I've posted here before on the paper
Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (August 2005) by Jeffrey Record of the Air Force's Air War College.
When I started composing a post to summarize it, I found it far more difficult than on most posts of this type. And I think the reason is that I found the whole thing so intriguing and refrishing that I hate to call out parts of it for particular attention. And since I'm familiar with Record's work on the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War, I felt very comfortable with his approach.
It's not often that you come across a genuinely insightful look at a familiar set of historical events. But this is one.
Record's account is not "revisionist" history, especially not in the sense that David Irving and other pro-Nazi or Holocaust-denier types use the term. And he's not making any claim to original research findings in this paper. What he's doing is telling the story of the Anglo-French policy of "appeasement" toward Hitler's policies prior to Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939.
The policy has been universally recognized as a disastrous failure. So much so that the word "appeasement", which in the 1930s and before simply meant a policy of concessions, has come to be a pejorative meaning weak, feckless and cowardly. As one example among thousands, the leading neoconservative Robert Kaplan writes in Use Brinkmanship on Iran
Los Angeles Times 09/29/06:
It was the delegitimization of force that provided the bedrock for appeasement in Europe in the 1930s. Europe was still recovering from a continent-wide war that had cost too many lives and caused untold destruction for no demonstrable result, and that was the product of decisions made by a closed political elite. Sound familiar? The idea that European governments could wage another conflict was seen as preposterous. There was no choice but to reach a diplomatic arrangement with the Nazis.
Appeasement was not only the product of cowards but also of eminently reasonable men. Adolf Hitler had not threatened to annihilate the Jews, and Germany's reasons for reoccupying the Sudetenland were based on principles of self-determination related to President Wilson's 14 Points - his vision for a just and lasting peace for Europe after World War I. (my emphasis)
The standard account of appeasement goes something like this. France refused to stop Germany from re-militarizing (moving troops into) the Rhineland in 1936. Germany rearmed at a furious pace after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and the leaders of Britain and France failed to realize the meanace it represented. In early 1938, Hitler occupied Austria and annexed it. (
Anschluss, as the event is known in English-language accounts as well as German ones, is the German word for "annexation".)
At the infamous Munich Conference later in 1938, Britain and France acceeded to Germany's demand to take over the part of western Czechoslovakia known as the Sudentenland, where German residents had carried on disputes of various levels of intensity with their Czech neighbors for decades. In doing so, Britain and France abrogated their treaty obligations to protect Czechoslovakia. This convinced Hitler of the weakness of the Western democracies, which emboldened him to further conquests, setting off the Second World War in Europe.
For ideologues like Kaplan, it becomes more of a tale of failure of Will than anything else. And let's not even talk about überhack Victor Davis Hanson, who cranks out bad Second World War anologies by the bucketful.
Record doesn't challenge the basic account I summarized in that narrative. And he certainly doesn't dispute the failure of the appeasement policy. His purpose is to analyze those events to understand them in their actual context in order to challenge the ritual "lessons of Munich" and common assumptions about why appeasement failed. As he notes, the failure of the appeasement policy is constantly invoked by strategists bother professional and armchair. Because of the lessons of appeasement, Presidential declarations about how the foreign policy priorty of the moment is a testosterone contest between the US and its oppnenet of the moment have great resonance. George W. Bush is by no means the first to invoke the comparison. Record wrote a book on the use of the Munich analogy,
Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002).
Record also observes that this is a favorite theme for our neocon unilateralists:
For neo-conservatives who have provided the intellectual foundation of U.S. foreign policy since September 11, 2001 (9/11) (enshrined in President Bush’s September 2002 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America), the failure of the democracies to stop Hitler in the 1930s remains the primary instruction on both international politics and America’s role in the world. ,,, (my emphasis)
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| Engelbert Dollfuss, Austrian Standestaat dictator |
Though presidents can and have, knowingly and unwittingly, misused the Munich analogy to describe security threats and the consequences of failing to act against them, there is no gainsaying the power of that analogy to mobilize public opinion. This is so because of the catastrophic failure of the security policies Britain and France pursued vis-à-vis Germany in the 1930s. In retrospect, Anglo-French appeasement, driven by perceived military weakness and fear of war, did nothing but whet Hitler’s insatiable territorial appetite (and his contempt for British and French political leadership), while simultaneously undermining the democracies’ security. The result was the most destructive war in history and an enduring pejorative image of appeasement whose casting includes Nazi ideology as a self-evident blueprint of Germany’s territorial aims; Neville Chamberlain as a coward and fool bent on peace at any price; Britain and France as betrayers of brave little Czechoslovakia; and Hitler as the great winner at the Munich Conference of September 1938. (my emphasis)
Record reminds us of one event often neglected in discussion of appeasement toward Hitler. That was the German attempt to take over Austria in 1934 by sending a strike force of Austrian Nazis across the border from Bavaria. They failed to overthrow the "clerical-fascist" government, which the autocratic Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss called a Standestaat, or corporate state. They did manage to murder Dollfuss. But the Nazis failed to rally any kind of popular support for their coup attempt. And Mussolini's Italy sided with Austria and was prepared to intervene militarily to stop the German takeover.
