The Umbrella’s Shadow

In a recent speech to the American Legion in August, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pointedly compared critics of the Iraq war to those fey souls who declined to fight for king or country on the eve of World War II. It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies, Rumsfeld noted. When those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and Nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored. Rumsfeld himself is hardly one to be ignored, but he has certainly suffered ridicule over his handling of the Iraq war. In response, he and other administration officials, up to and including President George W. Bush, have sought to put the Iraq war on equal footing with the titanic struggle against the Axis Powers.

Its an evocation that strikes a chord in the Wests collective memory. Sixty-eight years ago, Adolf Hitler, with the acquiescence of Britain and France, took possession of the Sudetenland, a territory that belonged to what was then Czechoslovakia. After signing the Munich Agreement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned home, wielding a large, black umbrella as he disembarked from his plane. Adoring crowds greeted him, cheering lustily when he proclaimed that hed delivered peace in our time. But the deal, meant to appease German demands for Lebensraum, would go down as one of historys great blunders. Just six months later, Hitler tossed the agreement aside and invaded Prague. To this day, some diplomats reportedly refuse to carry umbrellas because of their association with Chamberlains miscalculation and weakness.

A fondness for rehashing the disreputable legacy of appeasement is understandable, given that a bronze bust of Winston Churchill seems to be part of the standard-issue starter kit handed to members of Americas conservative foreign-policy establishment. Still, many conservatives seem to be marooned in 1938, with Hitler forever poised on the border of Czechoslovakia. It seems fair to ask: Doesnt history have any other lessons to offer?

Though the Munich Syndrome is particularly pronounced in the current administration, Bush is hardly the first American leader to revive the specter of Munich. As president, Dwight D. Eisenhower cited the dangers of appeasement when he decided to assist the French in suppressing communist guerillas in Indochina (an analogy that none other than Winston Churchill rejected). When John F. Kennedy opted to blockade Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis instead of ordering an immediate invasion, Gen. Curtis LeMay responded that the decision was almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich. President Lyndon B. Johnson trotted out the dangers of appeasement twice in 1965: once to justify the escalation of U.S. troops in Vietnam, and again to explain the need to invade the tiny Dominican Republic. And when Ronald Reagan fostered negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce stockpiles of ICBMs, a furious right wheeled on its erstwhile champion, branding him a modern-day Chamberlain. More recently, the George H. W. Bush administration commonly cited the need to avoid another Munich as a reason for reversing Saddam Husseins aggression against Kuwait. And Bill Clinton invoked appeasement when explaining his administrations decision to intervene in Bosnia against Slobodan Milosevic.

Whats going on here? Is every two-bit strongman a would-be Hitler who, let us recall, was the leader of the most formidable industrialized country of the day? Must every U.S. excursion abroad be a new crusade to rescue the free world? America may have been a 98-pound weakling when Hitler rose to power, but it emerged from World War II as a military and financial colossus, easily the most powerful nation in the world. Today, U.S. military might exceeds that of the combined forces of the rest of the world. Yet, like a gawky adolescent whos grown too fast to appreciate his own strength, Americans cling to the notion that they are weak and vulnerableand need to bluster and bully to compensate.

This stance is particularly ill-suited to our confrontation with radical Islam, which feeds on Americas post-9/11 outrage. By now it should be clear that the central pillar of our adversaries strategy is to provoke us into conflicts that they can then turn into a casus belli for their recruiting and propaganda efforts. We know this and yet we seem incapable of resisting when they twist the lions tale. As Shakespeare observed, when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner. Americas greatest strength is not its military, but its meaning. For generations, we were the nation that held the lamp high beside the golden door. Lately, we seem determined to frog-march people through it at the point of a gun.

In this age of American hyperpower, cant we agree that the oversized fear of appeasementa doctrine, after all, born of military weaknessdoes more harm than good? After all, the United States has never been stronger. If some of our adversaries fail to understand that, they will learn the hard truth, just as adherents to other -isms that now reside in the dustbin of history have learned. It is well past time we let go of outdated bromides from the greatest generation and stepped out from underneath the umbrellas shadow.