A Short History of the Munich Analogy, Part 2:
Neoconservatives and the "appeasement" meme
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In the diary A Short History of the Munich Analogy, Part 1, I addressed the long history of the Munich analogy in American political rhetoric and decision-making during the Cold War years up the time of Reagan. Part 2 continues the history of "Muniching" from 1980 to the fall of the Soviet Empire.
Its years of Cold War service as a master narrative and a political bludgeon have embedded the Munich analogy in American culture. The idea of Munich has become a tenet, or dogma, of the American civil religion, or at least a tenet of the Wilsonian interventionist denomination which has been shared at various times by both American liberals and conservatives. As a moral syllogism applied to "parallel" foreign policy crises, it postulates a predetermined outcome, and dictates an imperative course of action.
The Munich analogy today is a more than a historical analogy. It has become a cultural resource charged with moral significance, but for some users, for example the historically illiterate radio host Kevin James, it is clearly nothing but a political buzzword that is practically devoid of real historical content or context.
Munich 1938 has come to figure in American political discourse, not so much as a historical reference, but as a moral syllogism that expresses rigid absolutes. Because of the absoluteness of the ideas it embodies, it has come to figure in political discussion as a preemptive argument—a knockout punch that puts an end to, rather than invites, further debate.
The specter of Neville Chamberlain faded from American politics for a brief period after the Vietnam War ended. But by the late 1970s, the Munich analogy was back in fashion. Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservatism demanded a more confrontational Soviet policy and a stronger defense posture. To Reagan, President Carter’s foreign policy evoked "the tapping of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella on the cobblestones of Munich." Reagan wove warnings of a new Munich skillfully into his 1980 campaign rhetoric, and continued to invoke Munich against political opponents during his first term. In a 1983 address before the National Association of Evangelicals (Reagan’s "evil empire" speech), the President warned that "if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly."[1] Reagan also likened the advocates of nuclear disarmament to Neville Chamberlain.[2]
During his second term, after the revelations of the Iran-Contra affair and during Reagan’s unprecedented rapprochement with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan invoked Munich much less often. While campaigning for George H. W. Bush in 1988, however, he revived the old refrain, citing the "naive appeasement" that had led to World War II. "The sad lesson is that to be weak is to invite war, and George Bush and I will not rest until freedom is restored to all the peoples of Eastern Europe." [3]
The Munich analogy was hardly Ronald Reagan’s private property during these years. All hard-line anticommunists and defense hawks invoked Munich upon occasion. In 1985, for instance, the College Republicans distributed Neville Chamberlain-style black umbrellas to eight Republican senators who voted against the MX missile. [4] The Munich analogy was invoked with an especial urgency, however, by one group of anticommunist Americans in particular—those known as "neoconservatives." The neoconservatives’ affinity for this analogy, and for references to the Second World War and the Holocaust, stemmed primarily from the circumstance that many, although not all, were Jewish Americans. The neoconservatives, as John Ehrman observes, began as anti-communist liberal intellectuals in the postwar era (although some of neoconservatism’s leading lights were former Trotskyites in the 1930s and 40s). [5]
The neoconservatives-to-be, members of the "liberal consensus" of the 1950s and early 60s, became part of the fallout of the dissolution of consensus in the late 1960s. Rather than turning to the left or becoming isolationist as many liberal Democrats did, these intellectuals were alienated by the 1960s’ counterculture, by détente and post-Vietnam isolationism. In the 1970s, neoconservatives promoted a new tough-minded pragmatism in domestic affairs and a newly-forged brand of anticommunism unscathed by America’s debâcle in Vietnam—an ideological vision of a righteous America wielding its power to advance the cause of democracy. The central neoconservative foreign policy idea in the 1970s and 1980s was that America’s main enemy constituted an absolute threat—and that America’s sole criterion in choosing allies should be whether a regime was anticommunist or not. [6]
