Asleep at the Switch

...But the Kagans go further, contending that the practice dates back to the Locarno accords of 1925, of which the liberal Weimar Republic was the German signatory...

...And the policy implications were clear: England should curtail its strategic commitments abroad and, as George McGovern would advise America to do a half century later, come home...

...As Lloyd George put it, the task for England now was "to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in...

...It even devised a doctrine of "air policing," which was employed to put down insurrections in, among other places, Iraq...

...The Kagans allude to our "Vietnam syndrome," but, as they concede, that scarcely captures the price that the Somme and Passchendael had exacted from Britain's soul...

...RAF chief Frederick Sykes argued, "In air power we possess a rapid and economical instrument by which to ensure peace and good government in our outer empire...

...Important as airpower, and particularly strategic bombing, would prove to be, the resources devoted to its development exacted a steep price from Britain's air defense forces...

...The terms of Versailles, for example, harsh on Germany and difficult to enforce, were progressively watered down and eventually abandoned altogether...

...Just as U.S...

...In place of strategic thinking, they embraced instead the serene conviction that commercial relations and treaties were properly a cause rather than an effect of peace—a belief that should have been repudiated decisively at the Marne...

...The United States is in the midst of its longest ever period of economic growth...

...Every day that went by hardened in the minds of successive German governments the desire to overthrow the [Versailles] treaty and strengthened their vast and complex arrangement to subvert it in time...

...Then, too, the League of Nations, which, like the United Nations, was to preserve international order through collective security, fared no better than its successor...

...Were it to wash its hands of the world's problems, those problems would soon enough multiply and imperil England directly...

...America is in danger," they warn in the opening sentence...

...True, the inclination was evident even before Hitler takes power...

...It has also had a giddy and sometimes narcotic effect on otherwise sober-minded policymakers who seem convinced that a thriving international economy will suffice to sweep up the detritus of the last century...

...say, another Vietnam or Munich...

...In fact, as supplements to reasoned argument or tools of amplification and illustration, they are useful to historical writing, and, when handled with care, often illuminate...

...In the conventional telling, British appeasement commences with the decision to turn the other cheek when Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland and Mussolini invades Ethiopia...

...What is less well known, and what the Kagans recount in devastating detail, are the Panglossian assumptions about military technology that governed British military planning—assumptions that are being revived today as if nothing had been learned and nothing remembered...

...The British, too, embraced airpower (and a doctrine of "distant attack") without condition and regardless of consequence...

...At the time, Britain was, like the United States today, a hinge of world order...

...As historian David Hackett Fischer noted, when they fall into the wrong hands, analogies become dangerous weapons, employed as substitutes, rather than auxiliaries, to proof...

...That fairly summarizes the dim view the profession has of analogies that reduce complex issues to, Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at the New Republic...

...But just like their American counterparts in the early 1990s, British leaders during the 1920s seemed to view the country's military establishment less as an instrument of strategy than a burdensome drain on the national treasury...

...The most commonly noted, but nonetheless most important, similarity between the two eras pertains to the practice of appeasement...

...This line of thinking, neatly exemplified by the Locarno agreements of 1925, which essentially forbade war between Europe's major powers, also responded to multiple needs unrelated to Britain's faith in the power of treaties...

...strategy, alliances, armaments, military forces had been the causes of wars in the past...

...The Kagans correctly reply that there is none...

...As the Kagans demonstrate, Britain was by the late 1930s appeasing from a position of weakness...

...This makes the American version all the more inscrutable...

...And yet, when applied wisely, analogies can clarify...

...Their comparison of Britain during the interwar period with America now, is meant to be a wake-up call...

...But, as the Kagans convincingly demonstrate, it is repeating them nonetheless...

...America has suffered no such recent calamity as World War I," the Kagans add...

...Today, appeasement is a dirty word...

...As the Kagans summarize the thinking of those years, "The conventional wisdom of the past must be rejected...

...If two events seem similar in one way, the determined polemicist is sure to insist they agree in others...

...Clearly, America today lacks a rival on the scale of Germany...

...Its political creed has enjoyed near-universal vindication...

...What distinguishes the book's treatment of appeasement from hundreds of others before it—and what is sure to be its most controversial aspect—is the chronology it offers...

...Air power," the Kagans write, "became a panacea that cured the host of ills caused by military weakness— right up to the time the nation faced a serious test of strength...

