Abe Greenwald: The Chamberlain Defense
[Abe Greenwald is assistant online editor of COMMENTARY and writes regularly for its blog Contentions.]
Samantha Power, former foreign policy advisor to the Barack Obama campaign, has penned a strange defense of Barack Obama's willingness to negotiate with America's enemies. In this week's Time magazine, Power argues that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's diplomatic engagement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 should not sully diplomacy's good name. She writes:
. . . instead of caricaturing diplomacy by invoking the Munich Agreement as code for spinelessness, it is worth studying Chamberlain's failed effort in the Munich talks for lessons in how not to negotiate. He was unprepared, unsophisticated and ultimately unsuccessful in preventing World War II. Having never before boarded an international flight, he flew three times to Germany in 1938, appearing to play supplicant to a violent dictator.
International flights do make up the bulk of Barack Obama's foreign policy experience, so in that respect he is more sophisticated and better prepared to meet with madman dictators than was Chamberlain. But--to go by Power's own list of Chamberlain's missteps--in that respect only. Barack Obama, having vowed to talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions, has opened himself up to the very same category of disadvantages incurred by the man whose name is synonymous with appeasement. Consider what Power cites as the Prime Minister's lack of preparation for negotiating with Hitler.
Chamberlain sidelined professional diplomats and neglected even to bring his own interpreter, relying instead on Hitler's.
But surely the most Barack Obama could do to avoid this amateurish pitfall would be to politely request that his own translator accompany him to Tehran. The presence of one's own hireling, after all, constitutes a condition. And Obama has dispensed with those, remember? Power then remarks on the cognitive barrier that was Chamberlain's grandiosity...
Read entire article at Commentary
Samantha Power, former foreign policy advisor to the Barack Obama campaign, has penned a strange defense of Barack Obama's willingness to negotiate with America's enemies. In this week's Time magazine, Power argues that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's diplomatic engagement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 should not sully diplomacy's good name. She writes:
. . . instead of caricaturing diplomacy by invoking the Munich Agreement as code for spinelessness, it is worth studying Chamberlain's failed effort in the Munich talks for lessons in how not to negotiate. He was unprepared, unsophisticated and ultimately unsuccessful in preventing World War II. Having never before boarded an international flight, he flew three times to Germany in 1938, appearing to play supplicant to a violent dictator.
International flights do make up the bulk of Barack Obama's foreign policy experience, so in that respect he is more sophisticated and better prepared to meet with madman dictators than was Chamberlain. But--to go by Power's own list of Chamberlain's missteps--in that respect only. Barack Obama, having vowed to talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions, has opened himself up to the very same category of disadvantages incurred by the man whose name is synonymous with appeasement. Consider what Power cites as the Prime Minister's lack of preparation for negotiating with Hitler.
Chamberlain sidelined professional diplomats and neglected even to bring his own interpreter, relying instead on Hitler's.
But surely the most Barack Obama could do to avoid this amateurish pitfall would be to politely request that his own translator accompany him to Tehran. The presence of one's own hireling, after all, constitutes a condition. And Obama has dispensed with those, remember? Power then remarks on the cognitive barrier that was Chamberlain's grandiosity...