Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood: The Ghost of Munich ... America's Appeasement Complex
[Fredrik Logevall is a professor at Cornell University and co-author of America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Kenneth Osgood is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and author of Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad.]
The annual Values Voter Summit might seem an unlikely place to get a preview of the 2012 presidential debate on foreign policy. True, the gathering of several thousand conservative activists, sponsored by the Family Research Council, typically features a parade of Republican stars, many of them hoping for a shot at the top spot on the GOP ticket. But the attendees tend to focus on domestic issues that matter to social conservatives: religious freedom, protection of marriage, and abortion. The breakout sessions during the 2009 summit, held last September in Washington, featured topics like “The Threat of Illegal Immigration,” “Countering the Homosexual Agenda in Public Schools,” and “Global Warming Hysteria: The New Face of the ‘Pro-Death’ Agenda.”
Yet Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty used his evening plenary address to launch a blistering attack on President Obama’s foreign policy. Although relatively new to the national stage, Pawlenty secured his place as an early contender for the Republican nomination by delivering a rousing speech that garnered four standing ovations and landed him a strong showing in the Values Voter straw poll that always accompanies the summit. Strength, Pawlenty said, was one of the values under attack in the current political environment: “Not only did the president abandon missile defense, but he is opening negotiations with Iran and North Korea. The lessons of history are clear: Appeasement and weakness did not stop the Nazis, appeasement did not stop the Soviets, and appeasement did not stop the terrorists.”
By leveling the “appeasement” charge, Pawlenty tapped into a central theme that is sure to figure in both the 2012 presidential race and the upcoming midterm elections. But in selling his foreign policy bona fides to the Republican faithful, Pawlenty also summoned the most commonly used, widely accepted, and poorly understood historical analogy in American politics.
The reference to appeasement, of course, evokes the memory of the notorious Munich Pact of 1938. With the world on the brink of war, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sought to find a way out by meeting Adolph Hitler on his own turf, at the Bavarian city of Munich, nerve center of the Nazi Party. There Chamberlain made his infamous deal with the devil, allowing Hitler to annex a large chunk of Czechoslovakian territory in return for a pledge of peace. Chamberlain returned to a hero’s welcome in England. Carrying the black umbrella that would later become a symbol of shame, and waving the Munich agreement in his hands, he proclaimed that his appeasement policy had produced “peace in our time.” Less than a year later, Europe was at war. From that moment on, Munich would symbolize the ultimate folly of making agreements with dictators.
Although the United States was not party to the 1938 agreement, Americans have nonetheless fixated on it for seven decades. “Munich” and “appeasement” have been among the dirtiest words in American politics, synonymous with naïveté and weakness, and signifying a craven willingness to barter away the nation’s vital interests for empty promises. American presidents from Harry Truman on have feared the dreaded “Munich analogy”—and projected an air of uncompromising toughness lest they be branded as appeasers by their political opponents.
For a time, Vietnam seemed to challenge Munich, providing a counter narrative about the danger of avoiding diplomacy; but the specter of appeasement never really went away, and now it is back with force. As a candidate, Barack Obama virtually invited the Munich ghost to return when he signaled his willingness to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, and other so-called pariah states without preconditions. This set off a firestorm from the right, with then President Bush leading the charge. “We have an obligation to call this what it is,” Bush declared in a speech before the Israeli Knesset, “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” The drumbeat continued steadily following Obama’s inauguration. Scores of conservative commentators and politicians bludgeoned the new president for scrapping the missile defense plans for Eastern Europe, thereby allegedly caving to Moscow, and for trying to engage Tehran and Pyongyang. Obama had taken “another move straight out of the Neville Chamberlain foreign policy playbook,” Congressman Steve King charged. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who harbors presidential ambitions, sounded the same theme, asserting that “patterns of appeasement and avoidance . . . are the heart of this administration.”
We have, of course, heard these arguments before. For the better part of the last century, Americans looked at the Soviet Union in much the same way as they now look at Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and other “rogue states”: as dangerous, cunning, and above all devious. Americans assumed that the men in the Kremlin were motivated more by their Marxist-Leninist ideology than by the traditional interests of the Soviet state. Because of their very nature, they could not be trusted. Negotiations were pointless. Munich and the 1930s seemed to offer a clear-cut lesson, as Truman put it in 1948: “Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war.”
As the current debate over U.S. foreign policy again turns on the lessons of the past, Americans would do well to take a closer look at the country’s long wrestling match with Munich’s ghost...
