The United States is now paying for serial acts of appeasement for over a decade. We are witnessing the bitter fruits of irresolution, lack of national discipline, and self-doubt — and our enemies and potential adversaries know it.
The well-known archetypal appeaser was Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Great Britain who, in September of 1938, agreed that Adolf Hitler could take the Sudetenland, which was much of the former Czechoslovakia with a majority of German speakers. This followed Germany’s occupation in 1936 of the Rhineland, originally inhabited by Germanic Franks, and the annexation of Austria in early 1938. What followed, of course, was a cataclysm on a grand scale. While geographies and circumstances are different, the U.S. has committed various acts of appeasement toward Syria and Russia; Iran and its proxies, the militias in Iraq and Syria and the Houthis on the Arabian Peninsula; the Taliban of Afghanistan; and on our southern border with Mexico.
In August of 2013, President Barack Obama famously changed his publicly stated position and declined to order airstrikes against Syria, following the use of sarin nerve gas by Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, against his own people. A year earlier, Obama had defined the use of chemical weapons as a “red line.”
In early 2014, the Russian Federation invaded Crimea, a part of Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin used the pretext of protecting Russian speakers in Ukraine from genocide, also claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people — a single whole.” The response of the Obama administration was bland sanctions.
The appeasement of Iran continues since the Iran nuclear deal of 2015, when Obama gave us the false dichotomy of his deal or war with Iran; holding out for a better deal was not deemed an option. Part of the deal was to give Iran $1.7 billion, of which $400 million was covertly delivered by plane in various currencies of cash. The strategic flaw of Obama’s deal was that it contained no linkage to Iran’s adventurism elsewhere in the Middle East — and such behavior has only intensified since then, particularly through ideological and operational support of its proxies. Looking like supplicants, the Biden administration renewed talks with Iran in Vienna in 2022, and they went nowhere. Further, the Biden administration is not supporting the sanctions against Iran’s oil industry imposed by the Trump administration, which cut Iran’s oil revenue by an estimated $50 billion per year, to a nominal level.
Through early March, Iranian supported militias in Syria, and Iraq attacked U.S. forces in those countries 170 times since the Oct. 7 attack of Israel by Hamas; there was also an attack in Jordan. The U.S. policy was restraint until early February with a kinetic response by CENTCOM. However, missile and drone attacks by Houthis against commercial vessels and warships continue in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
The U.S.–Mexico border is yet another case in point. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates that over 7.2 million million illegals entered the country during the Biden administration, including 169 on the FBI terrorist watch list — with another 1.7 million known “gotaways” in fiscal year 2023, according to the House Homeland Security Committee. Thus far, the U.S. has not gone after the organizers or the cartels that are believed to exert much control at the borders — over which control has been abdicated by the U.S.
In recent years, the catastrophic American withdrawal from Afghanistan set the stage for state and non-state actors to challenge U.S. interests, believing the U.S. lacking in resolve — and they were right. An industrial, technological, and military colossus has been unable to defend its interests and its allies’ and to protect itself at home and abroad — indeed a giant, crack Doberman, but with no teeth.
With over a decade of displays of American weakness and hesitancy, the U.S. is facing an array of intensifying threats. Certainly, the Syrian “red line” seems to have started it, although some might argue that it was the lack of U.S. response to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, which met with almost universal condemnation but limited penalties for Russia.
As the leading member of NATO, the United States and partner countries deterred aggression by the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. Yet we were unable to deter Russia in Ukraine, as well as far weaker adversaries in the Middle East. It will probably take a new national security team to present more resolve. While avoiding so-called forever wars, the bad actors need to know that the U.S. is just over the horizon.
No doubt the observant Chinese Politburo is watching.
Frank Schell is a business strategy consultant and former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago. He was a lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals.