Lost in the spectacle of the high decibel State of the Union screel, and the quadrennial carnival of a presidential election, there was some dangerous news last week that was mostly ignored—for obvious treasonous reasons.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Iran—since 1979 a sworn enemy of the U.S. whose citizens it has murdered and interests it has thwarted with impunity—now possesses all the components for quickly assembling several nuclear bombs.
This development could mark the return of the 1939 diplomatic disaster of England’s and France’s abandonment of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany, which lit the fuse of the most destructive war in history.
Often considered a mere foreign policy cliché for feckless diplomacy, historian Telford Taylor described the caricature of England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, while note that “Munich’s lessons are much more complex, widespread, and consequential” than a parable about:
[A] timorous, bumbling, and naïve old gentleman, waving an umbrella as a signal of cringing subservience to a bully.
Specifically, Munich is the premier historical paradigm:
[F]or illusory ideals about foreign policy and diplomatic engagement that rationalize ideological prejudices, partisan interests, and received institutional wisdom––in our times, all at the cost of the exorbitant risk of a global conflict with nuclear-armed autocratic enemies.
And that threat has just intensified with the news about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The Wall Street Journal last week reported “troubling news” from Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency:
The Agency has lost continuity of knowledge in relation to [Iran’s] production and inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows, heavy water, and uranium ore concentrate.
Moreover, the Journal continues:
[The] Institute for Science and International Security, which has followed Iran’s program for years, says Iran can enrich enough uranium for 13 nuclear weapons, seven in the first month of a breakout. ‘Iran is able to produce more weapon-grade uranium (WGU) and at a faster rate since the IAEA’s last report in November 2023,’ it finds.
This is worrisome news, and a strong de facto rebuke of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, colloquially known as the “Iran nuclear deal” that was signed by Barack Hussein Obama without the Senate’s approval.
This multinational agreement, which at most merely delayed Iran’s progress, illustrates the fetish of diplomacy that also contributed to the September 1939 Munich debacle.
The “rules-based international order” that today’s Western globalists chant like a mantra had been established by the 1919 Versailles settlement after the “war to end war,” as H.G. Wells put it.
The following two decades saw the creation of the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaties of 1925, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, all intended to make good on the promise “never again” to repeat the industrialized carnage of the Great War, and instead settle conflicts with diplomatic engagement, treaties, multinational institutions, and non-lethal means like economic sanctions.
And all were signed by the future aggressors Germany, Italy, and Japan, whose invasions and occupations of other countries should have brought an end to these utopian delusions.
This naïve idealism, however, was turbocharged by other dubious ideas like socialism and pacifism, which exacerbated antimilitarist attitudes, encouraged the disarmament movement, and promoted antinationalist globalism.
For example, in 1935, two years after Hitler came to power, Labour Party leader Clement Attlee said:
Our policy is not one of seeking security through rearmament but through disarmament.
In the same year, historian Arnold Toynbee explained how this would work:
International law and order were in the true interests of the whole of mankind, [whereas the] region of violence in international affairs was an anti-social desire which was not even in the ultimate interests of the citizens . . . who profess this benighted and anachronistic creed.
War and militarism, then, were contrary to the progressive improvements in human nature and well-being brought about by science, technology, and expanding liberalism. “War was a primitive throwback redolent of our savage, unenlightened past.”
George Orwell observed in 1940:
For years after the war, to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters, even to know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, was suspect in ‘enlightened circles.’
Given The Regime’s de facto anti-Americanism, is it any wonder our enemies sneer at our emasculated power of deterrence? And when the installed imposter appeals to Iran with cringing solicitude, beseeching the clerics to renew the “nuclear deal” on which his crime syndicate masquerading as a political party already has spent multiple billions of taxpayer dollars, and the terms of which Iran has serially violated with impunity, why would they change their behavior?
These cultural, political, and policy dysfunctions are the predicates of appeasement, just as they were for England during the interwar years. The recent news about how close the mullahs are to possessing 13 nuclear weapons—news The Regime and its colluding mass propaganda media seemingly are disregarding—threatens consequence for our foreign policy failures much closer to those of Munich than we can imagine.
Final thoughts: Solving this riddle will be another task for the Israelis. To the Iranians: Build it and they will come.
