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Beyond appeasement's rhetorical and emotional barriers, just how dangerous is
the policy itself in practice, and when? After a modest inquiry, most of the
oft-cited liabilities of appeasement lack the kind of argumentative support
that should always
accompany such a wide-spread and knee-jerk assumption that dominates our policy
discussions.
For instance, integral to any argument against appeasement is the assumption
that appeasing - before or during a conflict - causes havoc on the appeaser's
reputation and (therefore) vital security interests. Hand-in-hand with any
discussion of appeasement is how we want others to see us - usually as a force
to be reckoned with - because that perception is said to affect our enemies'
behavior. In particular, if we demonstrate our strength with a consistent
refusal to appease our enemies, then those same enemies will be less likely to
misbehave or try to call our bluff. Unfortunately, by focusing almost
exclusively on how others view us, we have lost our grounded sense of reality
and mistaken the phantom of weakness for the real thing.
In the years since Munich, our political discourse has relied on war as a tool
to bolster our reputation, and remarkably, this justification seems to be
resonating more as the years go by. Such rhetoric, for instance, has played an
instrumental role in the public justification and private rationalization of
every US war and most of its conflicts.
Even before the end of World War II in 1945, president Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was already saying that America's readiness to fight would show (and
is showing) aggressive nations that their hostile policies would not be
indulged.
Ever since, image maintenance has been at the center of our foreign policy
discussions, and perhaps even more so since the end of the Cold War. During the
Gulf War, president George H W Bush was intent on making up for Vietnam's
legacy of American weakness, while president Bill Clinton had his own foreign
policy demons to exorcise in Kosovo, after years of being excoriated for
avoiding tragic wars in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. "If you don't stand up to
brutality and the killing of innocent civilians," Clinton warned, "you invite
them to do more", but "action and resolve can stop armies and save lives."
After the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing campaign
successfully expelled Serbian forces from Kosovo, Clinton noted,
I
believe what we did was a good and decent thing, and I believe that it will
give courage to people throughout the world, and I think it will give pause to
people who might do what Mr [Slobodan] Milosevic has done throughout the world.
President George W Bush drove the point home even further in the traumatic wake
of the September 11, 2001, attacks, when he argued that it was his
predecessor's transient appeasement that had enabled al-Qaeda to escalate its
methods and successes. In a September 2006 speech, for instance, Bush framed
America's resolve in the context of al-Qaeda's understanding of American
weakness:
Bin Laden and his allies are absolutely convinced they can
succeed in forcing America to retreat [from Iraq and Afghanistan] and causing
our economic collapse. They believe our nation is weak and decadent, and
lacking in patience and resolve. And they're wrong. Osama bin Laden has written
that the "defeat of ... American forces in Beirut" in 1983 is proof America
does not have the stomach to stay in the fight. He's declared that "in Somalia
... the United States [pulled] out, trailing disappointment, defeat, and
failure behind it". And last year, the terrorist [Ayman al-]Zawahiri declared
that Americans "know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The
Vietnam specter is closing every outlet."
According to this
logic, then, the only way to undermine al-Qaeda's hope for success was to prove
that it would be impossible to compel any kind of American withdrawal -
militarily, politically, economically or ideologically. Even disregarding the
fact that it was al-Qaeda's express intention to draw the US into a war, Bush
was so eager to avoid the appearance of weakness that he disregarded the
implications of what it might mean to actually be weak. And it is this
distinction that has haunted appeasement's detractors for the past 60 years.
To be sure, weakness is certainly a strategic liability, but it should come as
no surprise when public officials err on the side of overkill. Whether our
leaders cite the threat of appeasement to garner support or because they
actually believe what they say, game theory research has come to illustrate
that anti-appeasement rhetoric frequently leads us to dismiss available and
effective policy options.
Once we recognize and unpack the complexities of our understandable aversion to
appeasement, only then can we harness and control that aversion - rather than
be controlled by it. To that end, when we are trying to determine how our
behavior will deter or encourage certain behaviors among our current and future
enemies, there are a number of key factors to consider and several
misconceptions to abandon.
