more appeasement

Yglesias links a study from the Army War College - Jeffrey Record's "Appeasement Reconsidered." Very cool report on how the events of 1938 have been utilized in postwar America to justify aggressive reactions to possible foreign policy challenges.

From the conclusion:

The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy.

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades contain examples of the danger of overestimating a security threat.

Assign this as an optional reading during Hitler week, to remind how history is used in public discourse.