The Iran Deal is not Munich, but the same foolishness of
Western leaders is close enough to warn us what happens next. And it will not
be good.
The Iranian deal has called to mind the Munich Agreement
of 1938. Then Britain and France signed away the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia,
in hopes that Adolf Hitler would be content with absorbing the German-speaking
Sudetenland borderlands and cease further territorial acquisitions. But that
appeasement only accelerated Nazi atrocities, from Kristallnacht at home to the
dismemberment of all Czechoslovakia and, the next year, the invasion of Poland.Is the Munich disaster a sound analogy for the current proposed agreement with
Iran?
Is the Munich disaster a sound analogy for the current proposed agreement with Iran?
The Obama administration and its supporters say no. And they
have offered a variety of odd arguments. How can anyone compare the once most
powerful state in industrial Europe with the current, relatively isolated, and
backward Iran, whose theocracy supposedly poses a far smaller threat than did
Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht?
But is that assumption really true?
For all the later talk of Blitzkrieg in 1939-40, Hitler in
1938 was fairly weak. He had no model of tank that matched French heavy armor.
Combined British and French aircraft production exceeded Germany’s, and in most
cases allied planes were as good as German fighters and bombers. By 1940
Britain alone would be producing more fighter aircraft than Germany. In 1938-9,
the combined infantry forces of the Western democracies — Britain, France,
Denmark, Belgium the Netherlands and Norway — exceeded those of the Wehrmacht.
In the east, the Soviet Union alone fielded far more tanks,
planes, guns and men than did Germany in 1938. Czechoslovakia, in the Skoda
Works, had one of the most dynamic arms industries in Europe as well as
extensive fortifications on the German border. Had the Polish, Czechs, and
Russians united and stood firm, Hitler would have either backed down or would
have been defeated — at a time when he was vastly outnumbered on his vulnerable
Western borders.
The combined British and French fleets alone deployed about
ten times more capital ships than did Germany, which never built a single
aircraft carrier or deployed a single successful four-engine bomber.
In short, Hitler’s enemies in 1938 collectively enjoyed more
military strength than did Germany. What they lacked was cohesion, a common
cause, and a willingness to turn their military assets into credible
deterrence. Hitler instinctively fathomed such fecklessness. In methodical
fashion, he isolated Czechoslovakia, then attacked Poland with the help of the
Soviet Union, then gobbled up Denmark and Norway — all in separate and rather
distinct campaigns. When he finally invaded France in May 1940, he assumed
rightly that his new partner, the Soviets, would keep supplying him with key
resources, the British army would not show up in force in the manner they had
in World War I — and the Americans would keep completely out it.
In every regard, Hitler brilliantly judged the appeasing
mentalities of his far more powerful enemies. Only a horrific war restored a
grim reality to Hitler’s Nazis. By late 1943 the Third Reich had been brutally
reminded that Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States really were far
more powerful than Germany all along.
Iran now de facto runs Lebanon. It props up what is
increasingly a puppet state in Syria and all but controls Iraq, while
attempting to take over Yemen and erode Sunni authority in the Gulf. The
regional Sunni states — including Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, Turkey, and
Pakistan — together are collectively far stronger than Iran. But like the
Western democracies and their eastern allies in 1938, each nation apparently
prefers, in the paraphrase of Churchill, to be eaten last by the crocodile, and
thereby eschews collective forceful deterrent action.
The ascendance of ISIS complicates matters. Sunni nations are
in the embarrassing position of being threatened by fanatical kindred Arab
Sunni terrorists who in turn are often checked by Iranian Shiite expeditionary
forces. In the same vein, the Soviet Union once muddied the waters after the
destruction of Poland: for a while the democracies found themselves siding with
Finland, against an aggressive Russia, even as Hitler stealthily also wished to
help the Finns against his newfound partner the Soviet Union.
Iran is as military weak as was the 1938 Third Reich. But
like Hitler’s Germany, Iran fancies that its ardor and brinkmanship constitute
military assets far more valuable than mere carriers or planes. Like Hitler,
the theocracy believes loud bluster and perhaps even feigned insanity offer
real advantages against those who are sober, judicious, and intent on avoiding
the use of force at all costs. Are “Death to America” and constant threats from
Teheran — even as negotiations of the non-proliferation deal were still fluid —
all that much different from Hitler’s scoffing that his interlocutors at Munich
were “worms”? Acting as if one has nothing to lose is advantageous in
geostrategic poker.