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| Dollfuss murdered |
This was an example of successful deterrance in the short run (though obviously not for Dollfuss). But Hitler didn't give up his goal of annexing his home country to Germany. When he achieved it four years later, Italy was no longer ready to stand with Austria against Germany.
This was in part because of France's refusal to act militarily to prevent the violation of the Versailles Treaty when Hitler moved token forces into the Rhineland section of Germany, which was forbidden under Versailles. But Record is careful to explain that France's failure was not a problem because it was a loss in a testosterone contest. It was a problem because France's inaction was inconsistent with its strategic posture at the time.
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| German troops marching into the Rhineland 1936 |
France was relying on a system of political alliances with eastern European countries like Czechoslovakia and Russia and with Belgium. But its military posture was overwhelmingly a defensive one which "completely undercut" their diplomatic strategy. Record writes:
Both deterrence and coercive diplomacy rest on credibly threatened force, and France lacked the political will and military capacity to make credible threats of force. French diplomacy called for a military hammer, but the French military provided only an anvil.
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| British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 1938 |
In this regard, Hitler’s military reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936 was a much greater strategic disaster for the democracies than the sellout of Czechoslovakia in September 1938, but not because the Rhineland remilitarization blocked a French attack into Germany; France, as we have seen, had no intention of attacking Germany even through an undefended Rhineland. The disaster lay in the irreparable blow to French prestige. French failure to fire a single shot at token German military forces entering territory so vital to France’s security advertised France to the rest of the Continent as a feckless security partner. French inaction reinforced Belgium's decision to drop its alliance with France in favor of neutrality, exposing France to the very German attack that was delivered through Belgium 4 years later; it encouraged Mussolini, who in thwarting a Berlin-sponsored Nazi coup in Austria 2 years earlier had handed Hitler a major foreign policy defeat, to move closer to the German dictator; it left Austria exposed to virtually certain German annexation, thereby compromising Czechoslovakia’s defense; and it undermined the Eastern allies’ confidence in France. The Rhineland debacle even prompted Pope Pius XI to tell the French ambassador that, “Had you ordered the immediate advance of 200,000 men into the zone the Germans had occupied, you would have done everyone a very great favor.” (p. 18; my emphasis)
This, in turn, undercut France's diplomatic strategy. Even Belgium rejected a military alliance and adopted aneutral stance. But again, the problem was not for France to show that their God was bigger than Hitler's God, to borrow a notorious phrase from Bush's "war on terrorism". The problem was that France had adopted a military policy inconsistent with it political strategy and failed to evaluate realistically the risks involved.
In the end, France was not adequate prepared militarily to defend itself against Germany.
But it was not only French leaders who failed to realize it. Britain was severely overstretched with its colonies. A major attraction of the appeasement policy for Britain was the need to limit its military obligations in a potential European war. And, as Record observes, an overly-optimistic view of French capabilities was a major factor in Britain's misjudgment:
Until 1939, British political leaders and such influential strategic thinkers as B. H. Liddell Hart believed, or at least wanted to believe, that Britain could limit its liability in a future European war by restricting its role to the provision of naval and air power. (During the Napoleonic era, noted Liddell Hart, Britain’s main contribution to France’s defeat had been sea power and the extension of financial credits to continental coalitions that provided the ground forces.) Determined to avoid a repetition of the trench warfare horrors of 1914-18, increasingly fearful of the German air threat ..., and persuaded that France and its Eastern allies, which from 1935 on included Czechoslovakia and nominally the Soviet Union, would not require a major British ground force contribution in a war with Germany, British governments in the 1930s focused increasing defense expenditure on the Royal Air Force at the expense of the army. (my emphasis)
France, on the other hand, was very much aware of its own military dependence on Britain. So, even though France was banking heavily on eastern European alliances, French leaders did not believe France could undertake a defense of Czechoslovakia in 1938 without Britain's support. Thus, France regarded itself as obliged to go along with Britain's appeasement policy at this time.
