Where's Michael Godwin when you need him?

That's what I found myself wondering as I pondered the reaction to the president's summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by my fellow pundits.

More than a few found it necessary to compare his actions to those of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 when he got outsmarted by Adolf Hitler in Munich.

That brought to mind the axiom of debate created by author Mike Godwin back in 1990 when the internet was just getting started.

The common interpretation of "Godwin's Law" is that "when a Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress." (A related phenomenon is Reductio ad Hitlerum.)

By that standard, quite a few of my fellow commentators lost the debate over Donald Trump's summit with the North Korean dictator.

One was Eric C. Anderson, who was identified as "a retired member of the intelligence community" at the bottom of an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle in which he said this:

"Like Chamberlain, President Trump has backed away from first principles. The Prime Minister surrendered the Sudetenland without means of verifying Hitler's abandonment of further extraterritorial ambitions."

There was plenty more where that came from. Meghan "the Senator's Daughter" McCain called North Korea "The closest thing to Hitler's Germany to exist in modern times."

In fact, North Korea is communist. A more apt comparison is not to Hitler's Germany but to the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin. And if you're keeping score at home, you no doubt realize that Stalin was on the other side of World War II from Hitler.

But that gets complicated. It's much easier to bring up the good, old-fashioned idea of appeasement, which got lots of play from commentators describing the Donald's dealings with the dictator.

Among them was the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, who is the Post's idea of a right-winger even though her foreign-policy views are much closer to Hillary Clinton's than Trump's.

"The spectacle of the murderous dictator Kim Jong Un on equal footing with the president of the United States -- each country's flag represented, a supposedly 'normal' diplomatic exchange between two nuclear powers -- was enough to turn democracy lovers' stomachs," Rubin wrote.

My stomach remains unturned, perhaps because I've noticed that the idea of using the military to export American democracy has turned out to be the biggest foreign-policy folly in recent history.

Trump noticed that as well in the 2016 Republican primary debates. He outraged the party establishment by attacking his fellow Republicans for their willingness to topple dictators in the hopes that the foreign equivalent of the League of Women Voters would spring up and replace them.

When it comes to North Korea, democracy would indeed be wonderful. But we've got plenty of repressive regimes closer to home. Venezuela and Cuba come to mind. Both are repressive yet neither has nukes.

Cuba did have them once, however, as well as missiles that could hit America. That brought us to the brink of World War III.

So if Trump is truly successful in talking Kim into getting rid of his nukes and his missiles, then I for one am willing to hold the discussions on civic improvement off till a later date.

Back when Kim was threatening to lob a ballistic missile or two our way, I was genuinely worried. It's been 73 years since the U.S. first developed a nuke. It's been 50 years since we developed ICBMs.

That was back in the vacuum-tube era. It can't be that hard to build these things in the era of digital computers. So anything that makes that less likely is fine with me.

As an America-first conservative, I think Trump's real appeasement problem is that he keeps trying to win the approval of what is known as "the Swamp" when it comes to foreign policy.

He did so when he named as his National Security Adviser John Bolton, a foreign policy "expert" who still hasn't figured out that the second Iraq War was a complete debacle and who has expressed a desire to bomb a lot of places for no discernible reason.

Trump may vacillate on foreign policy, but he still shows flashes of his primary-campaign stance. One moment came when he said that a reason for ending U.S. military exercises with South Korea is that doing so will save the United States "a fortune."

He also said that eventually he would like to withdraw forces from the Korean Peninsula, thus saving another few fortunes.

That also outraged the Beltway crowd. But then they've got plenty of money.

As for us taxpayers, not so much.

ADD: IT'S NOT 1938 AND THIS ISN'T MUNICH:

Here's an excellent piece by English writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft in which he lampoons the many blowhard politicians and writers who turn every international crisis into another Chamberlain-Hitler encounter. He detailed how the example of Munich has been distorted to fuel all sort of foreign-policy follies:

"I think that no episode, perhaps, in modern history has been more misleading than that of the Munich conference," George Kennan told the Senate in 1965. By that point, words "Munich," "appeasement," and "Chamberlain," had not been merely misunderstood, as Kennan said, but repeatedly misprized and misapplied, very often with disastrous consequences.

Read the whole thing to see how often the cliche has turned against the person who utters it. As for Rubin, she's a former Hollywood lawyer with a liberal background who is devoid of any journalistic skill. Her Wikipedia entry contained this assessment from a former ombudsman at the Post: "Fire opinion blogger Jennifer Rubin. Not because she's conservative, but because she's just plain bad."

True enough. But then that goes for most of the Trump-hating "conservatives" out there.