Do Iran’s various promises of ending the Jewish state in the
21st century sound
all that much more unhinged than Hitler’s crackpot ideas in the mid-1930s of
solving the “Jewish question”? The Obama administration has obsessed about
American culpability in the 1953 Western overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh (and
in typically ahistorical fashion forgets that mullahs rallied against the
Shah-appointed Mossadegh, who had at times cut short elections and coerced the
parliament to grant him emergency powers). Is a coup over 60 years ago now
reason to overlook Iranian bellicosity — in the fashion that guilty Allied
powers once attributed their soft responses to Hitler to unease over the Versailles
peace treaty ? Note that in these cases, the Mossadegh affair and Versailles
were used by aggressors to leverage Western appeasement.
In 1938 the West was frightened about the specter of
slow-moving and near obsolete but quite loud and scary Stuka dive bombers, and
puny but nonetheless numerous Panzer Mark I and II tanks. The idea that
Hitler’s Germany in 1938 was a military colossus is quite absurd. In contrast,
in 2015 the West is rightly afraid of an Iranian nuclear bomb — a single weapon
that might allow the Iranians more destructive power than the combined carry
weight of all of Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombers of 1938. An otherwise weak Iran in
2020 — but one armed with 4-5 nuclear bombs and short-range missiles capable of
reaching most of the Middle East and parts of southern or eastern Europe —
could do far more damage to the region than the Germans could to their
neighbors in 1938.
The danger of an aggressor is never just the specter of raw
power, but instead the insidious messages about using what it has that it sends
to more responsible parties. Once Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier backed down
at Munich, the Soviets concluded that friendship with Western democracies was
as dangerous as enmity to Hitler, and thus flipped their affinities. Other opportunistic
Eastern European nations soon realigned with Hitler. So-called neutrals like
fair-weather Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey conducted
lucrative trade deals with Hitler and made the necessary adjustments to fit
what they saw as an ascendant Third Reich. If the Iranian deal goes through,
and if it is perceived as an economic, political, and military boon to the
theocracy, then the surrounding and terrified Middle East will likely make the
necessary political modifications to allow for Iranian expansionism.
There are other disturbing Iranian parallels to Munich — and
to all examples of appeasement from the Greek city-state appeasement of Philip
II, to the accommodations of European monarchies to Napoleon’s early rise, to
the license given Stalin to absorb Eastern Europe at Yalta. The appeasers
always pose as peace-makers and caricature their skeptics as near troglodyte
war-mongers.
We are seeing this predictable caricature as well, as the
Obama administration keeps insisting that there was no alternative to the deal
other than either an apocalyptic nuclear Iran or yet another ill-starred
Western preemptive attack in the Middle East — even as sanctions had crippled
the Iranian economy to the point that the theocracy in extremis limped to the
negotiation table seeking relief.
Today we see a Munich-like arrogance that men of assumed
reason and sobriety, by their winning charisma, rare mellifluence, or superior
wisdom, can convince Khamenei of the errors of his ways. Western humanists
habitually preen that they can demonstrate to authoritarians why their
bellicosity is supposedly against their own self interests — as if autocratic
aggressors envision risking war, and shorting their own people, as unimaginable
evils in comparison with the acquisition of honor, glory and respect that
follows from easily bullying neighbors and successfully gobbling up real
estate. John Kerry believes that the bomb is not in Iran’s real interest; Iran
believes that so far even the idea of a bomb most certainly has proved very
much in Iran’s interest.
As the democracies negotiated away Czechoslovakia to Hitler
at Munich, the Japanese and Italians had earlier offered the world clear
instruction about the wages of appeasement. Their serial aggressions in China
and East Africa throughout the late 1930s had sated neither dictatorship, but
rather convinced both that there were lots of weak countries that could be
safely harvested without incurring a larger war with the West.
While John Kerry ignored the long-term security of Israel and
the Sunni states in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin had earlier demonstrated
that Ossetia led to the Crimea that led to Eastern Ukraine that may well soon
lead to the Baltic states. Failed reset no more wised up John Kerry than
Abyssinia or Manchuria had enlightened Neville Chamberlain. Munich’s 1938 hype
led to catastrophe in 1939, in a way that the current 2015 self-congratulation
may well become frightening in 2016.
The Iran deal is not Munich, but the same naiveté, vanity,
and foolishness of Western leaders are close enough to warn us about what
happens next. And it will not be good.
