Tyrants and extremists regard compromise as an incentive to redouble aggression
By Melanie Phillips
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As the Ukraine crisis continues, one question in particular poses itself. How can it be that, having defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the west is now unable to get the better of the leader of the bankrupt kleptocracy that replaced communism in Russia?
At a synagogue meeting in Atlanta earlier this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken displayed the all-too hapless posture of the west. Asked what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next move might be having deployed 100,000 Russian troops on the border with Ukraine, Blinken replied: “He is the only one that can give you an answer”.
Having done nothing more than advertise his own cluelessness, he then enumerated core western principles: that a country can’t change the borders of another by force, decide another’s choices and decisions, or exert its sphere of influence to subjugate its neighbours to its will.
Fine principles indeed, but utterly meaningless unless the west is determined to uphold them. The reason that Putin has the whip hand in threatening to ride roughshod over those principles in Ukraine is that he knows that, for the west, these are merely pious words.
In Afghanistan, America betrayed all those who had given their lives there to fight the enemies of the free world when it abruptly pulled out its troops and abandoned the country to the Taliban.
Faced with Iran racing towards the bomb, the Biden administration has redoubled its offers of sweeteners to the world’s most lethal terrorist regime. It dropped American objections to a $5 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Tehran.
It released Iranian oil funds in South Korea, Iraq and Oman. Last March, it halted the release of a report by the International Atomic Energy Authority detailing Iran’s non-compliance with the IAEA’s investigation into its undeclared nuclear material and activities.
Even though America’s own interests have been subjected to running attacks by Iran-backed militias, it merely responds with a feeble flick of the wrist in delivering only token military reprisals.
All this is in pursuit of the Blinken/Biden fantasy that the genocidal fanatics of the Islamic revolutionary regime are people who respond to inducements and offers of compromise because they think like westerners.
In a similar vein, the administration’s foreign-policy team fantasises (as others have done before it) that if Israel would only offer inducements and compromises over land to the Palestinian Arabs, the war between them would be over.
The Biden administration fails to grasp that tyrants and extremists like the Iranian ayatollahs, Putin or Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas don’t think like westerners at all. That’s because their agenda is religious or political domination, and they regard any compromise gestures as proof of weakness and an incentive to redouble their aggression.
America’s incompetent blunderings around the world have been closely watched by Russia, China and Iran. They are calculating that they can get away with invading Ukraine or Taiwan, or building nuclear weapons, because the United States hasn’t got what it takes to stop them.
The Bidenites don’t understand that international relations rest upon a paradox. This is that to keep the peace you have to be prepared for war — and the enemy must believe you really do mean it. Without that implicit or explicit threat, war not only becomes much more likely but it will eventually take place on the enemy’s terms.
Recently, under the pressure of an imminent energy emergency as Putin threatens to starve Europe of gas supplies, America and Britain have started to shake their fists.
The United States has put up to 8,500 troops on heightened alert for a possible deployment to Eastern Europe. Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that the United Kingdom, which has already sent anti-tank weapons and a small number of British troops to Ukraine, is prepared to deploy troops to protect NATO allies in Europe if Russia invades.
In response, Russia has announced naval drills involving 140 ships and 10,000 troops from all of its naval fleets that will take place in the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, North Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk from January until February.
Putin is thus thumbing his nose at the west because he doesn’t believe it is up for the fight. He rightly perceives it is rudderless, with America seemingly going out of its way to display weakness abroad while it tears itself apart at home.
He undoubtedly understands that the west’s appeasement mentality reflects a more profound and devastating weakness — that it is no longer prepared to defend itself because it has lost its belief that its culture is worth dying for.
In 1938, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was cheered to the rafters when he returned from meeting Hitler in Munich waving the agreement he claimed had brought “peace for our time”.
The new movie “Munich,” based on Robert Harris’s thriller of that name, paints a revisionist picture of a heroic and clear-eyed Chamberlain having been motivated by the need to buy time for Britain to re-arm.
But this is untrue. Chamberlain thought that by his agreement with Hitler he had averted war altogether. Like many others at that time who had been deeply scarred by the terrible carnage in the trenches during World War I, Chamberlain believed that another war had to be avoided at all costs.
It’s hard to exaggerate the extent to which people are simply incapable of seeing what’s in front of their eyes if they are under powerful pressure to believe it’s not there. If they believe that the consequences of certain facts will be too awful, they deny those facts altogether.
It’s this type of blindness that caused the Biden administration to think Putin was a reasonable negotiating partner over the plan for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to deliver gas from Russia to Germany.
Both the Obama and Trump administrations opposed this pipeline in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But last year, Blinken waived sanctions on Matthias Warnig, the chairman of Nord Stream 2 and a close friend of Putin, claiming that he wanted to give time for diplomacy to work.
At a stroke, Blinken cut the ground from Ukraine since, without the pipeline, Russian gas supplies to Germany would need to pass through Ukraine making invasion a self-defeating project. At the same time, the pipeline gives Putin the ability to blackmail Europe over its gas supplies.
Now, America is belatedly trying to persuade Germany, which is even more wedded to appeasement, to say it will block the pipeline if Russia invades Ukraine.
Appeasement blindness is why the Biden administration thinks an agreement with the Iranian regime would be worth more than the piece of paper waved by Chamberlain on his return from Munich.
