The 1950s Want Their Foreign Policy Back

Whenever there was an international crisis when I was young, back in the days of Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Nikita Khrushchev, my mother used to say that “you can’t appease a dictator.” It was a lesson in foreign policy taught to an entire generation of Americans by the Munich Crisis of 1938 and Adolf Hitler’s subsequent invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland. By the time the Second World War was over, the so-called “greatest generation,” had taken that lesson to heart and made it an axiom of American foreign policy. Although it had the ring of truth, it has misled American foreign policy ever since. American unilateralism, the foreign policy of the founders that Franklin Roosevelt labelled “isolationism,” was dead. In its stead, the nation embraced a permanent role as guarantor of European security. By the early 1950s the nation had seduced itself into expanding that role across the globe.

Given the devastation of Europe in the aftermath of the war, the hostility of the resurgent Soviet Union, and the vulnerability of the western democracies, it made sense for the United States to underwrite their economic recovery and temporarily provide military support against communist subversion and Soviet expansion. As the Soviets pressured Turkey for military concessions in 1946, and covertly supported Greek communists waging a civil war against the pro-western government there, it was reasonable for the United States to support the Turks and Greeks in their resistance against what Harry Truman referred to as “armed minorities.” As the Soviets established communist police states east of what Winston Churchill called the “Iron Curtain,” it was reasonable for Americans to become alarmed. After all, as one nation after another fell into the Soviet sphere of influence, it reminded Americans of the late 1930s as Nazi Germany first reoccupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria, provoked the Munich Crisis of 1938 that demonstrated the bankruptcy of Neville Chamberlain’s popular policy of “appeasement,” and invaded Poland, provoking the Second World War. Increasingly, by the late 1940s the totalitarian USSR looked like Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin looked like Adolf Hitler. It seemed that history was repeating itself.

When, in 1949, the Soviets established a blockade around the western sector of Berlin in an effort to compel the British and Americans to rescind the economic unification of their two German occupation zones, Americans became convinced that the Russians were ready to use overwhelming military force to get their way. In response, the western powers launched the successful Berlin airlift, and organized NATO, a defensive military alliance. It was the first “entangling alliance,” to use Thomas Jefferson’s term, that the United States had entered since extricating itself in 1800 from the Franco-American alliance of 1778. The nation had turned its back on a one hundred-fifty-year-old foreign policy tradition, replacing unilateralism with multilateralism.

One of the primary reasons for this reversal was because “you can’t appease a dictator.” If you let a dictator take one country, so the reasoning goes, soon he’ll try to take another. If you give up Czechoslovakia, then Poland is next on the menu, followed by another world war. Accordingly, one must “draw a line in the sand.” One problem with this line of thought is that all dictators are not made alike. Hostile as Joseph Stalin was after the war, he was not Adolf Hitler. He well knew that the Soviet Union would require twenty or more years to recover from the devastation inflicted upon it during the war. He understood that Russia could ill afford a war with a nuclear armed United States. One might add that, repugnant though he is, Vladimir Putin today is neither a new Joseph Stalin nor a new Adolf Hitler. He may wish to reconstitute the old Soviet Union, but there is little evidence that his ambitions extend further west than that. Nor is there any reason to believe that he wants to risk war with a nuclear armed NATO over Poland or anywhere else.

Another problem with this line of thought is that hostility alone in a foreign leader does not necessarily constitute a serious threat. If the ground war of the past year has shown us anything, it is that the Russian Army is not the Wehrmacht of 1940 or the Red Army of 1945. It can barely defeat Ukraine. In fact, many “experts” predict that Russia might even lose the war. Even if they win they will be no match for NATO. Fears of a subsequent Blitzkrieg through Eastern Europe are wildly overblown. The Russians will have their hands full simply trying to pacify Ukraine. A Russian occupation of Ukraine will probably look somewhat like the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Meanwhile, NATO states will have ample opportunity to prepare for their own defense should it become necessary in the future. War in Ukraine is properly a European concern, not an American responsibility. Given the looming China challenge, the United States should disentangle itself from the European “blood lands,” and encourage the Europeans to accept responsibility for their own security.

The United States faces a more serious problem of its own. Thanks to decades of misguided economic policy, China now has both the ambition and perhaps the military capability of taking Taiwan, where the United States has both significant economic and geopolitical interests to defend. In Xi Jinping, we face a dictator who must be deterred. Yet, as the threat intensifies in the Far East, we are pouring enormous quantities of military equipment into a quagmire in Ukraine, while rapidly depleting the stockpiles of weaponry that we might need if China acts upon its repeated threats to seize the island. If, as seems likely, this reduces American military readiness in the Pacific, this seems more likely to encourage the Chinese to strike than to deter them. If we wish to deter China, we cannot do it by wasting resources in Ukraine. If that is our objective, the way to do it is to reinforce Taiwan.

Why are our leaders squandering resources we may very well need elsewhere? Ukraine is not a member of NATO and we have no treaty obligations to that country. Russian occupation of Ukraine would not shift the European balance of power against the United States or even against the European Union. Ultimately, the fate of Ukraine, whether partitioned with Russia or wholly absorbed will have no material impact on the United States. Throughout the entire history of the United States, Ukraine has been under the Russian thumb, and no American leader in the past has ever imagined that its fate was of any significance to the United States—or that it was worth the sacrifice of a single American serviceman. So, why now?

Why are our leaders risking a nuclear holocaust that could spell the annihilation of the the American people and the destruction of our two and a half century experiment in liberty to defend the borders of a remote Eastern European country? Although there may be less creditable reasons, at least in part because they still believe that “you can’t appease a dictator.” If the United States watches as the Russians brutally crush Ukraine, our leaders assure us that Poland, or the Baltic states will be next and that American boys (and girls) will be forced to spill their blood in a much wider war. In short, we are told that history is repeating itself. Putin’s ambitions are not limited to Ukraine. Putin is the new Hitler, and it is “Groundhog Day” in Eastern Europe.

This is nonsense. Yet there are an increasing number of political leaders in Washington DC of both political parties who advocate intensifying our already dangerous military support for Ukraine on the grounds that it will somehow deter China from attacking Taiwan almost 5,000 miles away! Among those dispensing such wisdom is Senator Lindsey Graham who told Sean Hannity on his March 14 show, that “China is sizing up Biden and they’re gonna go into Taiwan if we don’t up our game in Ukraine.” So, he thinks that we should send a carrier group into the Black Sea, an entirely legal operation, and, in an act of war, shoot down any Russian jets that interfere with American drones flying nearby. Should the United States follow Graham’s advice, and that of all those in Congress and elsewhere who offer similar counsel, it could easily escalate into another pointless and devastating war when the American people have a much more serious crisis to deal with at home, and a much more serious foe abroad. A war with Russia over Ukraine would be, as I wrote in American Thinker shortly before Putin launched his brutal invasion, quoting General Omar Bradley, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” We can’t allow misconceptions about the “lessons of Munich,” to guide our foreign policy eighty-five years later. Given the impending storm over Taiwan, peace with Russia, and peace in Ukraine should be our policy. The sooner the better.