Neoconservatives disseminated their ideology from an institutional base that included several conservative think tanks and a growing number of press outlets comprising the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, and Commentary magazine, edited for many years by Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz and the other neoconservatives shared a preoccupation, amounting very nearly to an obsession, with the nightmare of the 1930s and the fear that an unopposed totalitarian enemy would again embark on its Juggernaut march, rolling back democracy in its path. In 1977, Bayard Rustin and Carl Gershman, writing in Commentary, called the U.S. failure to counter the Soviets in Angola the clearest demonstration "since Munich [of] the impotence of the democratic world in the face of totalitarian aggression." [7]
In 1980, Podhoretz summed up the neoconservative sense of a dangerous decline of American power in "The Culture of Appeasement," which appeared in The Present Danger. Liberals, its author argued, refused to defend, and were incapable of defending, the democratic system that sustained them. A new nationalism, a revived sense of American mission was needed, otherwise, the "unimpeded culture of appeasement" would drive the United States into Soviet vassalage. [8]
A different threat also evoked images of Munich among neoconservatives — Arab hostility towards Israel, which was indeed an increasing threat in the 1970s and 180s. "The memory of the 1930s," evoked by fears of American decline, "was especially disturbing for the neoconservatives because so many of them were Jewish," John Ehrman observed; "...they feared, as a result of renewed American weakness in the 1970s, the destruction of Israel and a repetition of the Holocaust." Ehrman noted that Podhoretz, for example, "worried that the United States would try to appease the Arabs and the Third World by forcing Israel to trade land for empty promises of peace." [9]
American neoconservative rhetoric directed at the Palestinian Liberation Organization, replete with allusions to Nazidom, echoed that of Israel’s Likud Party leaders. [10] It should be noted that anti-Israel Arab rhetoric was couched in similar terms. If, however, as Peter Novick argued in The Holocaust in American Life, Menachem Begin and his supporters so overworked the Arab-Nazi equation during the Israeli-Lebanon war as to "discredit" this style of expression, the fact apparently escaped the American neoconservatives. [11] Norman Podhoretz, for example, accused those Jews who criticized Israel's Lebanon invasion with "granting Hitler a posthumous victory." [12] Any threatening Arab leader might be a Hitler. In 1984 U.S News & World Report announced that "Qadhafi is the Hitler of the 1980s." [13]
Neoconservatives turned out to support Ronald Reagan in 1980, and a goodly number served in his administration - Jeane Kirkpatrick, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Paul Wolfowitz. Neoconservatives had established, by 1980, a pattern of using the Munich analogy on behalf of politicians and parties of whom they approved, and then wielding Munich as a bludgeon against the same leaders when their foreign-policy stances seemed too weak. By 1983, Reagan had begun to incur neoconservatives’ displeasure, despite his unprecedented peacetime military buildup and lavish defense spending. In 1983 Norman Podhoretz, finding that Reagan was still too conciliatory towards the Soviets, compared the President to Neville Chamberlain, asserting that "appeasement by any other name smells as rank, and the stench of it now pervades the American political atmosphere." [14]
As the Cold War wound down in the second half of the 1980s, neoconservatives continued to excoriate any signs of "appeasement" towards Mikhail Gorbachev. The National Interest maintained that glasnost and perestroika were mere shams, behind which a still-hostile Soviet Union waxed stronger and more implacable while the United States foolishly and recklessly dropped its guard.
