Hugh Hewitt
Washington Post, Mar. 19, 2022
“The new version of appeasement is belatedly arming Ukraine while empowering Putin (and paying him indirectly) in the deal taking shape with Iran in Vienna.”
Neville Chamberlain was a good man, though vain, and when he died, Winston Churchill — who replaced Chamberlain as British prime minister — eulogized him in the House of Commons.
It was a gracious address that gave voice to the fact that Chamberlain was a man of good intentions. But, as Churchill noted: “It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man.”
President Biden came to mind as I reviewed Churchill’s eulogy. Appeasement springs from the genuine desire to avoid war. But, as its comprehensive failure in the 1930s should have proved, it’s impossible to rely on the word of tyrants. Hitler was a tyrant. Stalin was a tyrant. President Xi Jinping of China, who oversees a vast set of concentration camps carrying out the genocide of the Uyghurs — while continuing the destruction of Tibetan culture and the repression of Hong Kong — is a tyrant. Vladimir Putin is an evil tyrant. Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has a long record of mayhem and hatred — another tyrant.
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