The stakes game
Brand management is at the heart of public diplomacy, especially for a
superpower. And as in the business world, it is important to discern the
differences in the brand's interpretation. When president Ronald Reagan
withdrew American forces from Lebanon in the wake of a 1983 car-bombing that
killed 241 American marines, bin Laden claims he saw that withdrawal as a
weakness, and George W Bush - at least in retrospect - saw it as appeasement.
Yet even if one believes that the 1983 withdrawal from Lebanon was appeasement,
our reflexive disdain for appeasement prevents us from asking the much-needed
follow-up question: "Was the appeasement worthwhile? That is, did withdrawing
do more for our reputation and national interests than staying would have?" And
the answer is "yes". For perspective, consider why it took so long for the US
to pull out of Vietnam, while only a few substantive attacks by Hezbollah
compelled a US withdrawal from Lebanon?
Simply put, victory over communism in Vietnam was considered to be a strategic
necessity. For years we thought we had to win, no matter the costs. Adding more
pressure, we knew the Soviets were scrutinizing American resolve for weak
points, learning how we coped with losing a war that we regarded as a strategic
necessity. Granted, after we finally withdrew from Vietnam, it seemed that the
vaunted "domino theory" of contagious communism had been discredited, but our
civilian and military leadership believed otherwise at the time.
In contrast to Vietnam, however, Lebanon's civil war was dangerous, but in the
grand scheme of things, the Lebanon effort was regarded by the US as little
more than a humanitarian mission gone awry in a woefully chaotic region. The
same dynamic could be said for Somalia. Again, from a strategic perspective,
the US mission in Somalia was not nearly important enough to continue beyond
the loss of 19 soldiers, especially after such a public and gruesome spectacle
like the "Black Hawk Down" incident televised on CNN.
In other words, only if we abandon high-stakes missions does it cause
significant damage to our reputation. Merely because we feel humiliated - as we
did in the wake of our withdrawals from Lebanon and Somalia - does not mean
others will doubt our resolve when the stakes are high. After all, sizing up
your enemy when that enemy is fighting a mere nuisance does not provide even
moderately reliable intelligence as to how that enemy might behave if
confronted by a strategic threat. Vietnam gave the Soviets a reason to doubt
our resolve; Lebanon did not. By leaving Lebanon and Somalia, the message we
sent was not that we had no resolve; the message we sent was merely that we had
no resolve on relatively unimportant missions.
Admittedly, learning that we had no resolve on these two unimportant missions
was apparently sufficient to convince Bin Laden that we were weak enough for
his purposes, and this should certainly be taken into consideration when
determining foreign policy, even the humanitarian kind. Solely because Bin
Laden used these withdrawals to convince others that the US was weak was not
enough to actually make us weak.
As countless investigators, analysts and journalists have revealed, Bin Laden
knew he could not truly weaken the US unless he lured America into a larger war
that rallied the support of millions of Muslims who were traditionally
indifferent to his war cries. If Lebanon and Somalia were so instructive, then
Bin Laden would have devoted all his resources towards duplicating those
relatively small-scale incidents, forcing our piecemeal military withdrawal
from Muslim lands. But he didn't. He went big.
The mere fact that he cites those two withdrawals should point to the limited
threat he knew he could pose - short of a wider war that he needed us to start.
Both then and now, al-Qaeda's leaders are not counting on our hasty retreats;
they are counting on our over-reaction. Bin Laden needed to make us feel so
humiliated and vulnerable that we would forget our powerful place in the world,
rashly take his bait, and continue warring with the Muslim world until our
military and economy broke from the strain. In terms of policy formulation,
however, this distinction has been entirely ignored in Washington.
The humiliation of appeasement
Though counter-intuitive, even the painful withdrawals from important missions
have a certain degree of ambiguity as to the lessons learned by our enemies.
When we withdrew from Vietnam, the costs of the conflict had simply become too
high to justify staying. In the end, however, the same judgment and
cost/benefit rationalization that compelled us to withdraw was also employed by
the Soviets, thus mitigating our reputational fallout.
Similarly, when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s - after
nearly a decade of disastrous occupation and insurgency - we questioned their
resolve to a certain degree, but we also knew from our Vietnam experience that
occasionally even vital missions become too costly to continue. And it hardly
meant the Soviets were weak.
