Peter Scoblic: Republican Insanity on Foreign Policy, 1948-Present

Negotiating isn't appeasement - Los Angeles Times: In a speech to the Israeli parliament Thursday, President Bush took a swipe at Barack Obama for his willingness to negotiate with evil regimes.... But if there is anything that has been discredited by history, it is the argument that every enemy is Hitler, that negotiations constitute appeasement, and that talking will automatically lead to a slaughter of Holocaust-like proportions. It is an argument that conservatives made throughout the Cold War... overblown at the time... positively ludicrous with the clarity of hindsight.

The modern conservative movement was founded in no small part on the idea that presidents Truman and Eisenhower were "appeasing" the Soviets.... Conservative foreign policy guru James Burnham wrote entire books claiming that containment -- which, after the Cold War, would be credited with defeating the Soviet Union -- constituted "appeasement."... [C]onservatives agitated for the rollback... opposed all negotiations with the Soviets. When Eisenhower welcomed Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to the United States in 1959, William F. Buckley... complained that the act of "diplomatic sentimentality" signaled the "death rattle of the West."... When President Kennedy successfully negotiated a peaceful conclusion to the [Cuban missile] crisis, conservative icon Barry Goldwater protested that he had appeased the Soviets by promising not to invade Cuba if they backed down.... Goldwater believed that Kennedy's diplomacy gave "the communists one of their greatest victories in their race for world power that they have enjoyed to date." To Goldwater, it was far preferable to risk nuclear war with the Soviets than to give up our right to roll back Fidel Castro....

Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the elected face of the burgeoning neoconservative movement, charged President Carter with "appeasement in its purest form" for negotiating SALT II, which set equal limits on the number of U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles and bombers. Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 was seen as the culmination of the conservative movement, dubbed SALT II "appeasement" as well, but the trope would come back to bite him....

When he and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, which for the first time eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, Buckley's National Review dubbed it "suicide." The Conservative Caucus... paired photos of Reagan and Gorbachev with photos of Neville Chamberlain and Hitler....

The Bush administration has been little different, refusing for years to talk to North Korea or Iran about their nuclear programs because it wanted to defeat evil, not talk to it....

Alas, John McCain accused President Clinton of "appeasement" for engaging North Korea, instead calling for "rogue state rollback," and now he dismisses the idea of negotiations with Iran. Given conservatism's historical record, Obama's inclination to negotiate seems only sensible. When will conservatives learn that it is 2008, not 1938?