Check, Please

Mr. Bush's recent tirade against "appeasement" is apparently going to shape the foreign policy debate between Senators McCain and Obama. After 7 years of observing Mr. Bush, it seems clear to me that he has his kryptonite. Mr. Clinton's kryptonite was the fairer sex. Mr. Bush's kryptonite is history.

For, if Mr. Bush knew anything about the history of the nation he has driven off a cliff (there are more than one, so let my stipulate that I am refering to the United States here), he would realize that his predecessors, including Ronald Reagan and his own father, were, by his definition, craven and cowardly appeasers who ignored the lessons of history of groveled at the feet of tyrants in the vain effort to avoid inevitable conflict.

In Mr. Bush's world, the only way to avoid war is for America's adversaries to unconditionally surrender their system of government and their perceived national interests in the face of America's manifest superiority and benevolence.

The standard shorthand for appeasement in the American consciousness is British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich. There was quite a telling moment on MSNBC's dog and drivel show, "Hardball" last week, when the moderator made it crystal clear that one of his guests, who was rabidly denouncing Obama as behaving "like Chamberlain", had absolutely no idea what Chamberlain actually did.

Here's what Chamberlain did: he refused to start a world war over Czechoslovakia. He let Hitler take it without declaring war on him. Is that appeasement? Did the British give something away there? Yes, they did, in a certain sense. They gave something away which wasn't theirs to give, as the British are so proficient at doing. Palestine? Iraq? Ring any bells?

A few months later, war came anyway, as Britain declared war on Germany after its invasion of Poland. The relevant point is that Britain never gave anything of its own away to Hitler. And, for the trouble of declaring war on Germany, it lost its entire empire and much of its capital city, so perhaps Chamberlain was wise to avoid war for as long as possible.

Still, this serves, not without reason, as an argument against appeasing the appetites of aggressive nations. That is a valid lesson to be learned and held close. What Mr. Bush has done, however, is equated talking with surrender.

So, by Mr. Bush's own logic, every American president from Roosevelt to his own father was an appeaser, since every Cold War American president held high level talks with the USSR, which was the most dangerous adversary this nation has ever had.

The ultimate example of appeasement, by Mr. Bush's definition, came in 1972, when his father's boss, Richard Nixon, flew to China and met with Mao Tse-Tung. Mr. Bush refuses to talk to Iran because they are supposedly funneling weapons into Iraq and because they may, in Mr. Bush's artful phrasing "develop the know-how to get a weapon."

When Mr. Nixon met with Mao, Mao was playing Barry Bonds to Stalin's Hank Aaron, closing in on a world record once considered beyond reach. Only the metric here was murder rather than home runs. In 1972, Mao had become the most prolific murderer in world history. Among his victims were 100,000 American soldiers killed by Chinese proxies and weapons in Korea and Vietnam. In his spare time, Mao was amassing dozens of nuclear weapons. China, in short, was the ultimate rogue nation.

By meeting with Mao, Nixon drew China into the family of nations. Now, 36 years later, China and the US are so utterly co-dependent economically that war between them is unthinkable. That's diplomacy. Or, in Mr. Bush's world, "appeasement."

In Mr. Bush's world, diplomacy consists of the United States serving other nations with lists of ultimatums. If any of those ultimatums are rejected, the rogue nation in question is met with either war or isolation. What would the world look like today if no American president had made any contact at all with the USSR or China?

If I were to adopt Mr. Bush's worldview, I would wonder how America survived being led by such naive and seditious wimps as Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush. Greatest generation, my ass!

Imagine living with someone who was so self-absorbed, so narcissistic and petty, that when things didn't work out exactly as they felt they should, they reacted with a level of self-pity and self-righteousness that led them to believe that the universe has conspired against them, and that any compromise, any revision of their ideal, is nothing short of suicide. How could you live with a person so insecure, so selfish, so childish? Now, imagine that person is running your country. Because he is.