When Hitler invaded Poland, many people thought that he could be appeased by concessions and negotiation. It turned out that that the concessions just emboldened him to demand more and more.
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Perhaps there is a lesson there for Obama on Iran! Hint: an oil rich country does not need nuclear centrifuges….
There may be a lesson for Obama here, but I doubt it has anything to do with centrifuges, which were not offered as an act of appeasement. I think rather the lesson may be much closer to home.
The threat of a nuclear strike is not lost on me, but I have always had trouble understanding why we can have nuclear weapons but no one else can. In fact, one could easily make an argument for us being the very last country to be allowed to have a nuclear arsenal since we are the only ones rash enough to have actually deployed such weapons (twice no less).
Generally, you allow a responder to invoke Godwin’s Law, you don’t do it in the actual post…
Your analogy is a poor one anyway, since Hitler’s appeasers were the socialist-friendly European liberal doves who were quickly replaced by hawks when it all went bad for them. These were exacly the sort of folks who, today, would be demanding we negotiate with every terrorist state, that Israel should be taken from those mean old Jews and given back to those oppressed Arabs by force if necessary, that it’s OK to start a couple of military actions (wars) so long as you don’t put any Americans at risk (wars are messy and to be avoided by gentlemen), and that positions held are only for political expediency – to demionstrate that you have the moral high ground – not because you’d actually want to DO it (Gitmo). I think the Hitler appeasers would find a lot more in common with American liberals (as he did at the time) than the conservatives. (You might recall that Hitler’s Eugenics program was inspired directly by those already put place by “progressives” in Britain and the U.S., which shockingly weren’t dismantled here until the 1960’s.)
Uhm, no.
Austria, and everything prior to Poland, you’d be correct. But Poland was the line in the sand that caused England and France to declare war on Germany. Granted, neither did much beyond that until Hitler invaded France via Belgium but still.