Record states very clearly that it was dishonorable for France to abandon its treaty ally Czechoslovakia. But he also reminds usthat far moreconcrete factors were in play than vague notions of Will and testosterone:
But for both Britain and France, more than French honor was at stake. Czechoslovakia may not have been sustainable as a national state over the long run, but in 1938 it was the only democracy in Central Europe and formed a significant strategic barrier to German expansion into Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Indeed, a major failure of British diplomacy during the run-up to Munich was its almost willful disregard of Czechoslovakia’s formidable military capabilities. During the Czech crisis of September 1938, the German Army fielded 37 divisions (5 of them facing France) to Czechoslovakia’s 35 divisions (plus 5 fortress divisions). Moreover, the Czechs enjoyed three strategic advantages: they were on the defensive, operated along interior lines of communication, and possessed formidable defensive terrain and fortifications along the German-Czech border. Czechoslovakia also had the largest armaments production complex in Central Europe (the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 boosted Germany’s arms production by 15 percent, and the arms and equipment of the disbanded Czech army were sufficient to fit out 20 new German divisions). ( my emphasis)
Record spells out one aspect of the Czech crisis that rarely appears in poipular accounts of the "lessons of Munich". That is that Hitler wanted war with Czechoslovakia. He was actually angry when Britain and France agreed to his demand to annex the Sudetenland. Rightwing (or badly confused) revisionists make use of this fact to argue that the sellout of Czechoslovakia was a good thing.
Record certainly does not make that argument. He quotes a 1948 history by J.W. Wheeler-Bennett saying that Britain and France "had made so wholesome a surrender of Czechoslovakia that even Adolph Hitler could not find an excuse to go to war".
This aspect of the crisis might not fit neatly into the standard "lessons of Munich" narrative. But it's important in understanding Hitler's goals, methods and intentions.
Record also poses this counterfactual question, also one rearely discussed:
A most intriguing if unanswerable questionabout Munich is: what if Czechoslovakia had decided to fight anyway? Anglo-French abandonment did not dictate Prague’s renunciation of the inherent right of self-defense. The Czech military strongly favored resistance, and Churchill believed that a Czech decision to fight would have shamed France into war. And who knows what might have happened then? At a minimum, Czech resistance would have bloodied Germany militarily and postponed Hitler’s turn on Poland probably into the spring of 1940. Maybe his own generals would have moved against him. Moreover, as the Soviet Union was also a nominal treaty ally of Czechoslovakia though the two states shared no common border, a fighting Czechoslovakia, especially if joined by France, almost certainly would have delayed, if not altogether eliminated, the emergence of any incentive on Stalin’s part to cut the kind of strategic deal he made with Hitler in August 1939. [Czechoslovakian] President Benes’ decision not to order the defense of his own country for fear that a vengeful Hitler would slaughter the Czech nation may have been a more fateful one than the Anglo-French capitulation to Hitler on the Sudetenland issue.
He mentions how the highly punitive provisions of the Versailles Treaty promoted German revanchism that Hitler and his National Socialists (Nazis) exploited. But there was a difference in perspective on the Versailles Treaty between Britain and France that affected their ability to conduct a joint policy of containing Germany. France wanted to continue enforcing the restrictions of Versailles. Britain took the perspective by the 1930s that the treaty was too severe.
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| The Versailles Treaty had bad results |
There are a lot of things to be said about the Versailles Treaty, which is almost universally recognized now as having been a bad peace treaty, particularly in its provisions relating to Germany. The important point for the 1930s appeasement policy is that the difference between Britain and France toward the treaty provisions blocked a common policy of containing Hitler Germany, which gave Hitler opportunities that he sucessfully exploited:
The British opposed risking war to enforce a treaty they believed to have been a mistake in the first place, and they believed it inevitable that Hitler would rearm and cast off other Versailles restrictions on Germany. Indeed, in anticipation of inevitableGerman rearmament, Britain cut a naval deal with Germany in 1935 that violated the Treaty of Versailles and gave Hitler a green light to start building a navy, including submarines. The Anglo-German Naval Treaty, which Hitler repudiated just 4 years later, permitted Germany to construct tonnage up to 35 percent of that the Royal Navy. Since Germany was starting from scratch, the agreement invited the Third Reich to build a navy as a fast as it could. The agreement shocked the French, who had not been consulted in advance, and encouraged Mussolini to believe that the British were too scared of Hitler to oppose the aggression he was about to launch in Abyssinia. Not until March 1939, when Hitler broke the Munich Agreement, did British and French policy toward Germany converge on a willingness to go to war to stop further Nazi expansion.
