Biden calls Trump’s pressure on Ukraine ‘modern-day appeasement’
The former US president was speaking in his first post-presidential interview.
Joe Biden has said in his first post-presidential interview that US president Donald Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to give up territory to Russia amounted to “modern-day appeasement”.
The historically fraught term used by the former US president refers to a failed effort to stop the Nazis from annexing land in Europe in the 1930s.
Mr Biden told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 that Mr Trump’s statements about acquiring Panama, Greenland and Canada had bred distrust in Europe.
“What president ever talks like that?” Mr Biden said.
“That’s not who we are. We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity — not about confiscation.”
He also said it was a “difficult decision” to leave the US presidential race in 2024, four months from election day, to allow former vice president Kamala Harris to challenge Mr Trump.
But he added that making that move earlier as some critics had suggested “would(n’t) have mattered”.
The term appeasement refers to former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts in the 1930s to appease Adolf Hitler’s moves to annex land in Europe, which failed to prevent the Second World War.
Mr Trump has long dismissed the war in Ukraine as a waste of lives and American taxpayers’ money.
Early in his presidency, Mr Trump ordered a pause in American aid to Ukraine — then resumed it.
The two countries last week signed an agreement granting American access to Ukraine’s vast mineral resources — a return on investment, Mr Trump suggested, that could pave the way for more US aid.
He has also said that Crimea, a strategic peninsula along the Black Sea in southern Ukraine that was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, “will stay with Russia”.
Mr Biden said he worried that relations between the US and Europe were eroding under Mr Trump, with Nato member nations reconsidering whether they trusted America.
“Europe is going to lose confidence in the certainty of America and the leadership of America,” Mr Biden told the BBC.
The continent’s leaders, he added, were asking: “‘Can I rely on the United States? Are they going to be there?'”
Of special concern, Mr Biden said, was the administration’s proposal to let Russia keep some Ukrainian territory in an effort to strike a peace deal that would put an end to fighting.
“It is modern-day appeasement,” Mr Biden said.
Mr Biden said Mr Trump’s treatment of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February was “beneath America”.
“I don’t understand how they fail to understand that there’s strength in alliances,” Mr Biden said of the Trump administration on Monday.
Asked about Mr Trump’s triumphant celebration of his first 100 days in office, Mr Biden replied that he would let history render the judgment.
“I don’t see anything that was triumphant,” he said.
