Monday, August 03, 2015

Kerry and Obama: Naivete, vanity, and foolishness

Historian Victor Davis Hanson compares Hitler's Nazi Germany with today's Iran. Hitler sized up the fecklessness, and lack of cohesion of his enemies and then went on his killing spree across Europe.
In every regard, Hitler brilliantly judged the appeasing mentalities of his far more powerful enemies. Only a horrific war restored a grim reality to Hitler’s Nazis. By late 1943 the Third Reich had been brutally reminded that Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States really were far more powerful than Germany all along.

Iran now de facto runs Lebanon. It props up what is increasingly a puppet state in Syria and all but controls Iraq, while attempting to take over Yemen and erode Sunni authority in the Gulf. The regional Sunni states — including Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, Turkey, and Pakistan — together are collectively far stronger than Iran. But like the Western democracies and their eastern allies in 1938, each nation apparently prefers, in the paraphrase of Churchill, to be eaten last by the crocodile, and thereby eschews collective forceful deterrent action.

...Iran is as militarily weak as was the 1938 Third Reich. But like Hitler’s Germany, Iran fancies that its ardor and brinkmanship constitute military assets far more valuable than mere carriers or planes. Like Hitler, the theocracy believes loud bluster and perhaps even feigned insanity offer real advantages against those who are sober, judicious, and intent on avoiding the use of force at all costs. Are “Death to America” and constant threats from Teheran — even as negotiations of the non-proliferation deal were still fluid — all that much different from Hitler’s scoffing that his interlocutors at Munich were “worms”? Acting as if one has nothing to lose is advantageous in geostrategic poker.

...The danger of an aggressor is never just the specter of raw power, but instead the insidious messages about using what it has that it sends to more responsible parties. Once Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier backed down at Munich, the Soviets concluded that friendship with Western democracies was as dangerous as enmity to Hitler, and thus flipped their affinities. Other opportunistic Eastern European nations soon realigned with Hitler. So-called neutrals like fair-weather Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey conducted lucrative trade deals with Hitler and made the necessary adjustments to fit what they saw as an ascendant Third Reich. If the Iranian deal goes through, and if it is perceived as an economic, political, and military boon to the theocracy, then the surrounding and terrified Middle East will likely make the necessary political modifications to allow for Iranian expansionism.

...The appeasers always pose as peace-makers and caricature their skeptics as near troglodyte war-mongers.

Today we see a Munich-like arrogance that men of assumed reason and sobriety, by their winning charisma, rare mellifluence, or superior wisdom, can convince Khamenei of the errors of his ways. Western humanists habitually preen that they can demonstrate to authoritarians why their bellicosity is supposedly against their own self interests — as if autocratic aggressors envision risking war, and shorting their own people, as unimaginable evils in comparison with the acquisition of honor, glory and respect that follows from easily bullying neighbors and successfully gobbling up real estate. John Kerry believes that the bomb is not in Iran’s real interest; Iran believes that so far even the idea of a bomb most certainly has proved very much in Iran’s interest.

...While John Kerry ignored the long-term security of Israel and the Sunni states in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin had earlier demonstrated that Ossetia led to the Crimea that led to Eastern Ukraine that may well soon lead to the Baltic states. Failed reset no more wised up John Kerry than Abyssinia or Manchuria had enlightened Neville Chamberlain. Munich’s 1938 hype led to catastrophe in 1939, in a way that the current 2015 self-congratulation may well become frightening in 2016.

The Iran deal is not Munich, but the same naiveté, vanity, and foolishness of Western leaders are close enough to warn us about what happens next. And it will not be good.
Read more here.

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