Appeasement vs. abstention: dealing with Iran, North Korea

For the past 50 years, whenever presidents have dealt with a crisis in international affairs by not immediately dropping bombs on our enemies, or not invading them, or not even calling up the reserves, some ultra-conservative would bring up Munich.  The lack of action by the United States would be derided as akin to Neville Chamberlain’s “appeasementâ€� of Hitler at Munich in 1938, which allowed the Nazis to take over Czechoslovakia and accelerate Europe toward the onset of World War II.  

 Between 1969 and 1972, when President Richard Nixon reached for détente with the USSR, and then a rapprochement with Red China, conservatives on both sides of the Senate aisle yelled about appeasement to our  Communist enemies.  In 1974, when President Gerald Ford made a deal with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev at Vladivostok, he was accused of selling out to the Soviets as Chamberlain had done to Hitler.  

In the 1980s, when U.S. negotiator Paul Nitze and his Soviet counterpart took their famous “walk in the woodsâ€� in Geneva and came up with a plan to cut back on nuclear weapons, neo-con Richard Perle testified to the Senate that Nitze — the man who had given Perle his first job in Washington — was doing in Geneva what Chamberlain did in Munich.   

A couple of years later, the conservative making the appeasement simile about President Ronald Reagan’s dealings with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev was Representative Newt Gingrich.  Reagan’s willingness to sign a nuclear accord with the Russians caused French President Francois Mitterand to foam at the mouth about a new “nuclear Munich.â€�

 The only time that the Munich argument made much sense was in 1990 when President George H. W. Bush advisor Brent Scowcroft ­— whom the conservatives decried as too liberal — used it to convince the president that he must fight Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait.  

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Before the recent upheaval in Iran, a historically minded, moderate Republican friend said to me that it was time for Republicans to mothball the Munich analogy.  I agreed but not completely. There are times and places, where and when good people and good nations must take a stand and not permit dictators to go further, and Munich is a reasonable precedent to cite.  

But some important facts about the Munich agreement, I argued, had been forgotten. Premier Edouard Daladier, who also signed at Munich, flew home to Paris expecting to be lynched — and was amazed to be lauded for preserving peace.   The time to have stopped Hitler was not at Munich but years earlier, when he re-militarized the Rhineland and the Saar, which were forbidden by the Versailles Treaty.  France and Great Britain could have used that Hitler action as reason to invade, and crushed Germany before its military might grew too large.  

We have no similar shorthand for another equally short-sighted maneuver in international affairs, an action taken some time ago that, I believe, has led directly to what may very well be our next war, against Iran and/or North Korea, so I’ll label that maneuver abandonment.  

 Iran has been a problem for the United States since the 1979 coup that overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran and led to the take-over of the embassy in Tehran.  But in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States made attempts to rekindle the dialogue with Iran.  Similarly, during the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, attempts were made to communicate with North Korea. By the end of the Clinton years, some progress had been made in persuading North Korea to disassemble its nuclear program.

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 Then  George W. Bush arrived in the White House accompanied by a gang of neo-cons and those who slavishly listened to them.  Among the first actions by the Bush 43 administration, even before 9/11, was to put into practice the neo-con tenet of not dealing diplomatically with avowed enemies of the United States.  Why?  Because we were morally superior and should not sully ourselves, and because diplomacy was a waste of time, since whatever promises those enemies made would not be kept.  

Then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton made such a scene at a meeting of six powers called to dissuade North Korea from nuclear weapons that he was forced to leave the talks, which collapsed as he had wanted them to.  

 In Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, he labeled North Korea, Iran and Iraq the “axis of evil.â€�  It was not until 2007 that U.S. talks began again with North Korea.  They never did resume with Iran.  In the interim, six crucial years had slid by  without high-level contact.  Six years of abstention.  

Abstention is as bad as appeasement.  But while there can be a time and a place not to appease enemies, there is no time and place to give up talking to potential enemies, short of a declaration of war.   But we did, and partly as a result, today world peace is threatened most directly by those two countries.

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 In recent weeks the North Koreans have fired off missiles, imploded nuclear devices and ramped up their nuclear-material-creation program.  “Nuclear war is closer than ever,â€� a North Korean spokesman was recently quoted as saying, in response to the imposition of tougher U.N. sanctions and the issuing of statements by the United States and other powers that they may well stop North Korean ships at sea to determine whether they are carrying weapons that would enable other countries to also create weapons of mass destruction.

 Iran’s even more recent  election is getting more media play now, and is equally troubling. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejahd is declaring victory, repressing the opposition, and boasting that Iran will shortly have a nuclear weapon that it will aim at Israel, which the Iranians have pledged to wipe off the map.

 Already, the same neo-cons who pushed us into Iraq are trotting out the Munich analogy to decry President Obama’s hands-off approach to Iran’s post-electoral upheaval and his refusal to take immediate military action against North Korea.   No appeasement, they cry.  They argue for the immediate use of force to make Iran and North Korea give up their creation of nuclear bombs, and to change the electoral results in Iran.    

 No American can reasonably argue that force will not be necessary, now or eventually, in dealing with North Korea and Iran.  To protect ourselves and our allies, we must draw the line somewhere.  We must not appease.   But it would be equally foolish of us to do what the Bush Administration did for six years and refuse to deal diplomatically with Iran and North Korea, for such refusals will not make either situation get any better.     

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.