‘Barack Obama is the classic appeaser’

By Victor Davis Hanson

We now easily damn the idea of appeasement. Since the 1940s it has become a pejorative word for naiveté in foreign relations, if not downright cowardice.

It was no always so. The term gained popular currency in the Western democracies after the catastrophe of World War I as a sober and judicious way of approaching foreign crises. By understanding the viewpoints of an adversary, not obsessing over minor symbolic contentions involving honor and pride, and offering reasonable concessions designed to assuage tempers, sober adults might avoid another global bloodbath.

French and British statesmen certainly thought by allowing Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty, to absorb Austria in the Anschluss, and to dismantle Czechoslovakia, they would satisfy wounded German pride and end Nazi aggression short of war. The alternative, they feared, was needlessly going to war over “far and distant” small countries just two decades after the end of World War I, in which 15 million soldiers and civilians had perished.

Appeasement was not unique to naïve prewar British and French diplomats. It is innate to the human character and appeals to the better angels of our natures. Many fourth century B.C. Greek orators thought that by granting Philip II of Macedon his demands for control of Northern Greek city-states, a general war would be averted and Philip would interpret such concessions as magnanimity to be appreciated rather than weakness to be manipulated. What Athenian or Theban wanted another disastrous internecine conflict like the Peloponnesian War that three generations earlier had wrecked the Greek city-states? Philip, of course, saw such appeasement as feebleness and in time moved southward with his phalanges to destroy Greek liberty.

Remember that the appeaser always enjoys the higher moral ground – at least initially. His concessions to an aggressor in the short-term avoid an immediate war. In contrast, those who call for tough diplomacy, backed by the deterrent force of a strong military, appear Neanderthal-like. The charge against a stern Demosthenes or frowning Churchill – or Ronald Reagan – is that they were still governed by reptilian brains, assuming that bullies are not capable of being persuaded by logical minds, and instead only understand the role of force, unchanged since the Stone Age. Who wishes to embrace such a pessimistic view of unchanging human nature?

Barack Obama is the classic appeaser, whether setting empty red lines in Syria, pulling out all U.S. steward troops in Iraq while he wrote off ISIS as a jayvee organization, or granting concessions to Iran that include an absence of guaranteed onsite, thorough inspections and a preliminary end to crippling sanctions that had forced Iran to the bargaining table.

Obama can lecture that he may well have avoided war on his watch, in the manner that British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin left office in Britain in 1937 without incurring a war with Hitler and Mussolini.

By slashing defense investments, neglecting to ensure a strong American deterrent force, and hinting to adversaries that America would never use force unexpectedly or disproportionally, Obama, the Nobel Peace laureate, seems the ideal postmodern statesman who has transcended past nightmares like Hue and Fallujah. That he is young, idealistic, and rhetorical has convinced him that his winning personality is infectious. Give Obama an hour alone with a monster, and his charm should be able to disabuse current predators like Vladimir Putin and the Iranian theocrats of their misguided assumptions. The gentlemanly Neville Chamberlain was once convinced that his own superior intellect and logic had persuaded the former Austrian corporal Adolf Hitler that war had become outdated and uncivilized in the 20th century, and therefore benefitted no one. Hitler, after he got everything he wanted at Munich, despised his benefactor Chamberlain all the more, and bragged that he would stomp on him in their next encounter.

Another problem with appeasement is not just that it is seductive to the naïve or promises a break with our primordial past, but that it also never satiates aggressors. In fact, concession earns contempt, not thanks, and encourages only further aggrandizement. Part of America’s problem with Vladimir Putin is his own intense dislike of Barack Obama. The president has developed a bad habit of psychoanalyzing Putin, as either a class cutup or hung up on some sort of macho shtick. Obama seems mystified that after American reset, Putin would spurn outreach and instead unleash his thugs to go into Crimea and Ukraine.

So there is a psychological element to appeasement. It is not just that tyrants and bullies lose their fear of military consequences for their aggression. They also develop a particular pathological hatred of appeasers, a sort of spite and disgust for those who put on moral and intellectual airs, as if they had transcended the brutal world of a Hitler or Putin. This common reaction to appeasement proves dangerous, because it nourishes the emotions of aggressors and becomes a catalyst to unwise behavior.

By all normal measurements of military capability, Adolf Hitler should have known that Germany was not able to win a global war that might inevitably draw in both the Soviet Union and the United States. But by invading Poland and later the western European democracies, Hitler thought he wanted to prove his Nietzschean point: that real deterrence is found in will power, not just armor and planes. The French might have had better tanks, the British superior fighter aircraft, but both lacked the will to use those assets – in other words, to suffer some casualties in the present to prevent massive losses in the future.

Appeasers then are poor poker players, assuming that no one in his right mind would bluff with a weak hand. They fail to appreciate that precisely because an aggressor might have a militarily weaker position, he is sometimes all the more likely to gamble to prove that morale, not material force alone, matters in confrontations. Aggressors like a Hitler enjoy humiliating weaker nations like a Poland or Czechoslovakia, but they are downright thrilled to embarrass a state that in theory could stop them, but chooses not to.

Iran enjoys bullying neighbors in the Middle East and threatening Israel, but not as much as it does blowing up mock U.S. aircraft carriers, or promising destruction to superior American forces in the Gulf – as if to say, “we are weak and want war; you are strong and fear war; and therefore we are strong and you are weak.”

War, of course, finally clears up these prewar confusions and settles who really was militarily weak and who strong – but only at a terrible cost that could have been avoided by sound military deterrence and clear tough diplomacy that enforces to the letter any red line that it had established.

History warns us about the dangers of appeasement, but unchanging human nature still finds appeasement seductive and trumps the bitter lessons of the past every time.

Victor Davis Hanson, Ph.D., is author of “Seductions of Appeasement,” an e-book published by a division of PJ Media, LLC on June 16, 2015. The e-book is available in the PJ Store at http://ift.tt/1BDlg4L.

In addition to Hanson’s weekly PJ Media column titled “Works and Days,” he is also a regular columnist for National Review Online and is a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution.

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