Putin is not Hitler. His actions in Ukraine are horrific enough to need no exaggeration | Simon Jenkins

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Is Vladimir Putin another Adolf Hitler? The western world seems to think so. In which case is Donald Trump another Neville Chamberlain and Ukraine another Czechoslovakia? Is history bunk, or is it a wise old man leaning on the gate as Europe storms into its latest crisis?

Godwin’s law holds that the longer a political argument continues, the nearer it gets to Hitler. This reductio ad Hitlerum distorts the issue under discussion and diminishes the exceptional horror of Hitler and the Holocaust. A variant of Godwin’s law goes further. It asserts that having to call Hitler in aid means that you have already lost the argument.

Putin’s actions in Ukraine have been horrific enough to need no exaggeration. Trump’s sympathy towards him has been eccentric enough. Yet hardly a commentary on Ukraine fails to hint at “another world war” or Hitler or 1930s appeasement. A cartoon by Michael de Adder depicts Chamberlain declaring “peace in our time” (he actually said “peace for our time”) with the Munich agreement and Trump in talks with Putin. The Führer is always on hand when needed.

No post-revolution Russian rulers have sought to invade western Europe. What they have done is suppress and dominate the “buffer zone” of their immediate neighbours, such as Poland, Finland, Ukraine and Armenia. A better parallel for Putin is the west’s old ally, Stalin. He conned Franklin D Roosevelt at Yalta into believing that after the war he wanted merely to ensure he had friendly democracies along Russia’s border. FDR boasted that Stalin favoured him over the sceptical Winston Churchill, adding: “If I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return … he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” If parallels you want, Putin is Stalin and Trump is FDR.

The answer is that we choose the villains who most suit our case. There is no evidence that the Soviet Union had imperial designs on western Europe, nor have I heard of Putin harbouring such an ambition. Yet this assumption has underpinned the Nato alliance since the end of the second world war. A proclaimed fear of Russian aggression fuelled the US build-up of military might that has been one of the greatest in history. After 1989, intensive research failed to validate this fear, not least the work on Russian archives of Andrew Alexander in America: the Imperialism of Ignorance.

Yet deterrence and its handmaid, fear, depend on worst-case scenarios. If we say there is no Hitler lurking in the Kremlin, the defence lobby asks how we can be sure. Has the military-industrial complex not kept Europe free of another Hitler for 80 years? Billions have been spent – who cares if wasted? – but it has worked. Defence now demands Britain raise its military spend from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5%. It will apparently make the difference between Putin’s tanks charging across western Europe and leaving him quaking in his boots. Don’t impede the lobby now at its moment of maximum trial.

History can of course offer an opposing thesis. This is that Putin is merely another custodian of Russia’s paranoid patriotism. As he struggles to rescue his country from cold war defeat, he is threatened by an institutionally belligerent west. Think of Charles XII of Sweden or Napoleon or Hitler’s tanks just a few dozen miles from Moscow. How did Nato expect Moscow to react as western armies advanced across Russia’s old buffer zone at the turn of the 21st century, with one former ally joining after another?

A century ago Teddy Roosevelt likewise guarded America’s back yard in the Pacific. Trump is doing the same now against Panama and Canada. The west did not stop Russia guarding its “sphere of interest” when it invaded Georgia, or Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. Putin was always likely to feel threatened by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, particularly when he perceived Ukraine to be stuffed with anti-Russian fascists.

Putin’s one massive misjudgment – as he must now recognise – was the assault on Kyiv in 2022. He gambled that Nato would not aid a free state to which it was not formally allied. He was wrong. Whatever ceasefire deal is eventually reached, Putin is unlikely to make the same mistake again.

On this thesis, since even Nato’s worst-case scenario substantially diminished with the fall of the Soviet Union, it was only a matter of time before Washington called Europe’s bluff. Americans could not see why they should spend vast sums defending Europe from an implausible threat, which Europe was not prepared to spend itself. If Europe really thinks Putin is Hitler, it should pay up. It is Europe’s Hitler not America’s.

The true third way is to concentrate on Putin as Putin and Trump as Trump. Both should be assessed on their own terms and on those of their times. These times are the 2020s not the 1940s or even the 1980s. Britain certainly faces threats and hostilities, the greatest being commercial and technological, which is where defence spending should surely be directed. Yet Britain’s military leaders have spent the past month demanding a “national arsenal” of futuristic weapons, as if Hitler were still at our door. They are still hooked on Dad’s Army.

Keir Starmer told the Commons last week that Britain was under a greater threat of attack than ever since the cold war. He offered no explanation. The politics of fear always has the best tunes and defence is never precise in its greed. What is precise is Starmer’s readiness to sacrifice Britain’s public services and its overseas aid to the cause. That cannot be right.