Page 2 of 2 THE ART OF APPEASEMENT, Part I Unraveling a patchwork of improvised disaster
By David Young
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Even still, because the doom of Munich has been seared into
virtually every political decision-making process in the West, we have come to
assume that foolish appeasement can be easily diagnosed and discredited before
the allegedly unreliable party even violates the agreement. Still, given
Hitler's propensity for breaking promises, we cannot imagine how anyone could
fall for his tricks. But this fallacious notion demonstrates that hindsight is
not only 20/20, but blindingly so. Put differently, why do we never hear about
successful appeasement? Is it because
appeasement never works, or because we merely call it something else entirely?
Appeasement 2.0
In 1978, US president Jimmy Carter brokered a landmark peace treaty at Camp
David between Egypt (led by president Anwar Sadat) and Israel (led by prime
minister Menachem Begin). In what was called a "Land for Peace" treaty, Israel
returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt - which had controlled the land before
Israel captured it during the Six Day War of 1967 - and in exchange, the
peninsula would be completely and verifiably demilitarized to give Israel the
reassurance of a strategic buffer and retain its vital early warning defense
system.
At the time, Egypt was Israel's most powerful and dangerous enemy - one that
had (in the eyes of Israel and its Western supporters) mounted four strategic
assaults on the Jewish nation in the previous 30 years. To put it mildly, then,
the Israelis did not trust the Egyptians. Cairo had broken numerous previous
agreements with Israel, including several acts of war. Between the two most
recent wars, Cairo had warned Jerusalem that Egypt was preparing for war to
regain the Sinai, but Israel only began listening to these warnings in the wake
of the 1973 war, which naturally gave Israel reason to believe that the
Egyptian military could still inflict enough pain to warrant plenty of
attention, even if Cairo no longer posed a threat to Israel's existence itself.
Although many of the details (and obviously the outcome) of this treaty are
quite different from those of Munich, the principal arguments remain just as
potent. Both Berlin and Cairo were allowed to hold onto territory to which each
claimed a strong national connection. The fact that Berlin succeeded (while
Cairo failed) to secure that land by force is nearly irrelevant because the
messages coming from Cairo and Berlin were the same: if you concede this
territory, we will stop fighting you. Israeli, British and French leaders all
traded land for the promise of peace. We merely insist that Camp David was
smart (and not appeasement) because Egypt has held up its end of the bargain,
while Hitler did not - despite comparable evidence at the time that made each
likely to violate their respective agreements.
In fact, while there is a near consensus in theory that it is unwise to reward
aggressors by negotiating with (or appeasing) them, every White House and
virtually every contemporary foreign policy analyst hails the Camp David
Accords as a monumental success. Even former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert
recently said that he was wrong to have questioned and undermined Begin's
efforts at the time and wrong to vote against the ratification of the accords
in the Israeli parliament. Olmert even went so far as to say that Begin was
"smarter than I was" for having made such a wise decision.
Nevertheless, the Israel-Egypt treaty that followed the Camp David Accords had
the same public policy implications and sent the same messages to tyrants that
Munich did: first, if you are aggressive enough, rest assured that powerful
countries like Israel will be forced to listen and make concessions (though
probably not surrender); second, if you are able to get those concessions
through a compromise, then that compromise will likely give you a tactical
advantage, enabling you to easily take the modest reward for your aggression
(as Egypt did), or go double-or-nothing for the jugular, as Hitler did.
Aggression, according to Camp David's lessons, will give you options,
credibility and power.
Some could argue that Egypt's power paled in comparison to Germany's, so
appeasing Egypt was not as risky as appeasing Hitler; but thousands of dead
Israelis and their families certainly felt otherwise in 1978. And besides, it
would be a fantasy to think that Jerusalem ever negotiates with powerless
parties; Israelis only negotiate when they have to, and frequently not even
then.
Nor did the US push this peace summit because Israel would be just as safe
without the buffer territory. Israel's strategic interest in keeping the Sinai
was just as "vital" as Chamberlain's interest in stopping the spread of
fascism, and far more vital than his interest in the actual Czech territory
ceded at Munich.
Likewise, trading such a vital interest for what was essentially a mere promise
of peace had no bearing on Cairo's decision to stick to the deal. For whatever
reasons, Cairo did not exploit the concession and go for Israel's jugular.
Therefore, while many accused the Israeli government in the late 1970s of
trading vital interests in exchange for "minor concessions, or none at all",
that paradigm has proven to be completely unfounded. In fact, Israelis have now
recognized and come to value Egypt's promise in 1978 and its legacy of peace -
albeit a cold one. And in retrospect, few would call Egypt's promise of peace a
"minor concession" - one that led to Egypt's expulsion from the Arab League and
widespread celebrations in the Arab world when Sadat was assassinated in 1981 -
though Sadat's promise was little more than what Hitler offered.
Remarkably, then, even by the loose standards of the most vehement
anti-appeasers, Camp David should have backfired, just as Munich backfired.
Every simplistic red flag that we have been taught to look for as a result of
Munich should have prevented Camp David from ever taking place. But we somehow
ignored those red flags. We let it slip through, and ironically, the Camp David
Accords is likely the only blessing the Middle East has seen in the past half
century.
Strangely, despite discrepancies like this one - where the behavior of leaders
should be consistent but is not - we still seem to insist that it is easy to
identify and reflexively dismiss the policy of appeasement; the Holocaust's
legacy is simply too powerful to deny. Yet these inconsistencies hardly mean
that appeasement is always wise or always foolish; they simply show the
fallacious assumptions we make about what it takes to prevent or end wars.
Simply put, there are no rules to this game. After all, if people we deem
equally trustworthy or untrustworthy at the time of negotiations frequently
surprise us by pursuing entirely different agendas, then isn't there something
wrong with our barometer? And if only history can prove our judgments right or
wrong (and those judgments frequently turn out to be very wrong indeed), then
why the moral self-righteousness?
Without a doubt, some of our enemies have unlimited demands that we simply
cannot and should not indulge, but sometimes - contrary to what they publicly
say to us and even to their own communities - our enemies will actually settle
for concession that we could tolerate losing. In the meantime, however, the
fact that we have little predictive power to differentiate pathological bullies
like Hitler from the hideously opportunistic and practical ones like Kim
Jong-il in North Korea, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad has left our foreign policy a tattered patchwork of improvised
disaster.
NEXT: Understanding the enemy
David H Young is a Washington-based analyst who blogs at
www.justwars.org.
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Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
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