Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff shake hands during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow Aug. 6. (AP)
By his account, Donald Trump has been repeatedly denied the Nobel Peace Prize he was due.
This time, Trump is determined to get a Nobel. He's proposed a peace plan to end Russia's bloody war in Ukraine.
In effect, it would make Vladimir Putin a winner. Trump has pushed for Russia to get all the territory it has captured and for Ukraine to reduce its military and agree not to apply for membership in NATO.
There is a precedent with which Trump's peace proposal can be compared.
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany by arguing that his nation had been unfairly assessed financial reparations and territorial losses after World War I. His corollary was that Germany was thereby entitled to compensate itself with territory in Eastern Europe.
First, he annexed Austria, then he set his eyes on Czechoslovakia.
As the empire disintegrated during WWI, the Czechoslovak Republic was conceived -- in Chicago, of all places.
In the early 1900s, Tomas Masaryk came to the University of Chicago as a visiting lecturer. Impressed with the democratic principles in the Constitution, he promoted similar ideas for the Czechoslovak constitution. He was elected its first president in November 1918.
In 1938, England, France and Italy met with Germany to resolve the Czechoslovakian crisis. Representatives of the Czechs and Slovaks were not invited.
Similarly, Trump didn't consult the Ukrainians before proposing his peace plan. Instead, he had special envoy Steve Witkoff slip working documents to the Russians so that Putin's people could formulate an approach to convincing the Russian leader to get on board.
In the 1930s, an anti-war movement prevented Europe from rationally assessing the danger posed by Hitler.
On Feb. 9, 1933, the Oxford Union Society debated a motion, "that this House will under no circumstances fight for the King and country." The Oxford Pledge passed by a vote of 275 for and 153 against.
That followed a similar- minded motion at Cambridge University. In 1927, its student union debated whether "lasting peace can only be secured by the people of England adopting an uncompromising attitude of pacifism." The motion passed 213-138.
Accordingly, England's rearmament lagged dangerously behind that of Hitler's Germany. So when the Czechoslovakian crisis began, an international conference belatedly attempted to solve the problem.
Hitler wasn't deterred. He immediately annexed the Sudetenland region -- a German-speaking ring around the northwestern part of Czechoslovakia.
"This is the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe," Hitler announced.
Desperate to take Hitler at his word, England, France and Italy acquiesced. Hitler and his forces invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939.
When the United States entered WWII and Hitler declared war in return in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the Western Allies lacked military preparedness to fight back.
It was three years later that American and British navies landed troops in Normandy from which to begin the liberation of Europe.
Eighty years later, Trump naively wants to hand Ukraine to Russia on a silver platter, believing that it will mark the last of Putin's demands in Europe.
Mark my words. If Trump sacrifices Ukraine, he will mimic Neville Chamberlain's 1938 proclamation on his return from the Munich Conference: "I believe it is peace for our time."