Fruits of Appeasement

May 30, 1960

Grave as it is, the present international crisis has compensations. It can teach valuable lessons, if we still have time and wit to learn them.

It was unfortunate that a U-2 was downed 1,200 miles inside Russia. But as a result we now know that these planes have been flying over or deep into Russia for four years, that Russia has not previously had the equipment to detect them and bring them down, and that the piloted bomber is not obsolete. As Hanson Baldwin has put it: “It is safe to conclude that the Soviet air defenses today could not possibly fend off a major assault by SAC.” In short, our striking power is greater and Russian defensive power weaker than had been supposed.

This does not mean that Russia may not still have a substantial lead in long-range missiles. It is still true that our government, and the President, have made practically every diplomatic mistake in the book. It was a mistake to deny that the U-2 was on an espionage mission. It was an even bigger mistake to admit it, particularly after the denial. It was right to stress the need for such reconnaissance, but a mistake to do so without, at the same time, reciting Khrushchev’s open threats to bury us, and the whole appalling record of Soviet espionage. It was a mistake to imply that we would continue espionage flights. It was then a greater mistake to promise to stop them. This record of blundering, denial, confession, reversal, and retreat has done incalculable harm to our moral prestige.

THE ROOT ERROR

But beneath all the errors of the last few weeks has been the root error of our whole policy vis-à-vis Russia over the last fifteen years. From the very beginning, when we agreed to accept a militarily untenable position in Berlin, we have followed toward the Russian despots the same policy of appeasement, concession, acquiescence in insults and humiliation that Britain followed so disastrously toward Hitler.

Pressure to follow this policy has come continuously from the political left. Though Khrushchev, like Stalin, has successively broken every promise and treaty the moment it suited his ends to do so, though he feigned troop withdrawal from Hungary merely to give himself time to bring in more tanks to machine-gun patriots in the streets, we have been urged to negotiate with this monster as if he were a man of good faith, as if his word or his signature were worth something. The slogan of our appeasers has been “relaxation of tensions,” which, as Albert Wohlstetter has pointed out, is hard to distinguish from relaxing one’s guard.

END OF A DREAM

That we are all tense again is, in view of the actual threat we face, not a loss but a gain. We have been saved from a worthless agreement at the summit conference which might have caused us to live in a fool’s paradise while Russia built up for a devastating surprise attack. We should never have agreed to a summit conference. However we may try to disguise the matter, we agreed to that conference under the threat of Khrushchev to kick us out of Berlin. We should simply have told him we were there in accordance with our occupation rights and there was nothing to discuss. We could have told him that if he had any peaceful proposals to make our Ambassador in Moscow had plenipotentiary powers to discuss and convey them. We could have told him that if he wanted to relax tensions he could do so by a few simple deeds or restraints from deeds.

Let us hope that we are through with our summit-conference dreams. Our appeasement has only encouraged Khrushchev to recklessness. Let us at last launch a real propaganda counteroffensive of our own. Let us expose the nonsensical claims of Communist “economic growth” instead of swallowing them whole. Let us have the courage to defend capitalism, to explain the superiority of economic freedom. Instead of trying to call off the cold war, which we can’t, let us recognize at last that it is being relentlessly fought against us, by an enemy determined on world conquest; and that our only hope of peace and security is to accept the ideological challenge and to seek not a truce but a victory.