Negotiating Is Not Appeasement

Peter Scoblic, LATimes

In a speech to the Israeli parliament Thursday, President
Bush took a swipe at Barack Obama for his willingness to negotiate with evil
regimes.

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and
radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong
all along," Bush said. "We have heard this foolish delusion before.
As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland
in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to
Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this
what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly
discredited by history."

But if there is anything that has been discredited by history, it is the
argument that every enemy is Hitler, that negotiations constitute appeasement,
and that talking will automatically lead to a slaughter of Holocaust-like
proportions. It is an argument that conservatives made throughout the Cold War,
and, if the charge seemed overblown at the time, it seems positively ludicrous
with the clarity of hindsight.

The modern conservative movement was founded in no small part on the idea that
presidents Truman and Eisenhower were "appeasing" the Soviets. The
logic went something like this: Because communism was evil, the United States should seek to destroy it, not
coexist with it; the bipartisan policy of containment, which sought to prevent
the further spread of communism, was a moral and strategic folly because it implied
long-term coexistence with Moscow.
Conservative foreign policy guru James Burnham wrote entire books claiming that
containment -- which, after the Cold War, would be credited with defeating the Soviet Union -- constituted "appeasement."

Instead, conservatives agitated for the rollback of communism, and they opposed
all negotiations with the Soviets. When Eisenhower welcomed Premier Nikita S.
Khrushchev to the United
States in 1959, William F. Buckley Jr., the
right's leader, complained that the act of "diplomatic
sentimentality" signaled the "death rattle of the West."

Conservatives even applied this critique to one of the most dangerous moments
in human history: the Cuban missile crisis, during which the United States and the Soviet Union nearly came
to nuclear blows over Moscow's
deployment of missiles 90 miles off the American coast. When President Kennedy
successfully negotiated a peaceful conclusion to the crisis, conservative icon
Barry Goldwater protested that he had appeased the Soviets by promising not to
invade Cuba
if they backed down.

The Soviets withdrew their missiles in what was widely seen as a humiliation to
Khrushchev, but Goldwater believed that Kennedy's diplomacy gave "the
communists one of their greatest victories in their race for world power that
they have enjoyed to date." To Goldwater, it was far preferable to risk
nuclear war with the Soviets than to give up our right to roll back Fidel
Castro.

Indeed, conservatives considered virtually any attempt to bring the arms race
under control as a surrender to communism. When the SALT I agreement capping
nuclear arsenals came to Capitol Hill, conservative Rep. John Ashbrook (whose
presidential candidacy Buckley supported in 1972) said that "the total
history of man indicates we can place very little reliance on treaties or
written documents. This is especially true when the agreements are with nations
or powers which have aggressive plans. Hitler had plans. Chamberlain's Munich served only to
deaden the free world to reality. The communists have plans. SALT will merely
cause us to lower our guard, possibly fatally."

A few years later, Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the elected face of
the burgeoning neoconservative movement, charged President Carter with
"appeasement in its purest form" for negotiating SALT II, which set
equal limits on the number of U.S.
and Soviet nuclear missiles and bombers.

Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 was seen as the culmination of the
conservative movement, dubbed SALT II "appeasement" as well, but the
trope would come back to bite him. Although Reagan pleased the right enormously
during his first three years in office with his military expansion, his call
for rollback and his advocacy of missile defenses, conservatives reacted with
horror once he began serious negotiations with the Soviets. When he and Mikhail
Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, which
for the first time eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, Buckley's
National Review dubbed it "suicide." The Conservative Caucus took out
a full-page newspaper ad saying "Appeasement is as unwise in 1988 as in
1938." It paired photos of Reagan and Gorbachev with photos of Neville
Chamberlain and Hitler.

Containment, negotiation, nuclear stability -- each of these things helped
protect the United States
and end the Cold War. And yet, at the time, conservatives thought each was
synonymous with appeasement.

The Bush administration has been little different, refusing for years to talk
to North Korea or Iran about their nuclear programs because it wanted to defeat
evil, not talk to it. The result was that Pyongyang
tested a nuclear weapon and Iran's
uranium program continued unfettered. (By contrast, when the administration
negotiated with Libya -- an
act that its chief arms controller, John Bolton, had previously derided as,
yes, "appeasement" -- it succeeded in eliminating Tripoli's nuclear program.)

Alas, John McCain accused President Clinton of "appeasement" for
engaging North Korea,
instead calling for "rogue state rollback," and now he dismisses the
idea of negotiations with Iran.
Given conservatism's historical record, Obama's inclination to negotiate seems
only sensible. When will conservatives learn that it is 2008, not 1938?

J. Peter Scoblic, executive editor of the New
Republic, is the author of "U.S. vs. Them:
How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security."