Comparing our foreign policy to the feckless behavior of the UK and France before WW2 in the 1930's is often dismissed as an overused and simplistic historical analogy. But when one watches the US and other western governments pursue appeasing policies toward North Korea and Iran that over and over repeat the very same errors and delusions of that awful decade, it’s hard not to make those comparisons.
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| * "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." |
One lesson from the Thirties is that appeasing an aggressor encourages not just that one, but also others. The key act of appeasement of that decade’s many took place in March 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland with 22,000 unseasoned troops and 14,000 policemen, violating both the Versailles and Locarno treaties.
Facing them were nearly 100 French and Belgian divisions! Of course they did nothing, even though, as Hitler later confessed,
“If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.”
Now consider the decades-long appeasement of North Korea and the way it has emboldened the Iranians to follow the Kim family playbook for acquiring nuclear weapons. Just last week, newly minted North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un defied U.N. resolutions and American threats by launching a missile that could deliver a nuclear payload to the West Coast of America. As John Bolton tirelessly keeps reminding us, leaving Iran in control of the knowledge and facilities needed to create nuclear weapons, while letting them continue to enrich uranium even to 20%, merely postpones the ultimate reckoning.
As Winston Churchill once said, before becoming the WW2 Prime Minister of the UK; because of their appeasement policies the Nazis saw the UK and Europe as “a frightened, flabby old woman, who at the worst would only bluster”
For both Iranian and North Korea regimes, the West has become an object of contempt and that "flabby old woman"
(C) Bruce Thornton.
(Photos: Copyright Control)
So...Just when the western democracies need the leadership of a Churchill, the US has blustering Obama, the Chamberlain appeaser!
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| * Edmund Burke (above) was an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher who served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his support of the American colonies in the dispute with King George III and Great Britain that led to the American Revolution. |
