The Great Follies: Historical and Current Solutions for Appeasement Policies

When on August 27, 1928, the American Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, joined his French colleague Aristide Briand in signing what would become known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, neither of the two statesmen believed the Pact could in any way be enforced or upheld. After all, a treaty renouncing "war (...) as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another" did not seem probable or possible, even in the happy internationalist days of the late '20s.

Yet what brought these quite serious politicians to propose this quite seriously intended treaty, ten years after the Armistice and ten years before the Treaty of Munich? The necessity of preventing an unrighteous war now to be able to fight a righteous war later. Mere symbolic grandstanding such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was of course not the real instrument, but its assumption of pacifism does fit the bill of this policy very well: appeasement.

Now appeasement has generally rather a bad name in the West, but undeservedly so. My earlier blogpiece on appeasement argued that it is essential for preventing (or delaying for as long as possible) World War, especially within a context of a world of flexible alliances.

During the interbellum period there was a certain balance of powers, or at least a desire to maintain it on the side of the Western nations. The powerful European nations were the United Kingdom and France, who were joined in an uneasy alliance. This was balanced by two immense but isolationist powers on the borders of the European sphere of influence: the United States and the USSR.
During the years of this geopolitical balance, directly after WWI, there was a period of relative peace, and what's more important, of disarmament and nonviolence. This was guaranteed by treaties such as Locarno, Stresa and Washington, and by the London Naval Conferences, as well as a flurry of nonagression pacts.

However, this delicate but effective balance was upset because the second class powers, such as Italy, Germany and Japan, became increasingly dissatisfied with the current situation (for varying reasons) and decided to overthrow this balance. At first, each of these nations was prepared to solve their claims to increased power and influence by means of diplomacy. Yet the Allied powers, rigidly clinging to maintenance of the status quo because of their increasing inability to defend the whole of their empires and wanting to prevent this becoming altogether too clear, rejected every such effort with more force than subtlety. As a result, the have-not powers became increasingly aggressive, and the results are known.

This is a failure to consistently apply appeasement policy to a situation which did have a functional multipolar balance: the first Great Folly. After WWII, a new balance of powers came into being (also known as the Cold War), but it was also in the end ineffective at reducing volatile situations because it had appeasement (by way of the UN and many an international treaty such as START) while lacking multipolarity, instead being entirely based on MAD between two powers: the second Great Folly.

But what is more important is how we can learn from mistakes made then to prevent imminent geopolitical dangers now.
In the current world structure, there is one major power, the USA. There are several second-class powers in (temporary) decline, such as France, the UK, Germany and Russia. This, of course, creates a power vacuum where the influence of these declining nations has receded, but the USA has no sufficient power projection.

Into this gap jump, as happened in the 1930s and in 1945, new powers, as in this case China. The communist Chinese undisputably seek power equality with the United States, posessing a large nation with a huge population and a fast-growing economy.
Yet another force also needs to be taken into account.

The motley group of dissatisfied religious fanaticists, rebels and revolutionaries commonly regarded as "the terrorists" are not by any means a new problem for established powers: already during the 19th Century much of the colonial powers' expenditure went into crushing rebel uprisings and guerrilla tactics, and during the interbellum seldom a year went by without the British or French fighting a religious or nationalist assault. But what makes the terrorists as a whole a power of their own at this moment is the fact that the past decades have seen these various organizations increasingly using modern technology against the civilization that produced them, with sometimes devastating effects. Where years ago islamist uprisings such as that of the Mad Mullah were relatively easy to destroy because of their low level of military technology (a bomber raid sufficed to solve the problem in this case), this no longer applies to the current kind of insurgents.



These are the problems the Western powers face today. Learning from the lessons of recent and less recent history, the solution we should seek lies in a multipolar balance of powers (to affect China) and a powerful appeasement policy (to affect the terrorists).

The first can be achieved by countering the rising power of the dictatorial Chinese with a multipolar free bloc. When the major European nations become first class powers of their own again, the United States will no longer be forced to project power everywhere, reducing risks of 'imperial overstretch' and reducing isolationist pressure from the population itself. The European nations, or maybe even Russia when it has become sufficiently free, can each take their share of geopolitical power and can each project it on their own accord, thereby allowing militant unfree states such as China to be hemmed in, limiting their capacity for aggressive expansionism. This is the policy that was attempted in the '30s to hem Germany in, but which failed to materialize because the Germans acted decisively and struck a deal with the Soviet Union before the Allies could agree on it.
To reach this goal, the United States must concede to the European nations strategic assets that might hinder the forming of a strong alliance of this kind, which is at this moment mainly oil; the European nations meanwhile have to rearm on a serious scale to achieve the capacity for projecting power they will need. The former is essential as it prevents China from repeating history by seducing one of the Western nations to break the alliance, as might happen with France if that nation keeps being consistently denied strategic power by the United States.