In the midst of these claims, the Soviet empire collapsed. The Cold War had no rationale to continue. Neoconservatives now faced the task of adapting their ideology to a post-cold war world. Vice President George H. W, Bush succeeded Reagan in 1989. Neoconservatives had occupied key positions in Reagan's foreign policy and security establishments, but the George H. W. Bush administration was dominated by "realists" These foreign policy experts guided by pragmatism and balance-of-power ideas included advisers Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, and Bush himself. The neoconservative "defense intellectuals" who had influenced policy during the Reagan years reverted to the position of outsiders again. Nevertheless they dominated a number of major conservative foundations, and had media platforms through a growing list of journals, which now included the newly-founded National Interest, the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
As the Soviet threat waned, the Arab and Islamic threat in the Middle East, always an important issue to both Jewish and non-Jewish neoconservatives, rose in importance. This threat formed the basis of a new world outlook that required very little change to the old ideology of using American power to confront the encroachment of monolithic and absolute evil. "Enter the Middle Eastern bogeyman," wrote scholar Leon Hadar in 1991:
For the past year, neoconservative intellectuals have focused on the need for the US to confront the new transnational enemy from the East, radical Arab nationalism and Islamic ‘fundamentalism,’ or what Krauthammer termed the ‘global intifada.’ The operational implication of this type of reasoning is that the original intifada can be forgotten. The new, makeshift neoconservative line is that the removal of the Soviet threat in any Middle East calculation actually increases the value of the special relationship between the US and Israel, since the military strength of the Jewish state could serve as a deterrent to radical Arab regimes and help shore up shaky ones. By this vision, Israel becomes the contemporary crusader state, a bastion of the West. It was not a coincidence that writers like Krauthammer also supplied the ideological "Saddam-is-Hitler" formula that helped to press for the attack against Iraq. [15]
Early in 1990, amid the collapse of Eastern Europe’s communist regimes, the Baltic state of Lithuania asserted its independence from the Soviet Union. President Bush declined to intervene or to recognize Lithuanian independence. As the Kremlin sent troops to the Lithuanian border that April, Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis accused the United States of selling out the Lithuanian republic, declaring, "This is another Munich." Bush was deeply involved in negotiations with Gorbachev over trade and the entry of a united Germany into NATO, and thus had incentives not to begin regarding the leader, upon whose nation he was considering granting "most favored" status, as a Hitler, nor to fancy himself clad in the striped pants of Chamberlain, at the behest of one of the favored partner’s smaller satellites. [16]
Bush’s decision to let free Lithuania shift for itself was soon buried under the dogpile of ensuing events, and few Americans have paid much regard to it, or to the circumstance that the Munich analogy, so resonant in the Cold War context for so many decades, found at that time no echo chamber within the American media. William Safire, in his column of 30 March 1990, did note that the "umbrellas of appeasement" were "unfurling," from "the Baltics to Baghdad," but he devoted more column space, and far more rancor, to Baghdad than to the Baltics. [17]
Indeed, for the previous eighteen months, Safire, along with neoconservative editorialists A.M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton B. Zuckerman had been excoriating Bush and Secretary of State James Baker in the opinion pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and U.S. News and World Report for appeasing the Iraq menace. Saddam Hussein had emerged the victor (though rather a Pyrrhic one) from an eight-year war with Iran. Iraq had sustained severe war damage, an $80 billion war debt loomed, and the price of oil, on which Iraq’s entire national economy depended, had dropped significantly, wreaking havoc upon the nation’s finances. In the spring of 1990, Saddam had indeed begun to evince a very threatening posture towards the West, the United States and Israel, and he appeared to be making a bid for leadership of the Arab world by denouncing American influence in the Gulf and threatening Israel.
The pundits believed that Saddam was trying to acquire nuclear weapons and was only four years away from acquiring one. He had shown himself willing to use WMDs by gassing 5,000 Iraqi Kurds. The neoconservative pundits wanted Saddam Hussein forcibly contained in the most stringent Cold War manner. They equated Hussein with Hitler. Hussein wanted "to wipe out the Jews of Israel and rule the Middle East. He has made this as clear as Mein Kampf..." [18]
Instead of containing Saddam Hussein, however, President George H. W. Bush appeased and appeased. Munich 1938 figured as a leitmotif in these pundits' columns, through which the president, or, more often, Secretary of State James Baker slunk, figuratively attired in the striped trousers of appeasement and bearing the furled black umbrella of dishonor.
The neoconservatives’ warning drumbeat grew louder in July as a new crisis unfolded. On 15 July 1990, Saddam Hussein moved Republican Guards to the Iraq-Kuwait border. The next day, his foreign minister set Iraq’s demands on Kuwait before the Arab League. This latest "thuggery," wrote Charles Krauthammer in the Post, "finally jolted the Bush administration out of its policy of craven appeasement of Iraq." [19] Nevertheless, after Saddam assured the Egyptian president and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq that he would not invade Kuwait, Bush’s envoy assured Saddam that America had no intention of intervening in "Arab disputes." [20] Thus did the Bush administration succeed in recreating, according to columnist Charles Krauthammer, "a nightmare out of the nineteen-thirties":
Hitler analogies are not to be used lightly. To be compared to Hitler is too high a compliment in evil to pay to most tyrants. The time has come, however, to bestow the compliment on a tyrant who is truly a nightmare out of the 1930s: Saddam Hussein, president (soon for life) of Iraq...What raises Hussein to the Hitlerian level is not just his unconventional technique—violence—for regulating prices. Nor is it merely his penchant for domestic brutality—the wholesale murder of political opponents, the poison gas attacks on his own Kurdish minority, the Republic of Fear... that he has constructed.