Ultimately, the relevant difference here is between words and actions. If the
bulk of US forces soon withdraw from Afghanistan with anything remotely
resembling defeat, hostile observers in Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba
and China will undoubtedly rub it in our faces. (We certainly rubbed it in the
Soviets' faces when they withdrew from Afghanistan.) Our enemies and
geopolitical competitors will insist that our withdrawal from Afghanistan
proves that we have become a pathetic, sniveling mess.
But they will not attack us as a result. In fact, they are most likely to
employ aggressive tactics at a time (like now) when our military is too
preoccupied to retaliate effectively, if at all. So like any country or nation
with self-confidence and an investment in the status quo, we see any verbal
insistence that we are weak as a sign that we are, in fact, weak - even if no
one acts on those claims. To be sure, our most basic tool for gauging our
weaknesses should be the prevalence of force used against us - not the extent
of our enemies' teasing. But we are human, and a sense of humiliation seldom
inspires productive or even rational behavior.
Consider, for instance, that after the Israeli Air Force bombed a Syrian
nuclear facility in the autumn of 2007, it seemed that every analyst of Middle
East affairs said that Israel had re-asserted its dominance, warned Syria and
Iran, and regained the respect it lost after the second Lebanon war against
Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Yet if Israel were so vulnerable and weak,
then Hezbollah would have launched another war as soon as its arsenal was
restocked several months after that war ended. But it didn't, and it hasn't.
In fact, if Israel were actually more vulnerable after the second Lebanon war,
it was only more vulnerable to teasing and gloating. As is frequently the case
when any top dog gets a bloody nose, Israel felt the need to retaliate to
reassure itself, not the rest of the world, of its staying power. And to that
end, Israel succeeded. But humiliation is a feeling, not a state of military
readiness, and accordingly, countering a sense of humiliation is a bizarre
method for ensuring adequate defenses, though boosts in morale are always
helpful.
Ultimately, if we cannot distinguish between taunts and threats, then we cannot
distinguish between humiliation and genuine vulnerability. More than anything
else, the obstacle of humiliation is emotional in nature, and our insistence
that appeasement, by definition, is necessarily weakening is frequently the
product of a bruised or threatened ego, nothing more. There are times, in fact,
when "appeasement from strength", as British statesman Winston Churchill (of
all people) once noted, can be "magnanimous and noble, and might be the surest
and perhaps the only path to world peace".
In the early stages of the Vietnam War, president Robert Kennedy insisted that
no one would believe we could take on communism in Berlin if we did not do so
in Vietnam. Yet not only were the stakes drastically different in Berlin and
Vietnam - as discussed above - but going to war to preserve or bolster our
image was risky given our limited resources.
That is, while proving to the world that we had the stomach to fight proxy wars
with the Soviets, we also spent valuable resources that were needed to convince
the Soviets that we could and would actually take Berlin, if and when the time
came to do so. As in any war, proving that we have the stomach to do something
is irrelevant if - in the process - we spend all of the resources and capital
vital to actually doing that something. Fortunately, the Soviets never pushed
us so far that we felt compelled to try to take Berlin. In our new wars,
however, we might not be so lucky.
Appeasement 3.0
For the past six years, the US has been so consumed by the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan that any and every threat we issue to our current and potential
enemies has been a laughingstock. When the Iraq war started, Russia was
preoccupied with domestic matters, North Korea was only dabbling with nuclear
technology and Iran was trying to accommodate the US effort in Iraq as best it
could. But as it became clear that the US would be allocating far more time,
soldiers, money and attention to Iraq than Washington had anticipated, Russia,
North Korea and Iran have all turned to increasingly aggressive tactics in
countless public and private arenas.
After all, what reality are the Iranians, North Koreans and Russians more
likely to base their policies on? That the Americans are unpredictable cowboys
who must be feared? Or that these same unpredictable cowboys have spent their
gunpowder, starved their horses, and earned the democratic wrath of the
Cherokee, Navajo and Apache nations?