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| B-17s in combat during the Second World War |
It's also important that not only did the leaders of Britain and France underestimate the German threat in general, part of their hestiation came from an overestimation of the capabilities of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe). This included overestimating the specific air power resources Germany had, a belief in the air power zealots' mistaken views on how devastating and decisive air power would be, and an unrealistic British policy not back up by sufficient air power. These all served to inflate the German air power threat in policymakers' minds.
Britain's air strategy was based on what is known as "strategic bombing", i.e., bombing aimed at reducing the enemy country's infrastructure, as distinct from tactical bombing in support of specific military operations.
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| The end of appeasement: the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, 1939 - Pictured here: German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Joseph Stalin |
However, Britain's actual air force was not prepared to undertake such an effort. Record writes:
Indeed, the strength of the RAF’s ideological commitment to strategic bombing stood in stark contrast to its inability to provide convincing answers to such basic questions as what targets to bomb, how to reach them, chances of hitting them, how hard to hit them, how to determine damage inflicted, and what effect on German morale and industry?
Two famous names appear in Record's analysis in this connection. One is Charles Lindberg, darling of the isolationist, pro-German America First movement prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. The other is Winston Churchill, idol of the neocons:
The misreading of the Nazi air threat stemmed from failure to appreciate, especially in Britain, that German air power was being developed primarily for purposes other than strategic bombardment, and from deliberate strategic deception by Berlin and such influential American dupes as Charles A. Lindberg, a pro-Nazi defeatist who trumpeted German air power’s irresistibility to British, French, and American audiences.
I should introject here that the grotesque misuse of labels like "defeatist" by today's Republican supporters of the Iraq War does not mean that the terms have no legitimate usages. Record's description of Lindberg as "a pro-Nazi defeatist" is dead accurate. He continues:
The assumption was that Germany would attempt a knock-out strike against London, and as early as 1934 Winston Churchill, a persistent purveyor of inflated estimates of German air strength, argued that Germany was approaching air parity with Britain and would have three times the RAF’s strength by 1937. On the eve of Munich, Lindberg’s widely reported view was that “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris, and Praha [Prague] if she wishes to do so. England and France together do not have enough modern planes for effective defense.” (On the eve of the Munich Conference British intelligence estimated that Germany had a total of 1,963 combat-ready fighters, bombers, and dive bombers, when Germany actually fielded a total of only 1,194.) ...
Germany, in fact, had nothing of the sort of air capacity Lindberg claimed. A fleet of long-range four-engine bombers lay beyond Germany’s technical and industrial reach in the 1930s, and strategic bombardment was, in any event, alien to the kind of war the Germans planned to fight.
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| Charles Lindberg at America First Rally: "The three most important groups which have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." - Lindberg 09/11/1941 |
Overestimating the enemy's capabilities can lead to just as bad decisions and underestimating them. (I'm trying to avoid any direct analogies to the present, so I will resist the temptation to point out how overestimating the weapons capabilities of an enemy country has more recently led to bad decisions with disastrous results.)
Record also discusses the role of public opinion in Britain and France, which had more immediate effect on their governments' policies than did German public opinion on theirs. It's one of the greatest strenths of democracy, perhaps its greatest benefit, is that ordinary voters and citizens and working people are just not as much fascinated by the prospects of war than their leaders and corporate barons and the country-club set often are. That was true in Britain and France in the 1930s, as well - though to the extent that it led to underestimating the threat from Hitler Germany, the healthy instinct in this case may not have produced the healthiest policy. As the Biblical proverb says, there's a time for peace and a time for war.
Record observes:
Not until 1939, after Hitler violently breached the Munich Agreement with his invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, did British and French public opinion harden against Hitler to the point where it was prepared to risk war to prevent further German expansion. ...
The combination of war trauma induced by the experience of 1914-18 and sympathy toward a Versailles-wronged Germany effectively precluded any British government from carrying the country into war with Germany until Hitler clearly revealed his aggressive intentions beyond Germanic Europe. It is improbable that even the eloquent, Nazi-despising Churchill, had he been prime minister in 1938, could have mobilized public opinion for war with Hitler over the fate of Germans in a mistakenly created country that Britain was in no position to save.
