Sydney — New Zealand fired its top diplomat in London after he made a “deeply disappointing” remark questioning President Trump’s grasp of history, the foreign minister said Thursday. High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Phil Goff questioned whether the U.S. president “really understands history” during a panel discussion about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The comments were “deeply disappointing”, said a spokesman for New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, adding: “They do not represent the views of the NZ government and make his position as High Commissioner to London untenable.”
Peters later said he would have fired Goff if he made the same remarks about any other world leader.
“It’s seriously regrettable,” Peters told reporters.
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Goff, a former foreign minister, compared recent Ukraine peace efforts with the 1938 Munich Agreement — a pact between European powers that allowed Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. That policy would later be recognized as the appeasement of a determined aggressor and cited as a dire failure of foreign policy that led to World War II.
Some have expressed fear that Mr. Trump could push Ukraine to accept a peace deal in which Russia is allowed to hold onto swaths of captured territory.
“I was re-reading Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons in 1938 after the Munich agreement,” Goff said at London’s Chatham House this week, referencing the famed war-time leader. “He turned to (then Prime Minister Neville) Chamberlain and said: ‘You had the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor yet you will have war’.”
“President Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, but do you think he really understands history?” Goff asked.
The United States has “paused” intelligence sharing with Ukraine after a dramatic breakdown in relations between Kyiv and the White House.
Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a public falling out in the Oval Office last week, followed by the United States suspending crucial military aid to Ukraine.
