Negotiate v. Appease

With the GOP eagerly tossing around the idea that negotiating with terrorist or dictators is the same as appeasement, here is a thoughtful Newsweek article by Evan Thomas about the history of this rhetorical grenade. In 1938 Neville Chamberlain went to Munich struck a deal with Hitler that Germany would be allowed to take over Czechoslovakia with no objection and would then leave Britain alone. Hitler took over Czechoslovakia and a couple years later went after Britain. Chamberlain's blunder has echoed through American politics since then with mixed results. The good results were the Cuban Missile Crisis (in which Kennedy successfully followed "Munich" in public and negotiated in secret), and Reagan's success in negotiating arms reductions with the USSR. The bad results were wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs. After we were bogged down in Vietnam it served as a balance to Munich. The lesson is that global situations rarely neatly fit the mold of Munich or Vietnam and that negotiation is not always appeasement.

In a companion piece, Christopher Hitchens takes a look at the recent book "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War" by Pat Buchanan (yes, the occasional candidate for prez. on the GOP side). Buchanan did get a few things right -- the abysmal bungling of French and British attempts at diplomacy is one bright spot in the book. But the rest includes a lot of ignoring or misinterpreting of facts to allow Buchanan to fit his view of the war into the thesis he is trying to prove. While Hitchens does a good job of ripping the book to shreds, he doesn't answer my burning question. To what end is Buchanan reinterpreting history? Who gains? What political or cultural idea is he trying to promote? The book doesn't seem to serve the idea that America is a Christian nation, the goal of lots of other historical revisionism. Nor does he seem to be promoting Bush's reasons for going to war, because his idea is that even WWII wasn't worth it. So what is it?