
To adapt Churchill: Never in the field of global diplomacy has so much been given away by so many for so little.
Britain
and France's capitulation to Nazi Germany at Munich has long been a
byword for ignominy, moral and diplomatic. Yet neither Neville Chamberlain nor Édouard Daladier had the public support or military wherewithal to stand up to Hitler in September 1938. Britain had just 384,000 men in its regular
army; the first Spitfire aircraft only entered RAF service that summer.
"Peace for our time" it was not, but at least appeasement bought the
West a year to rearm.
The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 was a betrayal of an embattled U.S. ally
and the abandonment of an effort for which 58,000 American troops gave
their lives. Yet it did end America's participation in a peripheral war,
which neither Congress nor the public could indefinitely support.
"Peace with honor" it was not, as the victims of Cambodia's Killing
Fields or Vietnam's re-education camps can attest. But, for American
purposes at least, it was peace.
By
contrast, the interim nuclear agreement signed in Geneva on Sunday by
Iran and the six big powers has many of the flaws of Munich and Paris.
But it has none of their redeeming or exculpating aspects.
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