When negotiation is not appeasement

Jules Crittenden:

New Republic’s Scoblic beats conservatives with conservatives to defend Obama’s talk about talk with dictators. Talking worked with the Soviets, Scoblic opines, variously using a magnifying glass and a funhouse mirror to examine history’s miniscule details undistracted by any large inconvenient objects. LA Times....

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There are a couple of problems with his argument. Obama’s 2009 plan bears little resemblance to JFK’s 1962 stance or Reagan’s in the 1980s. In the cases he cites in which negotiations led to Soviets backing down it was in the face of strong, credible military threats, something he alludes to in passing. JFK and Reagan negotiated from positions of strength, and did not signal a willingness to give up prior to talks. Cuba was blockaded by the United States Navy and Gorbachev was confronted with a military buildup and technological develoment he couldn’t match, and determined support for resistance in various forms from Poland to Afghanistan to Nicaragua and elsewhere. The Carter era, cited as a banner success thanks to missile talks, also marked a period of Soviet escalation and expansion of its efforts, in Afghanistan, Central America and Africa.

The citation of Clinton and North Korea is a little bizarre. Presumeably Scoblic’s aware that North Korea not only continued its nuclear program, and apparently has been spreading the joy.

If Obama’s program of withdrawal and asking Iran for assistance in the dismantling of our influence in the Middle East bears any resemblance to any of that history, it would be the Clinton/North Korea part.

It is interesting to see how little liberals know about history when they start grabbing for analogies. The North Korean analogy does give an example of a liberal best case scenario. In some ways it reminds me of the Geneva Accords that was supposed to lead to a neutral Laos. Instead it led to a Laos where the US ground forces were excluded and the communist built a freeway to South Vietnam called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Even after it was an obvious disaster for our war effort in South Vietnam, Democrats were still looking at it as an example of what they needed to do to extract themselves from Vietnam rather than win the war. Ironically, even the North Vietnamese acknowledge taht if we had cut the trial, we would have won the war.