...At the same time, it underfunds the army, rarely permitting it to venture far from home and even then, keeping it on a tight leash to preclude it from causing embarrassment...

...If recent history has confounded the expectation that the post-Cold War era would be a period of international harmony, this vision, a staple of British thinking in the period after the First World War, was not so easily shaken then...

...But the Kagans focus instead on the practice as applied to Saddam Hussein (the chapter on Iraq is entitled "Another Versailles"), Serbia, and North Korea, which, however unseemly, has not been nearly in the same league as Britain's appeasement of Germany...

...To begin with, England's leaders, and even more so its public, were understandably determined to recover from the carnage of the war that had just ended...

...After all, Britain's unwillingness to shoulder its responsibilities was born of economic hardship and unimaginable bloodshed...

...What's America's excuse...

...The most notable parallel is the conviction that airpower offers a tool to unshackle decisionmakers from war's iron logic...

...Far from resenting American power, other nations implore the United States to maintain an active global role...

...Still, the parallels between the two eras are meant to alarm, and they do...

...America may be repeating Britain's mistakes for very different reasons...

...Donald and Frederick Kagan, historians at Yale and West Point respectively (and father and son), use an analogy to illuminate our present situation in While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today...

...The Clinton administration has, for example, shown a clear preference for what are known as "stand-off attacks"—missile strikes launched from a suitably safe remove or, if necessary, from manned aircraft...

...And, yet, it has not...

...Fortunately, England fielded a powerful insurance policy in its armed forces...

...But between the wars it was a policy whose worth had yet to be disproved—not unlike the current mantra of "engagement...

...In fact, the Kagans find engagement, especially in the case of North Korea, to be nothing more than appeasement clothed in new-age rhetoric...

...policymakers in recent years have been assuring Americans that their future will reduce to a simple narrative of material progress and moral improvement, so too did British officials insist a new era would abolish the complexities of international politics...

...The rejection of these things and the way of thinking that went with them is what would bring peace...

...Contentment can just as easily undermine America's vigilance...

...They also locate in America's stance toward Iraq echoes of allied feck-lessness toward Germany between the wars and reveal some intriguing similarities between 1998's Operation Desert Fox and France's ill-fated occupation of the Ruhr...

...Though understandable, the impulse to turn inward was misguided...

...But it is a fanciful conceit to imagine that prosperity can be relied on to achieve the foreign policy aims of the United States...

...Germany had by that point been rearming for at least six years with little complaint from Britain...

...The Kagans do not offer an explanation and seem genuinely puzzled by America's loss of will...

...Folly though the practice may be, America appeases rogue regimes from a position of strength...

...China, to be sure, may soon pose such a threat, and the United States has certainly been appeasing it...

...The continued wounds received from the 'Vietnam syndrome' are self-inflicted and unnecessary...

...These rules were abandoned only in 1932—seven years prior to the outbreak of another world war...

...For wealth seems to have dulled Americans' awareness of the threats beyond their shores...

...In what has since become the favorite cliché of American politicians, British conservative leader Bonar Law declared in 1922 that "we cannot act alone as the policeman of the world...

...But absent in London was even the inclination to attend to Britain's imperial obligations...

...As to the first of these, from the Versailles treaty to Munich twenty years later, the worthless and unenforceable accord was a leitmotif of the interwar period—just as it has become a staple of Clintonite diplomacy in North Korea, China, and the Balkans...

...And, measured by the Kagans' indictment of the Clinton years, this is exactly what it has done...

...But theirs is a polemic that manages, through meticulous detail, careful qualification, and absence of exaggeration, to avoid twisting the historical record...

...Reeling from the casualties of the First World War and unwilling to expend ample funds to maintain large ground forces, the British government proved an easy sell for the RAF...

...Rather, peace would be guaranteed as a result of three things: international law, military technology, and appeasement...

...There is no reason whatsoever why America should not accept the burden fate laid upon her in 1991...

...But in noting America's unprecedented fortunes, and how sharply this state of affairs contrasts with Britain's misery, they suggest a possible answer: that America's vulnerability derives from its very prosperity...

...Languishing from years of neglect, these forces would perform unevenly in the next war...

...True, many British officials, particularly those in the defense establishment, harbored suspicions about the power of the parchment...

...Intent on reaping a "peace dividend," officials pared the military to the bone and tailored strategic forecasts to reflect their parsimony...

...Notoriously, they devised successive "ten-year rules," which justified paltry defense expenditures on the basis of predictions of a lasting peace...