New Zealand fires the British envoy Phil Goff because of Trump comments

New Zealand has fired its high -ranking envoys in Great Britain for comments that have questioned the history of US President Donald Trump.

At an event in London on Tuesday, Hochkommissar Phil Goff compared the efforts to terminate the war between Russia and Ukraine with the Munich Agreement of 1938, which enabled Adolf Hitler to connect part of Czechoslovakia.

Mr. Goff remembered how Sir Winston Churchill had criticized the agreement, and then said about the US leader: “President Trump restored the bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. But do you think he really understands the story?”

His comments were “deeply disappointing” and made his position “unsustainable,” said New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters.

His comments came after Trump held after a military aid at Kyiv Heated exchange with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the oval office last week.

He contrasted Trump with Churchill, who, although he was alienated by the British government, spoke against the Munich agreement when he saw it as a surrender of the threats of Nazi Germany.

Mr. Goff quoted how Churchill had killed the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at the time: “You had the choice between war and shame. You decided, but you will have war.”

Peters said that Mr. Goff’s views would not have represented the New Zealand government.

“If you are in this position, represent the government and the guidelines of the day, you cannot consider that you are the face of New Zealand,” said local media, Peters.

“It is not the way they behave diplomatically as the front of a country,” he said, adding that he had taken the same procedure regardless of which country was spoken.

Mr. Goff is an experienced politician who has been a high commissioner since January 2023. Previously, he was two office hours as mayor of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and was the leader of the Labor Party from 2008 to 2011.

Peters, who is also a deputy prime minister, said reporters, he made the decision to dismiss Phil Goff without the first Minister of Minister Christopher Luxon.

When it was pointed out that Luxon was the leader of New Zealand, Peters replied: “I know that he is the prime minister, I made him a prime minister.”

The 79-year-old, who previously worked with Mr. Goff in the government, heads the New Zealand First Political Party, who joined Luxons National Party and the ACT party in 2023 to found the current government of the Governing Center-Room government.

Luxon, on his part, said Peters’ decision to dismiss Mr. Goff without consulting him first was “completely appropriate”.

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark was one of those who criticized Mr. Goff’s dismissal and said she was supported by a “very thin excuse”.

“I was recently at the Munich Security Conference, where many parallels between Munich 1938 and the US actions now draw,” she wrote in a post about X.

As part of the Munich Agreement of 1938, Hitler took control of the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. The deal was unable to stop Nazi Germany from increasing deeper in Europe, and the Second World War began when it entered Poland in 1939.