Thursday, October 1, 2026
When Adolf Hitler was rearming the Nazi war machine in the early 1930s and beginning his invasions of neighboring nations under the guise of safeguarding Germans living in regions of those countries, Europe’s leaders chose to ignore reality and look the other way. Nothing was more shameful than the Munich Conference in September 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain capitulated to Hitler’s seizing of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, which Chamberlain labeled a “quarrel in a faraway country.”
Chamberlain proudly returned to cheering crowds in Britain proclaiming he had secured “peace in our time.” Barely more than a year later, Britain was at war with Germany, enduring the bombing assaults of the Battle of London and fighting for its very survival. Chamberlain was forced to resign as prime minister, and was replaced by Winston Churchill, whose warnings about Hitler’s arming of that Nazi war machine and the lethal threat it posed to Europe had been largely ignored and often ridiculed throughout the 1930s.
While Hitler was advancing through Europe, too many Americans chose to follow the Chamberlain route of appeasement. Led by Charles Lindbergh and the America First isolationist movement, they argued that there was no American interest in stopping Hitler or assisting Britain. This was Europe’s war. Similarly, Hitler’s sworn policy to persecute Jews was an internal issue. It took Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States for us to fully mobilize and join Churchill to lead the successful war effort to destroy Hitler and defeat Nazi Germany’s existential threat to Western civilization.
In the post-World War II period, there was the threat of Soviet imperialism and expansion. Isolationism was discredited, discarded and consigned to history’s trash bin. The United States assumed the position of free world leadership, and alliances such as NATO were formed to preserve order and stability. Despite bumps and controversies along the way, the system worked. Europe was rebuilt, and the Soviet Union collapsed.
The defeat of Hitler and the world’s realization of the horrors of genocide also brought about the recognition of the State of Israel, which, despite wars and terrorist attacks, established itself as a thriving democracy and a strong ally of the United States.
All of this is now threatened. A resurgent Russia, led by its dictator, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine — the first invasion of a sovereign European nation since the end of World War II — and Putin employed arguments to justify the invasion similar to what Hitler claimed justified his attacks on Czechoslovakia and Austria. And in Israel, Hamas carried out a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, causing the highest number of Jewish deaths since World War II.
At this time, when Ukraine and Israel are fighting for survival, the civilized world would be expected to have learned the lessons of history and stand united against Russian aggression and Hamas’s threat to destroy the Jewish state. Instead, in the United States, the isolationist movement has emerged from the deep, dark shadows, and antisemitism is again rearing its ugly head. Dilettante influencers like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are today’s Charles Lindberghs. Going so far as to ascribe blame for World War II to Churchill, they enable Putin, disparage Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and accuse Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of war crimes and genocide.
Underlying all this madness is the discredited shibboleth that none of these crises affect the United States — that we can survive in our own isolationist world.
As for Europe, while it has stood strong with Ukraine against Russia, it is joining the anti-Israel chorus calling for rewarding Hamas with the creation of a Palestinian state, and accusing the Jewish state of inducing a famine and committing war crimes.
The stark realities Americans must face are that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t just “Europe’s war,” any more than Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland was a mere “quarrel in a faraway country”; and that Hamas’s attempt to destroy Israel isn’t just a “Jewish issue.” Israel was not the aggressor, and is not committing war crimes or genocide.
These are conflicts that affect the future of the world and demand strong, assertive American leadership.
