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Conservatives say Obama is like Neville Chamberlain. They said the same about Reagan.
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/6/8353991/conservatives-say-obama-is-like-neville-chamberlain-they-said-theFollow American politics long enough and you'll start to believe that the Republican party must have some sort of Neville Chamberlain insult generator hidden away in one of the Senate office buildings. (Chamberlain, you may remember, was the British prime minister who infamously came back from a 1938 conference with Hitler in Munich claiming that their agreement, which allowed Hitler to annex a large chunk of Czechoslovakia, had secured "peace in our time." It hadn't.)
After all, it seems like anytime a US president so much as has a conversation with a hostile regime, he can count on being accused of Chamberlain-style "appeasement," or of trying to negotiate "another Munich." Criticism of President Obama over the recent Iran deal is the latest example of the trend, but even Ronald Reagan was repeatedly accused of appeasement during his presidency.
But as this sampling of some of the leaders who have been accused of Chamberlaining shows, this critique is about attitude, not substance. It's trotted out as a way to insist that any leader who is willing to try diplomacy first is nothing but a delusional appeaser, and to imply that aggression is the one-size-fits-all solution to every dispute with an unfriendly regime. That kind of macho posturing might be good politics, but it would make for very bad policy....
That highlights a key point about these kinds of "Neville Chamberlain" accusations: the people making them seem to believe that the lesson of World War II is that the US should never try diplomacy with an unfriendly government — that the mere act of having a conversation is, in and of itself, "appeasement." That position may be appealing in its macho toughness, but in practice it would be a serious, unnecessary limitation on the US's ability to achieve its foreign policy goals.
After all, it seems like anytime a US president so much as has a conversation with a hostile regime, he can count on being accused of Chamberlain-style "appeasement," or of trying to negotiate "another Munich." Criticism of President Obama over the recent Iran deal is the latest example of the trend, but even Ronald Reagan was repeatedly accused of appeasement during his presidency.
But as this sampling of some of the leaders who have been accused of Chamberlaining shows, this critique is about attitude, not substance. It's trotted out as a way to insist that any leader who is willing to try diplomacy first is nothing but a delusional appeaser, and to imply that aggression is the one-size-fits-all solution to every dispute with an unfriendly regime. That kind of macho posturing might be good politics, but it would make for very bad policy....
That highlights a key point about these kinds of "Neville Chamberlain" accusations: the people making them seem to believe that the lesson of World War II is that the US should never try diplomacy with an unfriendly government — that the mere act of having a conversation is, in and of itself, "appeasement." That position may be appealing in its macho toughness, but in practice it would be a serious, unnecessary limitation on the US's ability to achieve its foreign policy goals.
Neville Chamberlain was Kenyan? Who knew?
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