On Saturday afternoon I found, among other things, an Andrew Sullivan post illustrating the contours of the Iran debate. "Here's Simon Jenkins, in a case for what can only be called appeasement," he wrote. "Appeasement," of course, is a dirty word in the contemporary West. After all, we all know Neville Chamberlain tried that at Munich in 1938 and it didn't work out.
But then again, appeasement is a commonsense idea. You've got a guy who wants to do some stuff. You don't want him to do that stuff. But you don't really want to fight a war, either. So you try to make a deal where you give him some of what he wants, but not all, thereby avoiding war and still keeping key goals in place. This also goes by the name "compromise" and it has a good record in foreign affairs.
To cite an example from recent years, people in the American government were pretty upset at Pakistan right after 9-11. Here was this country -- breaking all sorts of nonproliferation treaties, that had been offering all sorts of support to the very same Taliban sheltering the very same Taliban-sheltering terrorist network that had just killed thousands of Americans. There was going to be hell to pay! Except, there wasn't. Pakistan's military dictator caved on a few key points, cutting off support for the Taliban and offering flyover rights and other logistical support for our efforts to invade Afghanistan, and we let a lot of other potential gripes slide. The military regime is still in place, as are the ties to Kashmiri terrorist groups, as is the nuclear arsenal, and American sanctions are gone, replaced by aide packages. U.S. policy toward Pakistan can only be called appeasement, and it worked out great.
John F. Kennedy resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis by agreeing to appease the Soviet Union in several respects, removing some missiles from Turkey and agreeing that we would stop trying to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro's regime. Menachim Begin appeased Egypt by withdrawing from the Sinai Peninsula and returning it to its original owners. Israel, now the international community's biggest shrinking violet, undertook an even bolder appeasement gambit when Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli forces from Southern Lebanon. The hope was that this would get Hezbollah to stop killing so many Israelis. The boldness came from the fact that Hezbollah didn't even agree to this deal. Hezbollah remained -- and remains -- theoretically dedicated to Israel's destruction. But Barak gambled, correctly as it turns out, that their behavior would calm considerably if Israel withdrew and, indeed, since then Hezbollah has mostly immersed itself in Lebanese domestic politics leaving the business of blowing up Israelis to unappeased groups like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Ronald Reagan, for the record, also successfully appeased Hezbollah back in the 1980s by withdrawing troops from Lebanon.
James K. Polk won the 1844 presidential election with a campaign slogan of "54-40 or fight!" The United States would secure all of the Pacific Northwest from Great Britain or else it would be war. Once in office the British offered him what's now Oregon and Washington without a fight as long as they got to keep British Columbia and other now-Canadian points north.
One could cite countless examples. Disputes between countries or armed groups are common. Wars are, relatively speaking, rare. And even when they start, they tend to end, usually with something less than total victory for one side or another. This is all due to appeasement -- compromise -- the art of giving an inch to avoid a war.
Appeasement's excellent historical track record stems from the fact that war is a risky and destructive enterprise. Not only is getting beaten in a military conflict a very bad thing, but oftentimes even countries that win wars wind up worse off than they were before. This is not only true of highly destructive conflicts like the first world war, but even relatively minor ones like America's 2003 invasion of Iraq. America won, and rather easily, but with costs estimated at somewhere above one trillion dollars, the victory wasn't worth it. War is a negative-sum enterprise, and trade a positive-sum one, so there's usually room for compromise, an opportunity for appeasement.
Of course, appeasement did fail at Munich in 1938. But the lessons of this failure have been vastly overstated. Hitler, after all, has acquired a (well-deserved!) reputation as a uniquely pernicious force in world history. The world's democracies did err in assessing the threat his regime posed to the world, but they erred specifically because the assessment that a compromise superior to war could be found is usually correct. Even very bad actors (Stalin, Mao, etc.) or politicians who've made explicit promises not to compromise (Polk) are usually willing to accept some kind of deal.
Which returns us to Iran. Before the invasion of Iraq, many observers -- myself included -- had a distorted view of the issue, influenced by a hubris regarding the military strength of the United States. We've learned since then that wars against even much weaker adversaries can be extremely costly. And by all accounts, Iran would be a significantly more dangerous opponent than Saddam's regime. At the same time, America could clearly inflict enormous pain on the Iranian government should we choose to do so. Under the circumstances, there ought to be room for compromise, an opportunity for some appeasement, if you will. But somewhat shockingly, even as the conflict has played out for several years and now grown close to a boiling point, there have been no direct negotiations between the American and Iranian governments. There's no telling how such talks might go, and it's certainly possible that the Iranians are hell-bent on going nuclear come what may, but surely we should try and find out first.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
