The Ambassador Who Preferred Peace to Facts
Joseph P. Kennedy was sworn in as US Ambassador to the Court of St James on 18 February 1938. He arrived with a fortune, a famous family and a firm conviction that Europe’s troubles could be settled by gentlemen with chequebooks. Hitler was, in this view, merely a difficult customer.
The Original Performance
Kennedy sided at once with Chamberlain and the appeasers, believing that any deal with Hitler, however humiliating, beat war. Churchill he dismissed as a warmonger who would, in his diary’s telling, blow up the American Embassy and blame the Germans if that dragged America in. He sent Washington his thoughts in volume. Washington, in the manner of employers everywhere, noted them and carried on.
When the war arrived and Britain stood alone, the great diplomat’s courage was put to the test. Searching for an exit that would not look like flight from a besieged London, he checked into the Leahy Clinic. Few ambassadors have discovered a medical condition so conveniently timed.
Kennedy stayed in post through the Blitz and left only after his own mouth ended his career. He resigned on 6 November 1940 after outspoken anti-war remarks. His parting contribution was an interview in which he declared that democracy was finished in England and might be finished at home too. Historians have been kind enough to rank him among the worst diplomatic appointments in American history. Credit where due: he never did anything by halves.
The Sequel Opens in Washington
On 28 February 2025, the Oval Office staged a revival. Trump told Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards right now,” and added that without America, Ukraine would have none. He also accused the Ukrainian leader of gambling with World War III. The Ukrainian delegation never touched the lunch. The salad went to the press office, and the principle of defending a democracy under invasion went hungry with it.
The remark is worth parsing as a lawyer would. In war, cards are not dealt by a benevolent croupier. They are held by those with weapons, allies and nerve. When the supplier of the weapons declares the customer cardless, he is not describing the game. He is rigging it. Days later, Trump ordered a pause in American assistance to Ukraine. A prophecy, it turns out, is easy to fulfil when you control the deck.
The Kennedy Doctrine, Updated
Fast forward to this autumn. New talks have been announced for mid-November in the UAE, with Europe, Ukraine’s main ally, excluded once again, and Trump has suspended deliveries of the Patriot interceptors that are Ukraine’s only defence against Russian ballistic missiles. He has also criticised Ukraine’s strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and handed Moscow several key concessions in the latest diplomatic push.
Within hours of Putin agreeing in principle to restart talks, Russia launched a deadly barrage of ballistic missiles and drones on Kyiv. Nothing says “let us be reasonable” quite like a ballistic missile sent as a postscript. The pattern is consistent: pressure flows in one direction, and it is not toward the Kremlin. Kennedy at least had the decency to pretend the pressure was neutrality.
The Case for the Defence
Fairness requires the other side’s brief, and it is not frivolous. Trump’s defenders say he wants the killing to stop, that a stalemate bleeds Ukraine of men it cannot replace, and that a deal beats a funeral. Even sympathetic analysts, however, doubt the November talks can produce a full agreement while the two sides remain far apart on territory and security arrangements. The analogy also has limits. Kennedy was an ambassador whom Roosevelt could ignore. Trump is the president and has no Roosevelt to ignore him. Whether that makes the parallel milder or more alarming is a question each reader may settle at home.
The Egg
Here is the real danger. Peace is a perfectly respectable aim. But a peace extracted from the victim, while the aggressor keeps its cards, its territory and its sense of how things end, is not peace. It is an invoice, and the bill will be paid by the next country on the list.
American credibility is the egg in this story. It took eighty years of treaties, alliances and promises kept at inconvenient moments to build, and it can be cracked in one televised afternoon. Humpty Dumpty’s problem was never the fall. It was that the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not afterwards put him back together. Every capital with a security guarantee in its drawer, from Taipei to Tallinn, is reading the coverage and doing the same arithmetic.
Joe Kennedy left London in 1940 with his reputation in ruins and his predictions refuted. History did not wait for him to learn the lesson. It is now waiting, with considerable patience, for his successors.
