What is an Appeaser, and is Obama One?

President Bush’s statement last week before the Israeli Knesset warning of the dangers of appeasement highlighted the foreign policy naivete of Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama…without even mentioning him.

Though Obama has already said that as president he would “sit down” and apparently have tea with the world’s largest backer of terrorism (Iran, in case you missed it), he and his fellow Democrats were quick to protest that Obama was not, in fact, an appeaser…even though Obama was not named in the speech and the White House says Obama was not in the mind of President Bush when he made the speech.

But what is appeasement? Every administration has diplomats, don’t they? Can you have diplomacy without appeasement? Jed Babbin believes so, and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

Is Obama an appeaser? Of course. But why? What is an appeaser? An appeaser may be a diplomat, but all diplomats are not appeasers.

Diplomats buy and sell; appeasers just give things away. And that difference is something Barack Obama has yet to learn.

An appeaser is someone who is willing to compromise his nation’s interests without obtaining an equal or greater concession from the adversary. History’s most famous appeaser, Neville Chamberlain, gave the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 and received nothing in return. Having been appeased — and thus given time to further build his military might — Hitler attacked a year later, conquering Poland and igniting the largest and most murderous war in history.

In Churchill’s more literary definition, an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

If I might risk adding to Babbin’s excellent summation, appeasers engage in diplomacy simply for the sake of maintaining the illusion of peace. Good diplomacy, however, aims to preserve national interest and security…and walks away (Reykjavik) from the table when no reasonable and verifiable concessions can be obtained from the enemy.

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