The Mythology of Munich

That doesn't mean Obama won't employ clichés that serve his purposes, like the quagmire of Vietnam. As went Vietnam, so will go Iraq if McCain is elected president, or so Obama will argue. McCain will exploit the Munich-appeasement cliché; through his loyalists and by implication, if not in so many words, he will likely portray Barack Obama as a softy and vaguely "un-American." Obama and his surrogates, in turn, are likely to cast McCain as a once brave but now slightly unhinged former POW who has stubbornly determined to stay in Iraq in a war without end. Vote for Obama, the Republicans say, and you may get another Munich; vote for McCain, the Democrats say, and you may get another Vietnam.

The Munich and Vietnam analogies are, of course, closely linked. Arguably, the fear of appeasement, of not standing up to the communists, was the single most important factor in dragging America into Vietnam. In recent years, American politics has been trapped by both clichés. It is worth examining just how one dangerous trope led to another—and how the overreaction to both has repeatedly led America astray abroad.

For starters, it is important to understand why the Munich analogy is almost necessarily flawed. In the 1990s, George H.W. Bush compared Iraq's Saddam Hussein to Hitler, and Bill Clinton's secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, argued that allowing Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to commit genocide in the Balkans was to invite "another Munich." But the only real Hitler was Hitler. Saddam and Milosevic were murderers, but at most local menaces. Hitler, on the other hand, meant to extend the Third Reich over almost all of Europe, from the Urals to the Pyrenees, and he very nearly succeeded. In the city of Berlin, today rebuilt from the ravages of war, there is a scale model that reveals the vast scope of the Führer's ambitions. Hitler planned essentially to replace the core of Berlin with a city called Germania, built from marble and granite to last a thousand years. The Hall of the People, built for indoor rallies of 180,000, makes the next-door Bundestag look like a phone booth.

The Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin was just as evil, in his own way, as Hitler, and just as megalomaniacal. He was willing to murder millions and he preached the inevitability of the global triumph of communism. But he was probably not preparing to invade Western Europe; indeed, in the late 1940s the Soviets were tearing up train tracks so that the West could not invade Russia. In 1950, Harry Truman—FDR's successor and the first to invoke the Munich analogy—was right to see the invasion of South Korea by North Korea as a Stalin-backed ploy that needed to be resisted if "containing" Soviet expansionism was to have any meaning. But rhetorical excesses quickly permeated cold-war politics. "Who lost China?" demanded the Red-hunters. (Republican answer: the Democrats. True answer: the Nationalist Chinese.) Truman's successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was cagy and realistic enough about land wars in Asia to avoid getting sucked in after French Indochina fell to the communists in 1954. But even Ike somewhat ludicrously said he was willing to go to the brink to stop Red China from bombarding tiny Quemoy and Matsu, two islands off the Chinese coast in the Strait of Formosa (Taiwan). "Should the Reds eventually control Formosa, that would be a real Munich," Eisenhower explained.

By the late 1950s, the meaning of Munich was deeply embedded in the psyches of not just politicians but academics and the old East Coast foreign-policy establishment. In "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam captured Prof. McGeorge Bundy teaching "Government 180: The U.S. in World Affairs" at Harvard: "His Munich lecture was legendary … and when word got out that it was on the day's schedule, he played to standing room only. It was done with great verve, Bundy imitating the various participants, his voice cracking with emotion as little Czechoslovakia fell, the German tanks rolling in just as the bells from Memorial Hall sounded. The lesson of course was interventionism, and the wise use of force."

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy made Bundy his national-security adviser. The Kennedys' favorite word—and highest praise—was "tough." Kennedy wanted to show how tough he was by standing up to the Soviets in divided Berlin and by trying to overthrow the Kremlin's client, Fidel Castro, in Cuba. Fortunately, his early impetuous blunder at the Bay of Pigs, the failed CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961, was followed by a shrewd balancing of force and diplomacy during the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was fortunate enough, or wise enough, to have a speechwriter (and World War II conscientious objector), Ted Sorensen, who would write into JFK's Inaugural Address, "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." (The words are much quoted by Obama.)