As I am writing this Perspective, the US and key members of the European Community are meeting with Iran, trying to coax Iran into stopping its nuclear weapons program.  In one way or another, the US has been negotiating with Iran since 1979—to no avail.  Our new president believes that “engaging” Iran in negotiations can result in them abandoning their goals.  It is highly unlikely that negotiating with Iran will produce this desired result.  But this process raises an important question:  Is the West about to embrace a policy of appeasement with Iran?  The history of 1938 might offer the West some guidelines.  Historian David Faber has written a new book entitled, Munich, 1938:  Appeasement and World War II.  I do not mean to suggest that there is a perfect parallel between Hitler and Iran today.  But there are some important suggestions and transcultural principles to examine.  In an attempt to preserve his policy of peace at any price, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain forced his Cabinet in the summer of 1938 to abandon any military threat or warning to Hitler’s Germany.  This stance was taken despite all the evidence to that contrary:  Nazi Party operatives were stirring up violence in the Sudetenland, the ethnically German area of Czechoslovakia.  Hitler was rearming Germany and had already annexed the Rhineland, united with Austria and had declared in Mein Kampf his clear war aims.  Chamberlain’s policy was to avoid war at any cost.  As Joseph Loconte has written, “Thus Europe’s tortuous descent into a policy of appeasement was complete:  a diplomatic delusion that triumphantly delivered Czechoslovakia into Nazi hands, setting the stage for Hitler’s lightning assault on Europe.”  When Chamberlain signed the agreement in Munich, delivering Czechoslovakia into the hands of the Nazis, there was near euphoria in Britain.  The Times wrote:  “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield has come home adorned with nobler laurels than Mr. Chamberlain from Munich yesterday.”  What was happening in Britain is indicative of the pacifistic sentiment infecting all of Western Europe today.  Faber’s magnificent book details the dissolution of the moral and political will of all of Western Europe, not just Britain.
 
Listen to Joe Loconte and see if you do not hear a faint echo of the same reality facing us in 2009:  “The transcendent tragedy of Munich is that it might all have been averted.  The Czech frontier defenses were considerable, but once the country’s borders were redrawn they were taken over by the Germans.  The French Army, with a promise of help from Great Britain, might have held off the German advance.  Hitler’s generals, in fact, feared this outcome.  Thus, when Roosevelt asked Churchill what the new conflict should be called, he replied immediately: “the unnecessary war.”  So, we must ask in 2009, has the world learned anything from the 1938 “catalogue of surrenders” to tyranny and terror?  The central lesson of Faber’s wonderful book is simple:  “A political regime can become irretrievably wicked, and that accommodating such a regime only feeds its rapacious and murderous ambitions.”  In the summer of 1938, Hitler told his generals:  “Our enemies are still worms.  I saw them at Munich.”  Is this how Ahmadinejad sees the West?  Is Iran yet “an irretrievably wicked regime?”  Are Iran’s President and his denial of the holocaust and his desire to wipe Israel off the map, an echo of another regime in the 1930s?  I hope that President Obama does not desire to ever appease Iran.  It is wicked and so far negotiations have not stopped the nuclear program of Iran one bit.  Why does he believe he can stop it now?