President Trump’s plan to fly to meet Russian President Putin to negotiate peace — absent Ukraine — recalls Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and a flight to negotiate peace with a dictator on the march.

It was September 1938, a perilous time for democracies. Adolf Hitler, having invaded and annexed Austria earlier that year, was now threatening to invade Czechoslovakia and seize its Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia was a friend and ally of the West, its borders established by international covenant. It was the onset of the Munich Crisis.

Chamberlain, the British prime minister, smugly convinced himself that he alone could fix it. He would fly to meet Hitler. Like Trump, he excluded those most immediately affected — Czechoslovakia — as well as Britain’s allies. Alone with Hitler, he could make a deal.

Standing logic on its head, Chamberlain viewed the Czechs’ refusal to peacefully give up their land, not Hitler’s threat of invasion, as the threat to peace. Today, Trump, following suit, accuses Ukraine as responsible for the war by not making a deal to give land to Russia.

Churchill, a member of Chamberlain’s own Conservative Party, took the lead as his nation’s most outspoken opponent of Chamberlain’s appeasement plan. Churchill recognized Hitler for what he was: a dictator bent on conquest. Placing country over party, he courageously and eloquently urged collective security.

Czechoslovakia possessed formidable defensive fortifications with 35 mobilized divisions. Churchill exhorted his nation to stand by its ally; to present a united front against Hitler so that he would back down.

Hitler had no such worries. Negotiating with Chamberlain, he readily sized him up as “small fry” and willing to concede. Surely, today, Putin is similarly overjoyed to negotiate with an American president who claims Ukraine at fault and the 2014 borders unreasonable.

Vice President Harris’ charge to Trump comes to mind: “Putin would eat you for lunch.”

Putin, who clearly covets land beyond that currently held by the Russian army, knows Trump comes not seeking a just peace for Ukraine. What, then, is Trump seeking for his side of the deal?

The meeting at Munich formalized that deal. Hitler, promising no further aggression, could march his Wehrmacht into the Sudetenland unopposed. Chamberlain, trusting Hitler’s promise, could fly home claiming “peace for our time.”

The British may have felt relief, but also a sense of shame as Churchill decried Chamberlain “throwing a small state to the wolves.” With a heavy heart, Churchill said “the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged.” He said that Britain, through negotiation, had “sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.” Six months later, the Wehrmacht seized what remained of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia. Within a few months Hitler invaded Poland. World War II followed.

Visiting the Sudeten area with my Czech friends three decades after Munich, the sense of betrayal still hung in the air. They recalled their soldiers, tears in their eyes, forced to abandon their country’s border fortifications.

Today, we Americans can only imagine the sense of betrayal that the war-ravaged Ukrainian people feel at being abandoned in the peace process. As our ally on the front lines, their sacrifice has been death and destruction while, unharmed, our part has been contribution of arms. Putin’s aggression presents a danger to us all.

Munich’s timeless lesson is one of collective security. Through NATO, that lesson has stood us well through the likes of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Putin.

Chamberlain’s appeasement represented betrayal, not only of Czechoslovakia but of his own country.

Churchill’s bust, residing in the Oval Office, looked on recently as another weak leader for democracy berated America’s ally, the President of Ukraine.

“Sickened by that degrading spectacle,” said British senior Conservative Party leader, Robert Jenrick. “Churchill,” he concluded, “… would be turning in his grave.”

Chamberlain’s legacy resides in dishonor, Churchill’s in glory.

And Trump’s legacy?