Kevin Drum points out that hawks who pronounce today's Iran to be more irrational than the Soviet Union are conveniently forgetting their apocalyptic Cold War ideas. But it wasn't just the Soviets that hawks believed unstoppable. In the 1990s, they said that talking to China was leading to World War III.
"American policies these days are starting to look a lot like the kind of appeasement that eventually leads to disaster," Robert Kagan wrote in 1996. In a 2000 article titled "East Wind: The Threat That Blows From China," Mark Helprin said America's policy had been "capitulationist by action and by default. It has been cowardly, craven, and venal." When President George W. Bush apologized to China for an American plane landing without permission on an island in the South China Sea in April of 2001, the editors of the New Republic declared it a "sweet triumph for the philologists of appeasement ... one day we really will be sorry."
Since that day has not yet arrived, I think a little skepticism about a new unappeasable nation is in order.
--Jordan Michael Smith
