Appeasing Serbia

Appeasement Revisited

To appease the extremists might be easy but may not work.

The temptation to appease suffering populations with populist, selfish measures may grow as the crisis deepens.

But appeasement of China for commercial gain apparently is not considered morally repellent.

This was no mere gesture.

Realism, in the sense of balancing power by appeasing dictators, has its limits.

Appeasing Ozawa, however, is contrary to public sentiment and detrimental to the DPJ s hopes of regaining popular support.

In a world divided between two uncompromising superpowers, India s temporizing seemed like appeasement at best, and aid and comfort for the enemy at worst.

So were the profligate borrow and spend policies and the use of public sector hiring to co opt political factions, both of which resulted in Lebanon s massive debt problem.

For Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, that imperative meant placating the angry mob that recently attacked the US embassy rather than merely condemning the violence.

Bush was portrayed as facing down a new Hitler with Churchillian resolve, and advocates of containment were accused of appeasement.

The worst mistake would be to follow the opposite policy an inevitably futile effort to appease the extremists or seek to moderate them.

Now Google itself has become a victim of China s growing cyber prowess, in the same way that appeasement of Hitler boomeranged onto France and Britain.

Bargaining between member states leads to lowest common denominator budgets that appease vested interests but fail to support EU member states shared ambitions.

And European weakness, not to mention the treason of its liberal scribes, paving the way to an Islamist conquest of Europe ( Eurabia ) is seen as a ghastly echo of the appeasement of the Nazi threat.

Appeasement of Germany, in cooperation with Britain, was the policy after 1936, as France sought peace even in the face of Hitler's violations of the Versailles treaty and his escalating demands.

Moreover, the West s inclination to appease China will gradually cause ordinary Chinese to lose confidence that economic modernization will ever set them free.

But history suggests that new, fragile democracies are more likely to attempt to placate radicals than to eliminate them, and that terrorists can exploit democratic governments respect for civil rights and the rule of law.

But indifference becomes appeasement when it encourages Putin to pursue his lawless ways in the international arena, as in his current campaign to strangle Georgia s economy.

As The Economist commented about Rumsfeld s speech, until recently he plainly regarded such a focus on soft power as, well, soft part of Old Europe s appeasement of terrorism.

If we were less haunted by memories of appeasing the Nazi regime, and of the ensuing genocide, people might not be as concerned about human rights as they are.

The Secretary General went further, with the apparent acquiescence of the Security Council, to placate Ethiopia by appointing a Special Envoy to explore the options of an alternative mechanism as Ethiopia had requested.

Lucrative business opportunities can be allocated to soothe the successor s political adversaries, while renegades can be targeted to discourage others for example, by being stripped of property or dismissed from positions of influence.

But it is too early to tell whether its security crackdown in Sinai is a one time operation, intended to placate angry citizens, or the beginning of a serious effort to address the interconnected problems in Sinai and Gaza.

Syria has discharged its responsibilities in a spirit of sincerity, certain as it was that a professional and objective investigation would lead to Syria's being cleared. We have not cooperated with the Commission just to please certain parties, but because we wanted to cooperate.

He needed to placate Tories and his domestic critics while avoiding the economic and political havoc that would be caused by announcing an imminent referendum that might lead to the United Kingdom s withdrawal from the EU.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón has, in this respect, remained faithful to the script written in previous theaters in the drug war, whether in Bolivia, Colombia, or Peru, where governments have used military force and extradition to placate the US and punish those with the least voice and influence.

And, while equal treatment under the law obviously is one of democracy s more commendable features, the zeal of elected officials and mass media that pander to popular opinion in their treatment of talented artists is the ugly face of democracy.

If this assessment is accurate, the obvious next question is how much further Abe and Xi can move toward détente, thereby appeasing their business sectors, without losing the backing of nationalists, who tend to view the bilateral relationship as a zero sum game.

Dealing with elite interests requires ingenuity. Lucrative business opportunities can be allocated to soothe the successor s political adversaries, while renegades can be targeted to discourage others for example, by being stripped of property or dismissed from positions of influence.

But while Royal has been careful to placate her socialist base, she has also talked about the need for market reforms in the French economy, and taken some foreign policy positions on Iran and Turkey that are closer to the American view than are Sarkozy s.

Faced with difficult questions in foreign, fiscal, and social policy, he would be wise to turn toward the center rather than conciliate his conservative base, but it remains unclear whether the politics of conviction or of pragmatism will prevail.

The worst mistake would be to follow the opposite policy an inevitably futile effort to appease the extremists or seek to moderate them. Such a campaign actually disheartens the relative moderates who, feeling sold out, will try to cut their own deal with Tehran.