The follies of appeasement

Haven’t we’ve learned that appeasement doesn’t work?

I’m not talking about when the weak-kneed leaders of Britain and France went to Munich in 1938 and essentially gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler to buy a brief period of peace before Europe and the rest of the world went to war.

I’m talking about our more recent dealings with Russia, Iran and North Korea.

We’re in the trouble we’re in with North Korea because of our continual policy of appeasing the thugs who rule that oppressed and starving Communist paradise.

Most people don’t remember, but we started appeasing North Korea’s dictators in the 1990s, when Jimmy Carter was out of office and still felt he needed to play global peacemaker.

Carter went to North Korea behind the back of President Bill Clinton and sat down to negotiate a deal to stop them from building nuclear weapons.

He promised North Korea leaders two nuclear reactors and $5 billion in aid if they’d agree to the no-nukes deal and Clinton, not wanting to embarrass a former Democrat president, approved the deal.

Of course it took North Korea about 24 hours to break their promises.

They’ve been working on their nukes ever since, and our presidents have been appeasing them ever since. Now we’re at a boiling point.

You hope and pray we have the right people in office to make the right decisions and not go off the rails.

People are always praising my father for winning the Cold War without firing a shot or blowing up the world.

But he was able to defeat the Evil Empire with diplomacy because when he was dealing with the Soviets, the word “appeasement” was never in his vocabulary.

His way of describing his negotiating policy vis-a-vis the USSR and its nuclear arsenal was, “We win, they lose.”

I’m fearful, as many people are, by what might happen if we learn that the North Koreans truly have developed miniaturized nuclear weapons that could ride on their primitive ICBMs.

But I’m also concerned that we’ll just appease them again and we’ll find ourselves in this same scary spot next week or next year.

What we need to do is follow my father’s example and get appeasement out of our vocabulary.

While we practice smart diplomacy, we need to start putting anti-missile defense systems in areas the Russians or Chinese don’t like, like in South Korea — and too bad if it makes them nervous or mad.

As for Trump, he needs to get off building a border wall and start building a homeland missile defense system that will protect us from the rogue powers our appeasers have turned into world powers.

This story was originally published August 14, 2017 at 5:12 AM with the headline "The follies of appeasement."