Donald Rumsfeld’s Fractured History Lessons
Before finally being deposed and right up to his final moments, Donald Rumsfeld frequently argued that those who did not support the war in Iraq had failed to learn the lessons of history. He said that it had been a mistake to appease Hitler in 1938 when the Germans retook the Sudetenland, and that it was a similar mistake to treat with Saddam Hussein. The problem, of course, is that Rumsfeld takes one example from history, and a more ambiguous example than many think, and makes it a universal principle of statesmanship. That wouldn’t be so bad if Rumsfeld hadn’t been in a position to persuade the president and others and, in fact, might not be that bad if there had been a little analysis of the idea itself. Since I’ve been preoccuppied with other things lately, I haven’t written about this, but just because Rumsfeld is gone, the Rumsfeld mentality is not and it bears some examination.
Was Appeasement Bad in 1938?
Rumsfeld takes it as axiomatic that it was a mistake to appease Hitler in 1938 when he retook the Sudentland for Germany. However, the situation was relatively complex. Britain had suffered incredible losses in World War I, both in blood and treasure. The Great War had drained the British treasury and Winston Churchill himself had cut military spending dramatically through the 1920s, which meant the the British weren’t really armed and ready to go toe to toe with the Germans. Only a year passed before the Allies declared war and within the year after that, the disasterous performance of the French and British underscores that they were not ready to go to war in 1938. True, in 1938 the Germans were still limited in their buildup by terms of the Treaty of Versailles, but one can’t forget that though the Germans used the intervening time to rearm, so did the British and it isn’t clear that an earlier strike against the Germans would have gone any better.
From a political perspective, it was clear that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair to the Germans. President Wilson had forseen that it would lead to a future war, but could not stop the French from foisting it on the Germans. So it was not entirely unreasonable to think that the Germans were within their rights to try to redress the inequity of the treaty and that they might stop there. In other words, Chamberlain wasn’t completely delusional, but reasonably believed that it was better to give a tyrant an inch to avert a war and to leave war as a last resort. Not a bad lesson for Rumsfeld and Bush.
Furthermore, psychologically, the British were still recovering from the Great War and had a deep aversion to going to war except in absolute necessity. Americans had developed this healthy perspective in the wake of Vietnam, but unfortunately that mentality waned in the face of the smashing success of the first war against Iraq. Unfortunately, the debacle in Somalia did little to brace Americans to the reality of war.
So in short, Chamberlain could see that war with Germany was no slam-dunk in terms of military capability, political will and foreign policy. He preferred to wait until war was unavoidable before spending British blood and treasure on a gamble (war is always a gamble). The idea that much blood and treasure could have been saved by going to war with Germany in 1938, that is to say declaring war just one year earlier, would have changed anything is purely hypothetical. Furthermore, it is based on certain knowledge that appeasement did not work, and that knowledge was of course unavailable to British diplomats of the period. All in all, I would much prefer to be ruled by Chamberlain than by Bush.
When Appeasement Works
Churchill and Roosevelt are often seen as the opponents of appeasement, the strong leaders as opposed to the weak Chamberlain. They were, however, practical men who chose to appease Stalin at the Yalta conference and essentially tell him that they would let him take the Baltics and other regions into the Soviet orbit and we would do nothing to oppose him. Certainly Stalin was no less cruel, tyrannical and dangerous than Hitler. He had visions of world domination, hoped to overthrow the US and UK, and mercilessly starved millions of “his own people” (as they always say about Saddam poisoning the Kurds) to death on purpose. These were undoubtedly the most deadly intentional famines in history. The famines under Mao were larger, but it seems that Mao’s advisors hid from him the extent of the problem until it was too late. In other words, Mao was essentially delusional, whereas Stalin instituted famine as policy to get rid of the “reactionary” elements in his society at the cost of millions of death. Ultimately, Stalin also killed as many people in the Gulags as Hitler killed in the death camps (actually, twice as many by Solzhenitsyn’s reckoning in The Gulag Archipelago
So was it a mistake to appease Stalin? Should we have gone straight from WWII into an invasion of the Soviet Union, though the greatest armies of the modern world had destroyed themselves and bled their countries dry on the Russian plains? It seems to me that Churchill and Roosevelt made the right call there, a call to appease a tyrant in hopes that the tyranny would eventually crumble under its own corruption. We could make a long list of successful appeasement. Should we have attacked Mao? I don’t think so. In fact, “detente” and opening relations with China were great successes. If Nixon had not been a complete paranoiac and power monger himself, he would probably be remembered primarily for his great statesmanship that laid the groundwork for winning the Cold War without going to full-scale total nuclear or conventional war. What about Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Pik Botha, Pinochet, why didn’t we overthrow them? Well, of course in the last case it’s because we put him in power and in the second to last case a segregated America couldn’t really go to war on that issue… but I digress. The point is that tyrants eventually fall under their own weight. Isolating them diplomatically and economically (which eventually worked in South Africa), in short appeasement, has in fact typically been more successful than pre-emptive strikes.
So let’s take the lessons that history offers, but please quit make universal axioms from one tired old canard.
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