Read entire article at World Affairs Journal
The annual Values Voter Summit might seem an unlikely place to get a preview of the 2012 presidential debate on foreign policy. True, the gathering of several thousand conservative activists, sponsored by the Family Research Council, typically features a parade of Republican stars, many of them hoping for a shot at the top spot on the GOP ticket. But the attendees tend to focus on domestic issues that matter to social conservatives: religious freedom, protection of marriage, and abortion. The breakout sessions during the 2009 summit, held last September in Washington, featured topics like “The Threat of Illegal Immigration,” “Countering the Homosexual Agenda in Public Schools,” and “Global Warming Hysteria: The New Face of the ‘Pro-Death’ Agenda.”
Yet Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty used his evening plenary address to launch a blistering attack on President Obama’s foreign policy. Although relatively new to the national stage, Pawlenty secured his place as an early contender for the Republican nomination by delivering a rousing speech that garnered four standing ovations and landed him a strong showing in the Values Voter straw poll that always accompanies the summit. Strength, Pawlenty said, was one of the values under attack in the current political environment: “Not only did the president abandon missile defense, but he is opening negotiations with Iran and North Korea. The lessons of history are clear: Appeasement and weakness did not stop the Nazis, appeasement did not stop the Soviets, and appeasement did not stop the terrorists.”
By leveling the “appeasement” charge, Pawlenty tapped into a central theme that is sure to figure in both the 2012 presidential race and the upcoming midterm elections. But in selling his foreign policy bona fides to the Republican faithful, Pawlenty also summoned the most commonly used, widely accepted, and poorly understood historical analogy in American politics.
The reference to appeasement, of course, evokes the memory of the notorious Munich Pact of 1938. With the world on the brink of war, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sought to find a way out by meeting Adolph Hitler on his own turf, at the Bavarian city of Munich, nerve center of the Nazi Party. There Chamberlain made his infamous deal with the devil, allowing Hitler to annex a large chunk of Czechoslovakian territory in return for a pledge of peace. Chamberlain returned to a hero’s welcome in England. Carrying the black umbrella that would later become a symbol of shame, and waving the Munich agreement in his hands, he proclaimed that his appeasement policy had produced “peace in our time.” Less than a year later, Europe was at war. From that moment on, Munich would symbolize the ultimate folly of making agreements with dictators.
Although the United States was not party to the 1938 agreement, Americans have nonetheless fixated on it for seven decades. “Munich” and “appeasement” have been among the dirtiest words in American politics, synonymous with naïveté and weakness, and signifying a craven willingness to barter away the nation’s vital interests for empty promises. American presidents from Harry Truman on have feared the dreaded “Munich analogy”—and projected an air of uncompromising toughness lest they be branded as appeasers by their political opponents.
For a time, Vietnam seemed to challenge Munich, providing a counter narrative about the danger of avoiding diplomacy; but the specter of appeasement never really went away, and now it is back with force. As a candidate, Barack Obama virtually invited the Munich ghost to return when he signaled his willingness to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, and other so-called pariah states without preconditions. This set off a firestorm from the right, with then President Bush leading the charge. “We have an obligation to call this what it is,” Bush declared in a speech before the Israeli Knesset, “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” The drumbeat continued steadily following Obama’s inauguration. Scores of conservative commentators and politicians bludgeoned the new president for scrapping the missile defense plans for Eastern Europe, thereby allegedly caving to Moscow, and for trying to engage Tehran and Pyongyang. Obama had taken “another move straight out of the Neville Chamberlain foreign policy playbook,” Congressman Steve King charged. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who harbors presidential ambitions, sounded the same theme, asserting that “patterns of appeasement and avoidance . . . are the heart of this administration.”
We have, of course, heard these arguments before. For the better part of the last century, Americans looked at the Soviet Union in much the same way as they now look at Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and other “rogue states”: as dangerous, cunning, and above all devious. Americans assumed that the men in the Kremlin were motivated more by their Marxist-Leninist ideology than by the traditional interests of the Soviet state. Because of their very nature, they could not be trusted. Negotiations were pointless. Munich and the 1930s seemed to offer a clear-cut lesson, as Truman put it in 1948: “Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war.”
As the current debate over U.S. foreign policy again turns on the lessons of the past, Americans would do well to take a closer look at the country’s long wrestling match with Munich’s ghost...