No more "appeasement"

The Summer 2008 issue of Parameters is now available.

It includes an article by Jeffrey Record, Retiring Hitler and "Appeasement" from the National Security Debate:

It is high time to retire Adolf Hitler and "appeasement" from the national security debate. The repeated analogizing of current threats to the menace of Hitler in the 1930s, and comparing diplomatic efforts to Anglo-French placating of the Nazi dictator, has spoiled the true meaning of appeasement, distorted sound thinking regarding national security challenges and responses, and falsified history. For the past six decades every President except Jimmy Carter has routinely invoked the Munich analogy as a means of inflating national security threats and demonizing dictators. Presidents and their spokespersons have not only believed the analogy but also used it to mobilize public opinion for war. After all, if the enemy really is another Hitler, then force becomes mandatory, and the sooner it is used the better. More recently, neoconservatives and their allies in government have branded as appeasers any and all proponents of using nonviolent conflict resolution to negotiate with hostile dictatorships. For neoconservatives, to appease is to be naïve, cowardly, and soft on the threat du jour, be it terrorism, a rogue state, or a rising great power. To appease is to be a Chamberlain rather than a Churchill, to comprise with evil rather than slay it.

The Munich analogy informed every major threatened or actual US use of force during the first two decades of the Cold War as well as the decisions to attack Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Munich conditioned the thinking of almost every Cold War President from Harry S. Truman to George H.W. Bush. ...

Unfortunately, invocations of the Munich analogy almost invariably mislead because they distort the true nature of appeasement, ignore the extreme rarity of the Nazi German threat, and falsely suggest that Britain and France could have readily stopped Hitler prior to 1939. Additionally, the Munich analogy reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional support, and overstated threats encourage resort to force in circumstances where alternatives might better serve long-term US security interests. Threats that are in fact limited—as was Baathist Iraq after the 9/11 attacks—tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, including preventive war with all its attendant risks and penalties. If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades and post-9/11 years contain examples of the danger of overestimating such threats. (my emphasis)

Record has written two books on the uses and hazards of historical analogies: The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007) and Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002).

Most of the text of the former is contained in his paper available online, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (August 2005).

Tags: appeasement, jeffrey record