Jeffery Record on the mythical history of Allied appeasement (.pdf):

No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War II U.S. use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Presidents have repeatedly cited the great lesson of the 1930s—namely, that force should be used early and decisively against rising security threats—to justify decisions for war and military intervention; some presidents have compared enemy leaders to Hitler. The underlying assumption of the so-called Munich analogy is that the democracies could and should have stopped Hitler (thereby avoiding World War II and the Holocaust) by moving against him militarily before 1939. This assumption, however, is easy to make only in hindsight and ignores the political, military, economic, and psychological contexts of Anglo-French security choices during the 1930s. Among the myriad factors constraining those choices were memories of the horrors of World War I, failure to grasp the nature of the Nazi regime and Hitler’s strategic ambitions, France’s military inflexibility, Britain’s strategic overstretch, France’s strategic dependence on Britain, guilt over the Versailles Treaty of 1919, dread of strategic bombing and misjudgment of the Nazi air threat, American isolationism, and distrust of the Soviet Union and fear of Communism.

There’s a tradition on the internets, derived from “Godwin’s Law“, that anyone who brings up Hitler/Nazis/WWII in a debate automatically loses. This tradition is, like everything else on the internets, pretty stupid – you can’t improve the quality of discourse by pretending the seminal event of the last 100 years didn’t really happen. But it does acknowledge a problem: that, as the seminal event of the last 100 years, it tends to crowd out other events, which are likely more useful for analyzing current events. WWII is important because it is exceptional – Hitler was exceptionally evil, Germany was exceptionally warlike, the Holocaust was exceptionally barbaric; most things in this life, by definition, are not the exceptions. Many things are qualitatively similar to exceptional things – Saddam is like Hitler, North Korea is warlike, being catty on the internets is like the Holocaust – but, quantitatively, do not measure up. For a Godwin’s Law-violating example of this, see above – viewing events of 1938 too much through what was then the seminal event of the century, most European leaders failed to understand the un-Great War nature of their situation. If they had, WWII might not have been the seminal event it became, and we’d all be making lousy analogies to something else entirely. History is largely accident.

Maybe that’s a bad lesson to draw from WWII – it ties up the paragraph nice, at least, so give me a break. And it’s not as bad as the usual lesson, generally offered up by wind-up right-wing idiots, that “appeasement never works.” Appeasement often works quite well, even when dealing with our present-day Hitlers manqués – look at North Korea. Endless index card-reading wingnut rants notwithstanding, even rather awful people can often be satisfied if they are given what (note: not “whatever”) they want, will often be willing to make concessions in order to get it, and doing business is often much cheaper than acting tough, which is why grown-ups prefer it. WWII, as the exception, proves the rule.

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