{"id":8607,"date":"2015-08-18T08:42:15","date_gmt":"2015-08-18T15:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8607"},"modified":"2015-08-18T08:42:15","modified_gmt":"2015-08-18T15:42:15","slug":"obama-earning-contempt-at-home-and-abroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-earning-contempt-at-home-and-abroad\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama: Earning Contempt, at Home and Abroad"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Thucydides\u2019s Athens to 21st-century America, appeasement is not a winner.<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n
by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online<\/a><\/div>\n
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President Obama departs Air Force One. (Mandel Ngan\/AFP\/Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

T<\/span>he common bond among the various elements of the failed Obama foreign policy \u2014 from reset with Putin to concessions to the Iranians \u2014 is a misreading of human nature. The so-called Enlightened mind claims that the more rationally and deferentially one treats someone pathological, the more likely it is that he will respond and reform \u2014 or at least behave. The medieval mind, within us all, claims the opposite is more likely to be true.<\/p>\n

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Read Gerhard Weinberg\u2019s A World at Arms<\/a><\/em> or Richard Overy\u2019s 1939<\/a><\/em>, for an account of the negotiations preceding World War II, and you will find that an underappreciated theme emerges: the autocratic accentuation of the human tendency to interpret concession and empathy not <\/em>as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but rather as weakness to be exploited or as a confession of culpability worthy of contempt.<\/p>\n

The more Britain\u2019s Chamberlain and France\u2019s Daladier in 1938 genuinely sought to reassure Hitler of their benign intentions, the more the Nazi hierarchy saw them as little more than \u201cworms\u201d \u2014 squirming to appease the stronger spirit. Both were seen as unsure of who they were and what they stood for, ready to forfeit the memory of the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of their own on the false altar of a supposedly mean and unfair Versailles Treaty.<\/p>\n

Hitler perversely admired Stalin after the latter liquidated a million German prisoners, and hated FDR, whose armies treated German POWs with relative humanity. In matters big and small, from Sophocles\u2019 Antigone<\/em> to Shakespeare\u2019s King Lear<\/em>, we see the noble and dutiful treated worse by their beneficiaries than the duplicitous and traitorous. Awareness of this pernicious trait is not cynical encouragement to adopt such pathologies and accept our dog-eat-dog world. Rather, in the postmodern, high-tech 21st century, we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we have evolved to a higher level than what Thucydides saw at Melos or Corcyra \u2014 a conceit that is dangerous for the powerful and often fatal for the weaker.<\/p>\n

One thing Donald Trump got right was the pathetic spectacle of socialist Bernie Sanders being mystified about why Black Lives Matter activists would pick on him<\/em> of all people. Why would they not first hijack a speech by Trump or Walker to shout down the conservative audience? If two white pro-life evangelicals had grabbed Sanders\u2019s microphone, would he have so obsequiously ceded it? Would the activists have been more respectful of the microphone of the officious Sanders or the imperious Trump?<\/p>\n

The most important characteristic of a sound diplomat and negotiator is the acknowledgment of this sad human characteristic, which to some degree is innate in us all. It was often said during the Cold War that the Soviet hegemonists would rather negotiate with right-wingers than liberals, apparently on the premise that those they could not bully they respected, and those they could bully they felt only contempt for. It reminds me of a minor Chinese official who once told me that she thought Obama must be a master of intrigue; otherwise, she could not believe a leader would so frequently neglect his own country\u2019s strategic interests.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Consider immigration. After we had allowed well over 12 million illegal aliens into the country, permitted hundreds of sanctuary cities to be established, and de facto suspended federal immigration laws and stopped deportations, did either the Mexican government or the illegal aliens and their La Raza supporters interpret this as magnanimity to be reciprocated? Did we hear paeans to American willingness to take in 10 percent of the Mexican population and show it more deference and respect than did its mother country? Is that the message on Univision, in Chicano Studies departments, and at immigration rallies \u2014 the singular kindness of the United States in absorbing a tenth of the population of its neighbor by waiving all considerations of legality?<\/p>\n

Or did the shrill complaints of racism, nativism, and xenophobia only accelerate as more impoverished refugees made their way into postmodern California and found themselves exempt from enforcement of the laws \u2014 and, by extension, without much respect for a country that itself had no respect for its own legal system? If there were a walled border, an E-Verify system, expeditious deportation for those who had either committed crimes or quickly enrolled in government entitlement programs, would Mexico\u2019s rulers think worse or perhaps more highly of us, in the manner in which they assume that Central Americans respect Mexico for the confidence with which it patrols its southern border? Would illegal aliens here be more or less careful to follow the law, if a serious misdemeanor or a felony would result in instant \u2014 and permanent \u2014 deportation? Would there be more or fewer Mexican flags at immigration rallies, and would soccer fans be more or less likely to boo the American team and cheer the Mexican team, if the border were closed and those who broke the laws of the host country were sent home? In a system of closed borders, immediate and permanent deportation for criminal activity, and no sanctuary cities, would the illegal immigrant have more or less respect for his hosts?<\/p>\n

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