The second goal can be achieved by appeasement. Terrorists cannot, once on a path to destroy civilization, ever be reintegrated into that civilization again. They effectively become a liability to all including themselves, and this means no policy of any kind will solve this problem. However, the forming of new terrorists can be effectively prevented, by undermining popular support for terrorism which allows them to function.
To reach this goal, Western nations must ensure that the populations of the Third World nations are as free as the West can guarantee, which requires a strong and especially consistent interventionist policy against the various dictators and warlords of the world. At the same time the major powers must reach out to these populations and earn their goodwill and trust by conceding to them all demands as can be reasonably met, with the clear indication that such can only be considered when the populations involved cease any and all cooperation with terrorist or anti-Western groups in the region. Such a dual policy, of using the stick against their tyrants and the carrot for themselves, will not fail to appease the great amount of people in the Third World who don't like terrorists very much but like the great powers even less. In this way the forming and operation of terrorists will be minimized.

The lesson we must learn from history is that the only way to actually maintain relative peace and prosperity for longer periods in time is to achieve both a multipolar balance of powers and a strong appeasement policy combined with effective power projection, on the side of the free nations. This and this alone can not only reduce the threat of unfree powers, but also prevent the forming of new ones. Then maybe once we can finally say that our civilization has banished war forever.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 12:00

 

The Necessity of European Rearmament

Ever since the Second World War's European theatre ended with the double capitulation of the Germans in 1945, the various continental western nations have been attempting to cooperate in a spirit of mutual security and peace. The Cold War has moderated this antimilitarism somewhat due to the Western European policy of accepting American protection against the Soviet Union both on a military and a political level, but nonetheless this disarmament movement continued within the continent. The European Union, born out of the European Economic Community and before that the Coal and Steel Union, has been on the forefront of this process, desiring to forever end all wars within the continent by a policy of cooperative federalism between member nations and a policy of concentration on diplomatic efforts and an exclusively multilateral interventionism.

The idea behind this is that a policy of simultaneously removing cultural and economic barriers between cooperation and mutual disarmament within Europe can effectively completely defuse the European geopolitical situation, making chances of internal European wars, ever the bloodiest and most disastrous on earth, very slim indeed. On the whole, this seems an excellent policy for Europe seen in the light of balance of powers, of old the guarantee against world wars.

However, when looking at the current geopolitical situation in the world as a whole, this intra-European policy seems definitely short-sighted, and it is time to re-evaluate it.

The crucial downside to this policy is that it is in fact too effective at achieving its goal, namely defusing Europe. The consequence of this is that the military power projection capability of the European Union nations together has, relative to the other powers and power blocs in the world, been extremely reduced since 1945. Where the United Kingdom and France in 1939 had spheres of influence that stretched across every single part of the globe and even the secondary European powers like Italy and the Netherlands could boast impressive extracontinental assets, today all the armies of Europe combined would have significant trouble standing up to the armed forces of Israel, let alone the military might of countries like Russia, China or the United States. The antimilitaristic policies of Europe have indeed ensured that no intracontinental war between first world nations has occurred since 1945, but it has also caused the various European nations to neglect or even downright abandon their military aspirations and powers, to the extent that nearly no EU nation spends a percentage of GDP on the military that even meets the NATO recommended minimum.

What is the problem with all this, one might ask. After all, is it necessary for Europe to have any power projection capabilities in the current world, with the US mainly calling the shots, and China and Russia being the main opponent powers? The answer is a resounding yes, precisely because of this situation.

The consequences of our unilateral disarmament policies are that the United States cannot ever depend on Europe at a serious level for any kind of military operation or intervention, because Europe simply does not have the military power to take over even one single theatre of operations from American forces without an overall loss in military power in that theatre occurring. This in turn causes the Americans, as always wary of Europe but willing to cooperate when on an equal footing, to not take Europe seriously any more when it comes to strategic geopolitical operations, as it increasingly does not matter for them any more whether or not Europe supports them. This means a huge loss of European influence with the US and in the world as a whole, which in turn can have drastic consequences as it means that American power in the world will go unchecked and unmoderated.

Another important consequence is that the policy in the long run makes it impossible to reach its own main political target. Balance of powers within Europe may be possible by the cooperation/disarmament duality, but the more Europe disarms, the further distant the goal of balance of powers within the world as a whole becomes. The only major democratic power being the US, strong but fickle, and all the other major powers and secondary powers outside of Europe being either dictatorships or pseudo-democracies, the West is in the risky situation that the whole defense of liberal democracy rests upon one nation that has a history of isolationism and unilateral distancing from world events.

Increasing European military power and expanding, rather than intentionally limiting, European capabilities to exert that power abroad would enable the EU nations to assume the important position of arbitrator: the power between the powers, free but not unilateralist, that can moderate American rashness and arrogance on the one side and check antidemocratic powers in the second and third world on the other side. Such a position is ideal for a post-WWII Europe, and it would greatly benefit the world's geopolitical situation as far as balance of powers and the preventing of world war is concerned. There is no need to give up either internal cooperation or the desire for diplomatic conflict resolution for the fulfilling of this role. All Europe needs to do is to start rearming.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 17:04