In the fall of 1938, a defiant British member of Parliament named Winston Churchill rose to deliver a speech denouncing the Munich Agreement recently negotiated by Europe’s leaders to appease Adolf Hitler by ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany, in a futile attempt to avert World War II.
Churchill was vilified by his opponents as a warmonger who would deny “peace in our time” and drag Europe into needless conflict. One year later, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began in Europe, just as Churchill had predicted. Shortly thereafter, a desperate England would turn to Churchill to help lead it against the Nazi onslaught. The rest, as they say, is history.
And history really does seem to repeat itself. In 1986, nearly a half-century after the Munich debacle, President Ronald Reagan traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland, to meet with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan was under enormous pressure from U.S. allies, and some critics at home, to abandon his adamant opposition to the Soviet Union and instead forge a historic nuclear weapons reduction agreement with Gorbachev. But Reagan held firm to his conviction that the USSR was an irredeemable blot against human freedom, and rejected a nuclear deal he believed would have left the world even more vulnerable to Soviet aggression. Reagan, like Churchill before him, was denounced as a danger to world peace by the appeasers of his time. Yet within three years, Reagan’s steadfastness would be vindicated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Fast-forward to our own time — nearly three decades after the Berlin wall came down — and the world has again been faced with threats from belligerent dictatorial regimes, this time in Iran and North Korea, that could drag the world into nuclear holocaust. And again, the natural instinct of the international community has been to appease and reward these rogue regimes with hollow nuclear agreements that only left the world in greater danger.
President Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Iranian nuclear deal has been vociferously opposed by timid European allies and modern-day appeasers in our own country. Their insistence on peace at all costs has blinded them to the belligerence and aggression of the Iranian regime, and the predictable danger that Iran will eventually continue to pursue its nuclear ambitions in concert with its spreading of conventional warfare and terror in the Middle East.