I hope Obama and his speechwriters read that essay. Some choice examples. Ah, the brilliant forecasting abilities of conservatives--never in doubt, frequently wrong ("invariably" might be a better word than "frequently" in this context).
When Eisenhower welcomed Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to the United States in 1959, William F. Buckley Jr., the right's leader, complained that the act of "diplomatic sentimentality" signaled the "death rattle of the West."
The Soviets withdrew their missiles in what was widely seen as a humiliation to Khrushchev, but Goldwater believed that Kennedy's diplomacy gave "the communists one of their greatest victories in their race for world power that they have enjoyed to date."
Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the elected face of the burgeoning neoconservative movement, charged President Carter with "appeasement in its purest form" for negotiating SALT II, which set equal limits on the number of U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles and bombers.
When he and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, which for the first time eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, Buckley's National Review dubbed it "suicide." The Conservative Caucus took out a full-page newspaper ad saying "Appeasement is as unwise in 1988 as in 1938." It paired photos of Reagan and Gorbachev with photos of Neville Chamberlain and Hitler.
Containment, negotiation, nuclear stability -- each of these things helped protect the United States and end the Cold War. And yet, at the time, conservatives thought each was synonymous with appeasement. |