Record also recalls that Germany's policy prior to Pearl Harbor was to try to avoid direct provocations of the United States. And the US options were also restricted by British and French policies. His summary of Franklin Roosevelt's position is a good one:
Roosevelt, who from the beginning had reservations about the wisdom of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, grasped the nature and severity of the Nazi threat long before he was politically able to do much about it. By the end of 1937, he was persuaded that the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany, Japan, and Italy constituted a secret offensive-defensive alliance aimed at world conquest, and though he subsequently flirted with appeasement because Chamberlain seemed committed to it, the Munich Agreement and the bloody November 1938 Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht convinced Roosevelt that Hitler’s aims were unlimited and that Nazi Germany could be stopped only by credibly threatened force. ...
It is testimony to the isolationists’ grip on the Congress (as well as Capitol Hill’s determination to reverse what it saw as a growing Executive Branch accretion of power at the expense of the Legislative Branch) that the Senate rejected Roosevelt’s personal pleas to loosen the provisions of the Neutrality Act until after war broke out in Europe in September 1939 and did not repeal the key provisions of the act until the eve of Pearl Harbor. (Congress did not authorize conscription until September 1940 — after the fall of France and the Low Countries, and amazingly, the House of Representatives voted to renew authorization for conscription by only one vote in August 1941 - 2 months after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and only 4 months before Pearl Harbor.)
Record's account also stresses an important point about the Soviet Union, one that has often been lost in the mists of Cold War polemics. And that is, Britain and France also thought that by the appeasement policy toward Germany in the West, they would encourage Germany to direct any further acts of military aggression eastward toward the Soviet Union. In Cold War Soviet accounts, this came across as a central motivation of the appeasement policy.
For instance, in a Soviet-era biography,
Winston Churchill (1978) by V.G. Trukhanovsky, we read the following description of the British perspective leading up to the Munich Conference of 1938:
Neville Chamberlain, a man of very limited intellectual capabilities (and who, like all such people when in high public office, vastly overrated his talents), thought that he had found a way of killing two birds with one stone. He supposed that Germany should be egged on into a war against the Soviet Union and that, as a result of this war, the USSR would be destroyed or on the verge of collapse, and that Germany would so deplete her resources that she would lose the capacity to fight Britain for the hegemony of Europe. In order to arrange such a war, Chamberlain was prepared to make enormous concessions to Germany so as to strengthen her politically, economically and militarily. ...
As early as 1935, when the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, visited Moscow, Soviet leaders told him that it was dangerous to think that Germany would definitely strike against the USSR, while Britain remained on the sidelines: "The guns might start firing in quite a different direction." This piece of intelligent advice, like many other, similar warnings issued by the USSR, was not understood in the West. (my emphasis)
While distortion can be created by stressing one factor at the expense of all the others, as the author just quoted does, in reality Soviet leaders had every reason to be suspicious. As Record points out, if there were going to be an effective anti-Hitler coalition in the mid-1930s, a partnership between Soviet Russia and France would have been a necessary component of that:
Russia and France had been allies against Imperial Germany, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s constituted the only great power east of Germany. It fielded the largest standing army in Europe and possessed war production potential second only to that of the United States. The same logic that underlay the Anglo-French-Russian alliance of World War I against Imperial Germany applied to stopping Hitler from plunging Europe into another world war, and this logic should have been glaringly apparent after Hitler removed any doubt over his trustworthiness and territorial intentions byinvading what remained of Czechoslovakia after Munich.
But, as discussed earlier here, there were other reasons why France and Britain were reluctant to go to war over Czechoslovakia in 1938, not least among them the lack of military preparedness to match their political strategy. Also, while in retrospect an Anglo-French alliance with the USSR against Germany over the Czechoslovakian issue in 1938 seems like a blindingly obvious idea, French and British leaders had reason to wonder whether Stalin's government could be relied upon to remove its armies and associated political influence from the areas it would have to occupy in a war to protect Czechoslovakia's borders. In hindsight, it seems obvious that it was a risk worth taking. But those were real factors at work in their decision-making.
