By David Young
August 1, 2009
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online
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 th
an 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.)
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