previous reports that Mr Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers” — comments first reported in 2020 by The Atlantic."
Trump wants to give the rich a tax break
Kimberly Clausing is a professor of tax law and policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, says Trump "wants to shift the tax burden away from the well-off and toward the poor and middle class — while consolidating his power.
The signature legislative achievement of Mr. Trump’s first term was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, legislation that permanently lowered the corporate tax rate by 14 percentage points, alongside temporary tax cut provisions that expire at the end of 2025.
Extending these provisions would provide most Americans with only a small tax cut relative to current law, but it would disproportionately benefit those at the top.
An analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group, shows that the top 1% would save more than $70,000, about 3% of after-tax income, and the median household would get only about $1,000, about 1% of after-tax income.
While the poor get few of the rewards from those tax cuts, they bear more of the burden from tariffs, which are a tax on imported goods. The poor spend a larger share of their income than the rich do on things they want or need, including on imported goods, rather than saving or investing it, so tariffs operate as a sharply regressive tax.
Professor Clausing says "The tariffs threatened so far would fall instead on everyday household goods made in China, Canada and Mexico, along with steel and aluminium, which are used in a vast array of things Americans buy.
Countries not close to the United States have insignificant exports to the U.S. However, 15% of China's exports went to the U.S. in 2024
Internation companies typically work in several countries and complete products or services could have crossed borders before the final process.
For example, with a global presence spanning over 150 countries and an estimated $383.29 billion in revenue in 2023, according to Statista, Apple's success is a testament to its astute global strategy, a harmonious blend of differentiation, adaptability, and unwavering commitment to quality.19 Jan 2024
Apple's Global Revenues crossed $400 billion in 2024.
How far will he go?
Leaders | How far will he go? Donald Trump, the would-be king: America is fated to wage a titanic struggle over the power of the president
The Economist February 22ND: "Trump’s every act demonstrates his belief that power is vested in him personally, and affirms that he is bent on amassing more. Ignoring the legislature, he is governing by decree. He asserts that the president can withhold money allocated by Congress. The framers had expected that branch of government to be the most powerful but this would diminish it."