Having said all that, Record's analysis of the results of their unwillingnessto make such and alliance is still justified:
Yet in August 1939, Stalin entered a nonaggression pact with Hitler that essentially freed German forces, once they (in conjunction with Soviet forces) had erased Poland, to attack in the West with no fear of having to wage war on a second front in the East. Stalin’s conversion from a potential ally of the West into a collaborator with Nazi Germany was the product of several factors, but primary among them was Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler and manifest fear of Communism and mistrust of the Soviet Union. Many Britons and Frenchmen believed Communism posed a greater threat to the West than Nazism, and there were in any event reasonable doubts about the Soviet Union’s value as an ally against Hitler, especially after Stalin decimated the Red Army’s officer corps in 1937-38. "It was natural for European states, especially the great imperial powers, Britain and France, to regard Soviet communism as their sworn enemy - for so it was," observes P. M. H. Bell. "From this fact of life some took the short step to the belief that the enemies of communism were your friends, and that fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were useful bulwarks against Soviet influence. Once this notion took root, it was hard to accept that the Nazi regime was itself a threat, nearer and more dangerous than the Soviet Union." (my emphasis)
And this latter point was also the core of Churchill's analysis of the Nazi threat. Churchill had strong anti-Soviet credentials and an arguably unrealistically hostile view of the Soviet Union. But he also recognized that Nazi Germany was a more direct and immediate threat to British and other Western interests than the USSR.
Record sums up his analysis at the end by saying that the appeasement/compromise policy failed to restrain Hitler's expansionism because Hitler was both
unappeasable and
undeterrable. And that the leaders of France and Britain should have understood that at the time Hitler made his demands for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
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| Nazi book burning, 1933 |
He was unappeasable because his real goals were such than in the end Britain and France could not have accomodated them. Hitler showed a great deal of diplomatic and political flexibility, aa the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 illustrated very dramatically. But, as Eberhard Jäckeldemonstrated in
Hitlers Weltanschauung (1981), Hitler never lost sight of his two central goals: eliminating the Jews and conquering Russia.
Hitler was undeterrable because he wasn't trying to avoid war, he was seeking the right opportunity to make war for
Lebensraum in the east. Nazi ideology also celebrated war as a positive good whereby the Aryan master race achieved its rightful dominance over lesser human beings.
However, saying that Hitler was
undeterrable is not the same as saying he could not be
contained. The point is that Britain, france and Russia could ultimately not have contained Hitler Germany witout actually
going to war. "War," Record writes, "was thus inevitable as long as Hitler remained in power."
Here, Record gives a limited and grudging endorsement to the present-day neocons' use of this historical situation:
To repeat, because Hitler was both unappeasable and undeterrable, war could have been avoided only via Hitler’s forcible removal of from power, an option apparently not considered by London or Paris and only briefly considered by German military leaders in 1938. Beyond Hitler’s departure from power, only a preventive war that crippled German military power, collapsed the Nazi regime, or both, could have averted World War II. Given the horrors of that war, initiation of a preventive war seems retrospectively imperative, and when neo-conservatives such as Richard Perle speak of how Hitler could have been stopped before 1939, they mean forcible regime change of precisely the kind the United States launched against Iraq in 2003. For Britain and France in the 1930s, however, a decisive preventive war against Germany was morally unacceptable, politically impossible, and militarily infeasible. Rewriting history is always easier than writing it.
But he makes a strong point that the endless use of the Hitler analogy in America's wars leads to an unrealistic view of threats:
No post-1945 foreign dictatorship bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship. The scope of Hitler’s nihilism, ambitions, and military power posed a mortal threat to Western civilization. No other authoritarian or totalitarian regime has managed to employ such a powerful military instrument in such an aggressive manner to fulfill such a horrendous agenda. Stalin had great military power but was cautious and patient; he was a realist and neither lusted for war nor discounted the strength and will of the Soviet Union’s enemies. Mao Zedong was reckless but militarily weak. Ho Chi Minh’s ambitions and fighting power were local. And Saddam Hussein was never in a position to reverse U.S. military domination of the Persian Gulf. Who but Hitler was so powerful and unappeasable and undeterrable? (my emphasis in bold)
The neocons and warmongering nationalists would argue that whatever countries are on their hit list at the moment actually do meet those criteria. Saddam Hussein, to hear the Bush Republicans tell it, was the worstest and evilest and more horibble dictator and military aggressor since Hitler, no,
worse than Hitler!
Here's where good judgment comes in. Rational and responsible people need to distinguish between realistic threat evaluation and trumpted-up war propaganda.
And he concludes with dual warnings, that a menace comparable to Hitler is possible, but that there are serious risks in making every war a new war against Hitler, as the US routinely does:
The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy.
If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades contain examplesof the danger of overestimating a security threat.
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