In this way, avoiding appeasement or going to war to preserve/bolster our
reputation is just as likely to backfire as appeasement is, if not more so. The
war in Afghanistan was a direct challenge to the people who attacked us on 9/11
and thus was not predominantly focused on frightening our other adversaries.
First we had to take out our immediate enemies, and then focus on deterring our
potential ones.
But after Afghanistan, we lacked the resources to simultaneously attack and
invade Iraq, Iran, North Korea and (perhaps) Libya and Syria, so Washington
hoped to use a successful image-maintenance invasion of only Iraq to scare the
other regimes into terminating their weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs
and cooperate fully to root out the terrorists whose activities they had
traditionally overlooked.
As intended, Libya caved, but the others only mildly cooperated until they saw
impending disaster in Iraq. They waited to see how serious and reckless we were
- which is what we wanted them to do - but more importantly, they waited to see
how competent and powerful we were. Being serious and "unpredictable" - as
urged by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - is
frequently helpful when confronting an enemy, but that approach loses its value
if all of your unpredictable options are equally weak.
And this is the danger of fighting wars in an effort to avoid appeasement. When
the primary (if private) justification for going to war is sending a message,
then you have to win and win big; no war at all is better than even an
ambiguous victory. Yet today, not only is our military overwhelmed, but there
is no way to hide this reality from our enemies, as we are operating at full
capacity.
After 9/11, we had enough power, clout and flexibility for a limited war that
aided American interests more than it undermined them. Had the US not
intervened in Iraq, our success in the war in Afghanistan might have
demonstrated US resolve without using the bulk of America's armed forces - thus
maintaining America's reputation as a force to be reckoned with, willing and
ready for deployment. But for whatever reasons, the invasion, occupation and
overthrow of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was not enough - in Washington's eyes -
to solicit a sufficient degree of security- and WMD - cooperation from
Pyongyang, Riyadh, Tehran, Damascus, Tripoli and certainly Baghdad.
Six years later, we now we have the worst of both worlds: our military is
preoccupied in zero-sum nation-building when it should be preparing for
increasingly credible threats in Moscow and Tehran, and exponentially more
terrorists than before 9/11. Meanwhile, America's domestic tolerance for
misadventure abroad is plummeting, and there is little we can do about any of
these developments. A war to bolster our reputation has been instrumental in
overthrowing it, and in the process, we have revealed our immature grasp of
what it means to be strong.
With simplistic "anything-but-appeasement" policies, we forget that strength is
more than simply appearing strong, and far more than simply feeling strong.
Strength is anticipation and longevity. And while weakness and humiliation
sometimes overlap - as weakness is often humiliating - usually they do not,
especially not for a superpower. It does not take much to humiliate us, but it
takes an awful lot to weaken us.
Unfortunately, even though Obama seems more likely to discard his predecessor's
myopic concept of strength and anti-appeasement insecurities, the problems
Obama has inherited deny him the freedom Bush possessed to set America's
agenda. So rethinking appeasement might only be possible when we face a new set
of challenges abroad that allow us to spend more time acting and less time
reacting.
Either way, however, this means we must resist the temptation to grant our
primordial instincts exclusive domain over the formulation of our foreign
policies. Adolf Hitler's legacy is overwhelming, much as it should be. But
whether we like it or not, and regardless of what we call it, the idea of
appeasement is little more than a compromise that we come to regret. And
because we consistently fail to accurately predict who will stick to our deals
and who will not, the corrosive compromises only become distinguishable from
the successful ones after the negotiation is over. By focusing so heavily on
how strong we appear to others, it is easy to forget how strong we actually
are, and how easily we crack the ice beneath our feet with "anything but
appeasement" policies.
It is time, then, to develop a more accurate method for gauging the likelihood
that an enemy will abide by the tenets of any given agreement, or if war must
be declared or continued. This new gauge would likely pivot on the axis of
geostrategic interests, rather than on how "evil" a leader or government may
be. The first step, no doubt, is to recognize that appeasement is no more
crippling to our national security than war is, and appeasement should be
regarded in the same light - no better, no worse. Just another tool in the
toolbox. We have restricted our own policy options for far too long, and only
now has the cost truly become unbearable.
David H Young is a Washington-based analyst who blogs at
http://www.justwars.org.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in contributing.
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