[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

Samuel Johnson once said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates  his mind wonderfully.” Last week Texas House Rep. Wesley Hunt recounted a story from Donald Trump’s negotiations with a Taliban chief that riffed off this quote. While discussing the conditions for an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump said, “If you harm a hair on a single American, I’m gonna kill you.” Then he handed him a satellite photograph of the chief’s house, and walked out of the room. Not a single American died in Afghanistan during the following 18 months.

The lesson is, deterrence depends on credibility. The enemy whose behavior you want to change has to believe that lethal consequences will follow a warning if ignored. We have lost that credibility, and Joe Biden’s disastrous foreign policy blunders, and our weakened power of deterrence are the wages of that lost prestige.

The most dangerous foreign policy blunder is appeasement, concessions that signal weakness. Trump projected strength to the Taliban chief by talking in a way that he could understand. Joe Biden, on the other hand, approached the withdrawal from Afghanistan in a way that projected weakness, itself the consequence of his return to the Iran nuclear that deal Trump had left, and the subsequent concessions to the mullahs, especially the lifting of sanctions and the transfers of billions of dollars.

Such unrequited concessions have also been deemed weakness by our other enemies and rivals. After all, what else would you call concessions to a sworn enemy of some 40 years, an enemy who had, with impunity, formally declared war on the U.S.––dubbed a theological enemy by the epithet the “Great Satan” ––and kidnapped its diplomats, murdered its troops, attacked and slaughtered its regional allies, and was actively pursuing nuclear weapons with the expressed purpose of reprising the Holocaust by destroying Israel.

Hence, Biden’s disastrous skedaddle from Afghanistan was a huge failure not just of policy but of execution––U.S. citizens and Afghan allies left behind, the latter now targets of the vengeful Taliban; as well as billions in sophisticated weapons, a state-of-the-art military base, and worst of all, 13 dead American soldiers. Can anyone doubt that Xi, Khamenei, Vlad, Kim, and our other global enemies saw this fiasco as a sign of weakness––just as Osama bin Laden did in his sermons to recruits that catalogued U.S. withdrawals from Saigon and Mogadishu as the signs of a “weak horse”?

What makes Biden’s foreign policy folly even more egregious is that history has shown that appeasement begets more appeasement. The epitome of appeasement, the capitulation to the Third Reich by the more powerful France and England at Munich in 1938, was just the culminating act in the 20-year tragic farce that produced the most destructive war in history.

For example, in 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, a gross violation of the League of Nations and other multinational treaties––all of which Italy had signed–– that proscribed seizing and occupying other sovereign nations. Yet the League’s members did nothing other than bluster, and sanction Italy’s economy––except for oil, the most important resource for achieving Italy’s aim to take over and rule Ethiopia.

So, it’s not surprising that a year later, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, not just a violation of the Versailles Treaty, but a blow to France’s national security, as the Rhineland had been the jumping off point for two earlier invasions by German. The Allies’ appeasement of this act is made more reprehensible by the puny size of Hitler’s force: 34,000 soldiers and policemen facing 100 French divisions on or near its eastern border. Again, neither France nor England did anything other than complain.

This act of appeasement, enabled by the earlier appeasement of Mussolini, similarly encouraged yet another, the Anschluss, or annexation, of Austria in 1938. Don’t take my word for it; Hitler explicitly mentioned the unchallenged remilitarization of the Rhineland while browbeating Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, who alluded to his support by France and England. Hitler scoffed, “England will not lift a finger,” and said of France, “When we marched into the Rhineland with a handful of battalions––at that moment I risked a great deal. If France had marched, then we should have been forced to withdraw . . . but for France it is now too late.”

It was indeed, for less than two years later, Germany invaded and after a brief war, occupied France.

Other factors facilitate an unwillingness to use force when checking aggression from an enemy. Foreign policy idealism, the belief that diplomatic engagement and multinational institutions could resolve conflict without force, creates the moral hazard that leaders politically averse to war will promote policies like diplomacy in order to avoid the risks and unforeseen consequences of action.

Barack Obama campaigned on such idealism, and characterized the war against Iraq, which neutralized a brutal autocrat with programs to create weapons of mass destruction, as a failure of force because no stockpiles were uncovered by inspectors. For Obama and the Democrats, this was a “failure of diplomacy,” despite Iraq’s unpunished violation of 17 UN resolutions. When Obama announced his bid for the presidency in 2007, he had made clear in an article in Foreign Affairs his globalist perspective that conflict could, and should be resolved by multilateral diplomatic engagement.

In his article he argued that what he called Iraq’s “civil war” ––a duplicitous or naïve way to characterize a brutal autocrat’s efforts to obtain WMDs in order to dominate the region––required “a comprehensive regional and international diplomatic initiative to help broker an end to the U.S.’s war in Iraq.” In other words, more talk that led nowhere. Such dubious faith in diplomacy reminds me of what Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty in Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet, observed after Munich–– that Hitler required not “the language of sweet reasonableness,” but “the language of the mailed fist.”

But when it came to Iran, Obama, like the military pygmies in the EU, opted for diplomacy, pacts, and bribes, all ineffective for stopping Iran’s push to acquire nuclear weapons, let alone checking the mullahs’ aggression against its neighbors and our forces in the region. Donald Trump later abandoned that feckless agreement, whose terms the mullahs serially violated, and put maximum pressure on Iran’s economy, as well as killing Revolutionary Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani. But Joe Biden rejoined the deal and undid Trump’s progress at weakening Iran and restoring our deterrent power.

Finally, our foreign policy idealism carries a moral hazard: that weak or self-interested presidents or foreign policy officials will avoid the risks of action that threaten their political careers, and camouflage appeasement with “diplomatic engagement” and negotiated agreements that the enemy, as Iran has done, can violate or game, buying time until they can reach their objective––just as Iran has done, putting itself mere months from producing several nuclear weapons. Imagine the world today if the mullahs can hand off tactical nukes to one of its proxies, who have all sworn to subject Israel to another Holocaust, and to damage US interests by any means.

There are many reasons for a change in the White House, from a broken border letting in hordes of unvetted strangers, to an economy crippled by high taxes, hyper regulation, and policies that, as Rudyard Kipling put it, are “robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul.”

But in a world with an axis of autocrats eager to supplant us, more important is restoring to our foreign policy the realism that Donald Trump showed when he concentrated some Taliban minds.