By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
Before World War II appeasement was
a good word, reflecting a supposedly wise policy of understanding an enemy’s
predicaments. Sober Western democracies would grant tolerable concessions to
aggressive dictators in Germany, Italy, and Japan to satiate their appetites
for more. With such magnanimity everyone would avoid a nightmare like another
Somme or Verdun.
Appeasement is always a seductive
diplomacy because in the short term a bloody crisis is at least avoided. Hopes
then rise that either tensions will cool as aggressors are pacified — or at
least the latter won’t start trouble until the appeasers are long out of
office. Appeasement is based on the theory that if you give one or two scraps
of leftovers under the table to the dog at your feet, he will wag his tail and
leave, grateful for such generosity, rather than to prove be even peskier for
more.
Everyone associates appeasement with
the Western democracies’ concessions to Adolf Hitler over the occupation of the
Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
Such appeasement — widely praised at the time — was supposed to pacify Nazi
Germany to end its chronic bullying, as even Hitler would concede it was
foolish repeating the mess of 1918 for possession of slices from a far-away
country. It worked for a year, until in late 1939 Hitler invaded Poland to
begin World War II.
There are lots more recent examples
of alluring appeasement. Secretary of State Dean Acheson once assured a tired
postwar America that the Truman administration’s defense obligations did not extend
to the Cold War powder keg on the Korean Peninsula. Relieved pundits praised
such a realistic concession. Only a nut would want to bring back the B-29s and
their former pilots or rev up obsolete Sherman tanks. Then a few months later
North Korea invaded the South.
For years Britain felt that it had
diffused tensions over the Falkland Islands by appeasing various Argentine
dictatorships and convinced them of the senselessness of fighting a stupid war
over windswept rocks that a few thousands British subjects stubbornly clung to
as English home soil. But by 1981 the British had even proposed withdrawing its
only small warship from the islands as a gesture of reconciliation or of
avoidance of unnecessary expense. The Argentines took note of the planned
concession and the next year invaded.
In summer 1990 the American
ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie,
tried politely to talk sense to Saddam Hussein about rising tensions with
Kuwait. At one point she reportedly explained that “the United States did not
take a stand on Arab-Arab conflicts, such as Iraq’s border disagreement with
Kuwait.” Saddam shortly invaded Kuwait and two Gulf wars followed in the next
two decades. Apparently he counted on U.S. indifference or a weak response to a
far-away in-house Arab vendetta.
The problem with appeasement is
threefold.
Outreach is always seen as more
enlightened and preferable to the greater expense of military preparedness and
deterrence. In the 1930s, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain sounded like
enlightened humanitarians when Churchill groaned like a has-been scold. Until the annus horribilis of 1979-80, Jimmy Carter seemed a steady nice-guy pacifist, and Ronald
Reagan was written off as a fossilized kook railing against giving into
tin-horn dictators, Muslims, commies and the like.
Concessions often diffuse the
immediate crisis, but too often ensure a greater war to follow — giving enemies
both critical breathing space to prepare for war and increasingly psychological
surety that their future enemies are too morally weak to be taken seriously.
Again, the proponents of appeasement are seen as peace-loving, its skeptics
derided as little more than war-mongers. Worse still, appeasement deprecates
material considerations, and substitutes national will as the perceived arbiter
of victory. Hitler’s generals warned him that the Western democracies had more
assets in 1939 than did the Third Reich; Hitler snapped back that he
had seen such worms at Munich
and their spiritual flabbiness could not be built up by mere tanks, forts, and
planes.
Candidate Barack Obama originally
campaigned on the idea of the U.S. should pull all troops out of Iraq by 2008.
Once president, he waited a bit until he removed all American peacekeepers at the end of 2011 from a seemingly quiet Iraq.
That move was understandably popular
with the public, especially during the reelection year 2012. But as soon as the
U.S. garrison left Iraq, there was not quiet appreciation from Islamists.
Instead, jihadists of the Islamic State overran half the country. Tens of
thousands have died who probably would not have had U.S. forces still
controlled Iraqi air space and been on the ground to monitor the Maliki
government.
Obama’s reset with Russia was
originally also popular, especially when contrasted with George W. Bush’s
bitter estrangement with Vladimir Putin over the Russian invasion of Georgia.
But resetting the reset with Russia only green-lighted further aggression in
Crimea and Ukraine — with more probably to follow in the next two years. So far
the oil crash, not necessarily sanctions, has weakened Putin. He knows that
chance not resoluteness has stymied his next move. And he also appreciates that
fortune is fickle, but Western complacency is predictable. We have not seen the
last aggression of Putin’s Russia.
Recently the president hinted that
one day the United States might open an embassy in Iran, given his hopes that he can achieve a breakthrough deal
with the Iranian theocracy that might lead to new mutual understanding.
Unfortunately, the theocracy in Iran probably sees American well-meant outreach
as appeasement that will fast-track their efforts to get a bomb — and with it a
new Middle East hegemony. If deadlines to stop enrichment in the past were
negotiable, if tough sanctions were relaxed, if America was silent when
demonstrators took on the theocracy, why would Iran now assume that anything
the U.S. advised should be taken very seriously?
Obama unilaterally and by executive
order ceased the half-century U.S. isolation of Cuba — but without achieving
any mutual concessions from the tyrannical Castro regime. After six years of
empty red lines and deadlines in the Middle East, and prisoner swaps from
Guantanamo Bay for a U.S. military deserter, the impression grows that the
United States will do anything in the short term to alleviate tensions, without
much worry about the consequences in the years to follow.
Years ago Obama promised to withdraw
all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, regardless of events on the ground. Now they
are almost gone. But the ascendant Taliban is responding not with commensurate
concessions. Instead, it is confident that there will soon be no obstacle to
overrunning Afghanistan and returning it to the medieval theocracy that once
hosted Osama bin Laden as he planned 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans who
took seriously Western liberalization and reform will soon likely flee for
their lives to places like Bakersfield or Minneapolis — or end up dead as the
country sinks to the status of a post-American Iraq or Libya.
The more the United States cuts it
defense budget to historic lows not seen in over a half century, the more the
administration talks of outreach, the more America boasts of its smart
diplomacy and soft power, the more in the next two years there will be a
likelihood of war. Obama might have been able to get away with appeasing our
enemies had he vastly increased our defense capability. Or he could have worked
with our allies to issue genuine and enforceable deadlines, even in the midst
of a defense cutback. But lowering our guard while backing off from
self-created crises is a prescription for disaster.
Even Nobel Peace Prize laureates can
cause wars — or rather especially Nobel laureates can cause wars.
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