In the 1930s Europe chose appeasement. Today Spain has done so again. Europe may follow.
One can understand Europe's reaction in the 1930s. First, it could almost plausibly convince itself that Hitler could be accommodated. Perhaps he really was only seeking what he sometimes said he was -- the return of territory, the unification of the German volk, a place in the sun -- and not world conquest.
Today there is no doubting the intentions of Arab-Islamic radicalism. It is not this grievance or that (U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia). It is not this territory or that (Palestine, Andalusia). The intention, endlessly repeated, is the establishment of a primitive, messianic caliphate -- redeeming Islam and dominating the world. They have seen the future: Taliban Afghanistan, writ large.
Moreover, Europe in the 1930s had a second excuse. The devastation of the first world war, staggering and fresh in memory (France and Germany lost a third of their young men of military age), had made another such war unthinkable. This does not excuse appeasement -- it cost millions more lives in the second world war -- but provides context and possibly humility. One has to ask oneself: Am I sure I would not have chosen the cowardly alternative?
Nonetheless, it was still the cowardly alternative. And today Spain has chosen it -- having suffered not Europe's 20 million dead of World War I but 200 dead in the Madrid bombings.
The Socialist Party placed the blame for the attack not on the barbarians who detonated the bombs but on the Spanish government that stood with the United States in its war against the barbarians. The Spanish electorate then voted into office the purveyors of precisely that perverse view.
Spain will now withdraw from Iraq, sever its alliance with America and, as Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has promised, "restore magnificent relations with France and Germany."
Nonetheless, Spain is just Spain. The really big prize is Europe. Which is why the most ominous development of the week was the post-Madrid pronouncements of Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission.
"It is clear that force alone cannot win the fight against terrorism." Sounds reasonable until you hear Prodi's amplification of the idea just two days earlier. "We know that international terrorism wants to spread fear," he said. "Fear generates not so much justice but rather vengeance, which chooses war to answer the need of security. . . . We become prisoners of terror and of terrorists." In other words, making war on terror is unjust, fearful, mere vengeance and ultimately a victory for terrorism.
If not war, then what? A centerpiece to Prodi's solution to terrorism: a new European constitution. I'm not making this up: "to defeat fear we only have democracy and politics. . . . Today for us, politics means building Europe completely with its constitution and its institutions."
This is beyond appeasement. This is decadence: Terror rages and we tend our garden.
Prodi is right that the war on terror is not resolved by force alone. How is it won apart from hunting down terrorists and destroying terrorist regimes? By reversing the Arab-Islamic world's tragic collapse into oppression, intolerance and destitution, in which popular grievances are cynically deflected by repressive regimes and clergy into the virulent anti-Americanism that exploded upon us on Sept. 11, 2001. Which means trying to give desperate and oppressed people a chance at the kind of freedom and prosperity that we helped construct after World War II in Europe and East Asia.
Where on this planet is this project most engaged? Iraq, where day by day the U.S.-led coalition is trying to build a new civil order characterized by pluralism, the rule of law and constitutional restraints. Even a modicum of success in this enterprise would constitute a monumental strategic advance, a historic change in the very culture of the Middle East.
Spain's response to this challenge? Abandon the effort.
So when Zapatero and, more important, Prodi speak of nonmilitary means to combat terrorism, they don't mean draining the swamp by gradually building free institutions. They mean buying off the terrorists, distancing themselves from America and seeking a separate peace.
Sure, they will continue to track down individual al Qaeda terrorists. But that's no favor to anyone. They want to make sure there's not another Madrid, in case European appeasement is not quite thorough enough to satisfy the terrorists. But on the larger fight, the reordering of the Arab world that produced the terrorists, they choose surrender.
Discuss the strategy of appeasement as a two-person game. Are there circumstances where it is a good strategy?