Victor Davis Hanson on the Markers of Appeasement

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It is easy to damn the 1930s appeasers of Adolf Hitler -- such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in England and Edouard Daladier in France -- given what the Nazis ultimately did when unleashed.

But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post facto but trying to reconstruct the rationale of something that in hindsight seems inexplicable.

Appeasement in the 1930s was popular with the European public for various reasons. All are instructive in our hesitation about stopping a nuclear Iran, or about defending the right of Western newspapers to print what they wish -- or about fighting radical Islamism in general.

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Just as Hitler concocted incidents such as the burning of the Reichstag to create outrage, Islamist leaders incite frenzy in their followers over a supposed flushed Koran at Guantanamo and several inflammatory cartoons, some of them never published by Danish newspapers at all.

Anti-Semitism, of course, is the mother's milk of fascism. It is always, they say, a small group of Jews -- whether shadowy Cabinet advisers and international bankers of the 1930s or the manipulative neoconservatives and Israeli leadership of the present -- who alone stir up the trouble.

The point of the comparison is not to suggest history simply repeats itself, but to learn why intelligent people delude themselves into embracing naive policies. After the Taliban and Saddam were removed, the furious reply of the radical Islamist world was to censor Western newspapers, along with Iran's accelerated efforts to get the bomb.

In response, either the West will continue to stand up now to these recurring post-September 11, 2001, threats, or it will see the bullies' demands increase as its own resistance weakens. Like the appeasement of the 1930s, opting for the easier choice will only guarantee a more costly one later.