Bush's Knesset Address: Revisiting the Lessons of Appeasement

With President George W. Bush's address to the Israeli Knesset yesterday, the world community received a pointed reminder of the dangers of caving diplomatically to revisionist powers whose demands are insatiable.

Bush decried appeasement, and along the campaign trail Democratic partisans attacked the president's implication that Barack Obama lacked the determination and vigor to resist America's implacable enemies. The controversy's now a full-blown partisan war over the direction of American foreign policy.

It's always a touchy thing wielding the appeasement cudgel. Throughout the postwar period, denouncing the weakness of political opponents as encouraging another "Munich" has been one of the most serious charges that can be leveled in debates on American foreign affairs.

Unfortunately, the Munich analogy's often overused (although I don't think so in this case, for reasons mentioned below), and the utility of appeasement as a useful tool of shrewd foreign policy statemanship has fallen forever out of favor.

I studied appeasement in some detail in graduate school. One article helpful to this debate is Robert Beck's, "Munich's Lessons Reconsidered," although unfortunately the full text isn't available online.

I did find a nice piece by defense scholar Jeffrey Record, "Appeasment Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s" (pdf). Here's the introduction to the paper:

No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War II U.S. use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Presidents have repeatedly cited the great lesson of the 1930s—namely, that force should be used early and decisively against rising security threats—to justify decisions for war and military intervention; some residents have compared enemy leaders to Hitler. The underlying assumption of the so-called Munich analogy is that the democracies could and should have stopped Hitler (thereby avoiding World War II and the Holocaust) by moving against him militarily before 1939. This assumption, however, is easy to make only in hindsight and ignores the political, military, economic, and psychological contexts of Anglo-French security choices during the 1930s. Among the myriad factors constraining those choices were memories of the horrors of World War I, failure to grasp the nature of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s strategic ambitions, France’s military inflexibility, Britain’s strategic overstretch, France’s strategic dependence on Britain, guilt over the Versailles Treaty of 1919, dread of strategic bombing and misjudgment of the Nazi air threat, American isolationism, and distrust of the Soviet Union and fear of Communism.

Appeasement failed because Hitler was unappeasable. He sought not to adjust the European balance of power in Germany’s favor, but rather to overthrow it. He wanted a German-ruled Europe that would have eliminated France and Britain as European powers. But Hitler was also undeterrable; he embraced war because he knew he could not get what he wanted without it. There was thus little that the democracies could do to deter Hitler from war, though Hitler expected war later than 1939. There was going to be war as long as Hitler remained in power.

A reassessment of the history of appeasement in the 1930s yields the following conclusions: first, Hitler remains unequaled as a state threat. No post-1945 threat to the United States bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship. Second, Anglo-French security choices in the 1930s were neither simple nor obvious; they were shaped and constrained by factors ignored or misunderstood by those who retrospectively have boiled them down to a simple choice between good and evil. Third, hindsight is not 20/20 vision; it distorts. We view past events through the prism of what followed. Had Hitler dropped dead before 1939, there would have been no World War II or Holocaust, and therefore no transformation of the very term “appeasement” into a pejorative. Finally, invocations of the Munich analogy to justify the use of force are almost invariably misleading because security threats to the United States genuinely Hitlerian in scope and nature have not been replicated since 1945.

Record's introduction pretty much reflects the scholarly consensus on the use of the Munich analogy in international relations (some interesting research in this area is found in Yuen Foong khong's, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, And The Vietnam Decisions Of 1965).

It's certainly true that Hitler's Germany was a unique case in the history of 20th century international security. Thus the frequent references to war with Nazi Germany are sometimes overdone.

In the first Gulf War, for example, G.H.W. Bush's comparison of Hitler and Saddam Hussein struck me as strained, not so much in the sense of Saddam's revisionist intentions, but in the fact of the far lower degree of Iraqi economic and military capabilities relative to the United States. This is not to say the Iraqi threat was non-existent. Far from it. It's that if American policy-makers have to resort to elevating all national security issues to Nazi-level proportions, the importance of that historical precedent becomes diminished, watered-down in its power to generate public support for repelling significant threats to international order.

Having said that, there's always the need to take new challenges seriously, and as World War II was the "good war," it's natural to place contemporary challenges in the context of earlier times, especially when unified public backing for war is so crucial to the successful application of military power (which is why the Democratic Party's opposition to Iraq, starting only months after the Congress passed bipartisan legislation authorizing the deployment, is unprecedented in its degree of backstabbing, seeking to undermine a war launched with initial widespread support).

As for President Bush's comparison of today's Iranian threat to the 1930s, the regime in Tehran is by no means as powerful as Hitler's Germany of the interwar period, and Iran is not about to overthrow the world distribution of capabilities any time soon. Yet the Iranians, indeed, seriously threaten Israel and the regional security order in the Middle East, and the course of diplomacy over the last few years has not stopped the regime's efforts at procuring nuclear weapons capability. Iran's proxy armies arrayed around Israel's periphery today pose an existential threat to the Jewish state.

And this is why Barack Obama's pledge to open talks with Iran "without preconditions" should rightly be denounced as folly. President George W. Bush is right to invoke the lessons of Munich in this case, as we are dealing here in the realm of intentions. The security of Israel is of the greatest importance today. Ahmadinejad is not Adolph, but Tehran's designs to consolidate Iranian hegemony from the Persian Gulf to Russia's southern area of influence no doubt have the potential to do lasting damage to regional order. Appeasing Iran's leadership is not in the interest of the United States, Israel, or the international community.

For more on this see, Captain Ed, "Rookie Mistakes Again: Obama Owns Appeasement."

See also the text of the president's speech, "President Bush Addresses Members of the Knesset."