Two great war leaders united by American isolationism: Charles de Gaulle and Volodymyr Zelensky

Difficult relationship: Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Charles de Gaulle, and Winston Churchill at a conference in Casablanca January 1943. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Eighty-five years before Volodymyr Zelensky visited Downing Street in search of support for Ukrainian democracy, a Frenchman arrived in London with a similar request.

Charles de Gaulle was not the French prime minister. That job belonged to Paul Reynaud. De Gaulle had been undersecretary of state for defence in Reynaud’s government for less than two weeks.