Bob Edlin: Infamy in the White House – and the shredding of Atlantic Charter ideals

A Day of American Infamy is the headline above a New York Times column by Bret Stephens, who harked back to August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

US President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on “common principles” for a postwar world.

Key points included:“

• no aggrandizement, territorial or other”;
• “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them”;
• “freedom from fear and want”;
• “freedom of the seas”;
• “access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.”

Stephens describes the charter, and the alliance that came of it, as a high point of American statesmanship.

The article then deals with more recent – and less laudable – happenings:

On Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to sign away anything he could offer President Trump except his nation’s freedom, security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House.

And here’s the zinger:

If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky.

Regardless of whether Zelensky played his cards poorly, Stephens insisted — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — “this was a day of American infamy”.

Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE. - where this article was sourced.