And appeasement blindness is why the west is responsible for the war by the Arab world against Israel. In the 1930s, Britain sought to buy off the Arab uprising in Palestine against the proposed Jewish homeland by offering the Arabs land promised by international agreement to the Jews.
For most of the period since the State of Israel was created, the west has continued with the fiction that the Arab war of extermination against the Jewish homeland is instead a conflict over the division of the land between two sets of people with an entitlement to that land. As a result, the Palestinian Arabs have been incentivised to continue their war of extermination, confident that the west would blame Israel for defending itself.
People often wonder why tiny, embattled Israel bucks the western trend of fatally low birthrates, sclerotic economies and miserable populations. The basic answer is that it believes in itself and is determined to survive.
To convince Putin not to invade Ukraine, he has to believe that the west means to defend its principles. But for that to happen, the west has to start believing in itself and wanting to survive. And of that there is no sign.
@Edgar Yes, I read that Samuel was a cultural Zionist who opposed Jewish statehood, as was Albert Einstein, who may have been the first one to misuse the term Nazi to slander Jews when he called Begin a Jewish Nazi during or right after independence. And then he was offered the presidency, which he declined.. So bizarre. I am also referring to “cultural zionism,” as if the Muslims who had oppressed Jews for centuries would ever have allowed a Jewish cultural center to flourish in the absence of a state or what the point of said cultural center would be if it left the majority of Jews in the world in harms way.
According to everything I’ve read, including Samuel’s exculpatory auto-biography, which I have, the British, through Samuel, were positively trying to placate the Arabs. This was the reason that Samuel chose and appointed Haj Amin in his completely newly-invented-for-the- occasion, office of “Mufti of Jerusalem”. He took the advice of the prominent Arab members of his Council, over the contrary warnings of the Jewish members.
Even though his job was to carry out the British Mandate conditions to encourage Jewish immigration, and settle Jews all over the Land. His Council had a telling majority of Arabs over Jews. He bent over backwards to appease the Arabs at the slightest sign of opposition from them.
In fact, truthfully, during reading it I was not even sure that Samuel was a Jew despite his name, and looked him up in Britannica.
I disagree with Vivarto. Much the same arguments were used to justify Hitler’s annexation of Austria, and his subsequent annexation of the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia (the so-called “Sudetenland”), and his claims to Danzig (a city that then had a German majority) and a small German-speaking city in Lithuania (I can’t remember its name). Didn’t the people of these territories (in reality,some of them but not all of them) consider themselves German? Did they not want to be part of Germany? Wasn’t Hitler just complying with their wishes?
In reality, we have no way of knowing what the people of either the Crimea or the Donbass want, because there has never been and probably never will be a plebiscite, free of intimidation and violence by either side, to ascertain their wishes. What we do know is tha Russia during the administration of Boris Yeltsin did sign an agreement with the Ukraine that recognized Ukrainian sovereignty over these territories. Russia has since used force to seize the Crimea, and it has infiltrated soldiers into the Donbass to support the secessionist rebellion there.
Not all of the soldiers serving the Donbass “independent republics are native to the area. Many are Russians who crossed the Ukrainian border to help detach these regions from Ukraine.
I am not saying that the issue is simple. Russia does have a case, since large parts of the Ukraine were conquered by Russia in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and subsequently a large part of the southern part of the country was settled by Russians.
The Crimea was seized by Russia from Turkey in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and large numbers of Russians then settled the area. However, the Crimean Tatars had been the only inhabitants of the region before the Russian conquest. They were all exiled to Siberia by Stalin during World War II.
However, Russia’s claims to these territories, including all of Ukraine, rest on military conquest, not the wishes of the natives.
Putin has claimed all of Ukraine as Russian territory in his recently published essay. That is wrong and unjust.
I agree with everything that Melanie writes here. One of the very few clear-sighted journalists in the English-speaking world.
I didn’t know about Harris’s novel defending Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. I had noticed, however, a lot of videos about Chamberlain on YouTube. Most of them try to rehabilitate his reputation in one way or another. This boom in Chamberlain studies is obviusly an attempt to validate and legitimate the present the West’s present-day appeasement of Russia and China. When writers seek to revise the way past history is interpreted, it is usually with the idea of justifying some policy of governments in the present.
The British were not appeasing the Arabs during the Mandate.
They were consciously reneging on the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate in order to kick the Jews out of Palestine and keep the Arab vassal states under the British control.
All the problems Israel is having now were started by the British during the Mandate.
The West (with a few others) wants to destroy Israel which explains its “unexplainable” treatment of the so-called ME conflict.
Obviously, if the West succeeds, there will be another Holocaust.
Basically, for the Jews the 2nd world war has never ended.
As far as Chamberlain’s “appeasement” of Hitler, it will take too long to explain.
@Vivarto I agree with you about Crimea and Donbas. She’s right about the rest, however.
I am disappointed by Melanie’s article.
Return of Crimea back to Russia was not an act of imperialism. It was an act of historical justice, and acknowledgement of the Crimean people’s will.
So far Russia has not ‘taken’ any other territory.
However should the people of Donbas prefer to belong to Russia, than here, too, transferring Donbas to Russia would be the right thing to do. And by the same token, should the people of Donbas prefer to be in Ukraine, I’d respect that, too.
This is not at all similar to 1st and 2nd world war, nor to Napoleonic wars.