What makes him truly Hitlerian is his way of dealing with neighboring states. In a chilling echo of the ‘30s, Iraq, a regional superpower, accuses a powerless neighbor of a "deliberate policy of aggression against Iraq," precisely the kind of absurd accusation Hitler lodged against helpless Czechoslovakia and Poland as a prelude to their dismemberment. [21]
So impressed with Charles Krauthammer’s analysis was Congressman Tom Lantos of California, that he had the editorial read into the Congressional record on 27 July. [22]
One week later, on 2 August 1990, Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait.
(The Munich Analogy, Part 3: "Appeasement" & the Persian Gulf War will appear in a day or so.)
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NOTES:
- Peter McGrath, "The Lessons of Munich" Newsweek (3 October 1988): 37.
- "Legionnaires Hear Reagan Attack Peace Movement" Christian Science Monitor (24 August 1983): 2.
- Merrill Hartson, "Reagan Seeks Midwest Support for Bush." Associated Press (30 September 1988).
- Helen Dewar, "Senators Repel MX Censure from College Republicans" Washington Post (23 March 1985): A6.
- Gary J. Dorrien’s Neoconservative Mind gives a fuller account of the complex intellectual lineages of neoconservatives and their thought than does John Ehrman’s The Rise of Neoconservatism. Ehrman leaves out the influences of 1930s Trotskyism and the Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss. See Gary J. Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1993), 1-18; and John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994 (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1995).
- The present paper discusses only the general foreign-policy principles of leading pundits and defense officials from the 1970s to 1991. Neoconservative social critics and editorialists included Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer, Morton B. Zuckerman, A. M. Rosenthal, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Neoconservative officials who served in the Reagan administration, many of whom began as aides to Senator Henry Jackson in the 1970s, included U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Pipes.
- Bayard Rustin and Carl Gershman, "Africa, Soviet Imperialism and the Retreat of American Power" Commentary 64, 4 (October 1977).
- Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger: Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980). 80-6.
- Ehrman, John. The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994. (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1995), 108.
- For examples, see William Claiborne, "Israel Condemns West Europeans’ Stance on Mideast; Israel Likens Europe’s PLO Stand To WWII Appeasement Policy" Washington Post (16 June 1980): A1; and David K. Shipler, "Israeli Cabinet Harshly Denounces Venice Declaration" New York Times (June 16, 1980): A1.
- Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 161.
- Norman Podhoretz, "The State of the Jews" Commentary 76 (December 1983): 45.
- "Muammar Qadhafi; Desert Terrorists on the World Stage" U.S. News & World Report (7 May 1984): 3.
- Norman Podhoretz, "Appeasement by any other Name" Commentary 76 (July 1983).
- Leon T. Hadar, "The ‘Neocons’: From the Cold War to the ‘Global Intifada’" Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (April 1991): 27.
- Andrew Katell, "KGB Sends Border Guards to Lithuania, Which Denounces U.S. Stand." Associated Press (24 April 1990); David Hoffman, "Bush and Gorbachev Proclaim Cooperation But Fail to Agree on Germany and Lithuania." Washington Post (4 June 1990); A1.
- William Safire, "Baltics to Baghdad." New York Times (30 March 1990): A31.
- A. M. Rosenthal, "We Are Warned." New York Times (5 April 1990): A29.
- Charles Krauthammer, "Nightmare from the Thirties" Washington Post (27 July 1990): A21.
- "The Glaspie Transcript: Saddam Meets the U.S. Ambassador, July 25, 1990," in Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf, ed., The Gulf War Reader (New York: Random House, 1991), 122-33.
- Krauthammer, "Nightmare from the Thirties," A21.
- Lantos, Rep. (CA) "The Iraqi Bully—A New Hitler" Congressional Record ONLINE 2 August 1990. Thomas. [Available at:] http://thomas.loc.gov/...