Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) They’ve found Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance 10,000 feet underwater. It is remarkably intact. Photos and a video at the link; really quite extraordinary.

Without any exaggeration this is the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen – by far,” said marine archaeologist Mensun Bound, who is on the discovery expedition and has now fulfilled a dream ambition in his near 50-year career.

“It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation,” he told BBC News…

The mission’s leader, the veteran polar geographer Dr John Shears, described the moment cameras landed on the ship’s name as “jaw-dropping”.

“The discovery of the wreck is an incredible achievement,” he added.

“We have successfully completed the world’s most difficult shipwreck search, battling constantly shifting sea-ice, blizzards, and temperatures dropping down to -18C. We have achieved what many people said was impossible.”

My goodness. The day it was found was the 100th anniversary of Shackleton’s funeral.

(2) A prizewinning NY Times reporter admits to Project Veritas that the coverage of January 6th exaggerated the danger, that the demonstration wasn’t organized, and that there were “a ton” of FBI informants present.

(3) What’s Tchaikovsky got to do with it? Nothing, in my opinion. This is just stupid virtue-signaling, and there’s a lot of it going around.

(4) The left and the Democrats have been saying for many years that they want gas prices to skyrocket. I tend to take people at their word when they say something like that. Now they are getting their opportunity.

And no, I don’t think the left somehow persuaded Putin to invade Ukraine so we could apply sanctions that would raise gas prices. But I think they see recent events as a golden opportunity to help raise them.

(5) Oh, and they’re framing high gas prices as being Putin’s fault, despite the fact that they had risen a lot prior to Putin’s Ukraine invasion. This administration, the left, and the MSM think that Americans have the memories of plankton.

An Iran Deal many times worse than Obama’s

The New Neo Posted on by

As Obama himself reportedly said: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to F*** things up.”

And yet Joe’s ability in that regard is so prodigious that it’s hard not to underestimate it. And Biden’s Iran deal is so astoundingly awful that it’s hard to believe it’s some sort of mistake, and easy to think the prospective damage must be intentional.

Please take a look at this link:

Anyone seeking to gauge the imminent outcome of the international talks over Iran’s nuclear program being held in Vienna should take a look at reports from late January that three top U.S. diplomats had quit–largely in protest over the direction set by U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, who serves as the U.S. government’s chief negotiator.

Having served for two years in former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Iran Action Group, I knew that this development was tantamount to a public cry for an intervention. Such resignations–not of conservative dissenters, but of career staff and President Joe Biden’s own political appointees–should have been cause for Biden or Secretary Antony Blinken to recall Malley and investigate. Their failure to do so is a sign either of a troubling lack of attention to the talks, or else the possibility that Malley–who served in the same capacity under President Barack Obama when the first Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was originally negotiated and signed–has been given a free hand to negotiate whatever he wants, as long as he gets Iran to sign.

Evidence for the latter view can be gleaned from the fact that Blinken has reneged on his pledge that his Iran negotiating team would have “a diversity of views.” Instead, he has let Malley continue to concede issue after issue in Vienna. Multiple career officials view these capitulations as so detrimental to U.S. national security that they contacted me requesting that I rapidly share details of these concessions with Congress and the public in an effort to stop them…

With Robert Malley in the lead, the United States has promised to lift sanctions on some of the regime’s worst terrorists and torturers, on leading officials who have developed Iran’s WMD infrastructure, and has agreed to lift sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) itself. In exchange, Iran will receive fewer limitations than those imposed under the JCPOA, and the restrictions on its nuclear program will expire six years sooner than under the terms of the old deal. And that’s just the beginning.

Why would Biden sell the United States down the river to its arch enemy? I wrote “Biden” there, but he’s not doing this alone and may be only tangentially involved. It’s the people he appointed who are doing the hands-on work. Malley, the man in charge, is the same person who negotiated Obama’s deal, which was bad enough. So why is this so much worse?

Are these people being paid off? Are they Iranian moles? This doesn’t really seem to be about climate or the Great Reset or any of those obvious leftist motives other than sheer spite and nihilism and destructiveness. And although the Democrats seem to have come to hate Israel, I don’t think that hurting Israel is quite motive enough, either. And although “doing the opposite of Trump” is clearly part of what’s going on, it just doesn’t seem to be sufficient as an explanation, particularly since Obama engineered his own awful deal before Trump was ever in the picture.

I confess to being somewhat stumped and deeply alarmed at the sheer awfulness of what’s being reported, and reduced to hoping that it’s an exaggeration and that the final result won’t be as bad. Or that there will be some sort of sticking point that will mean that no accord is reached.

But if this terrible deal is in fact what’s about to be announced, can the American people do anything to stop it from being implemented? And what is the GOP doing? Congress didn’t seem to be able to stop Obama’s Iran deal, despite some efforts to do so. And are the Democrats really eager to walk off this particular cliff? Are they all advocates of this destructive deal?

This action, if it’s as reported, should be more than enough to impeach and convict Biden (in fact, I see it as actually treasonous), but I don’t see any bipartisan move whatsoever for that, and it would have to be a bipartisan move to be successful. Even if that were to happen, what would we get? Kamala Harris? And wouldn’t the same negotiators just continue under her unless they were removed from office as well?

Events are in the saddle and ride mankind.. But this particular event was engineered by human beings and was never the least bit inevitable.

Coming to a decision

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently on this blog and elsewhere I’ve seen variants of the question “doesn’t it bother you that on the issue of Ukraine you are in some sort of agreement with Democrats?” – only it’s often asked in a way that isn’t so polite.

Here’s a polite version: “It should give a person pause that Soros, Adam Schiff, the Clintons, the Deep State and everyone else you don’t trust is so intensely against Russia.”

It gives me nearly zero pause and I’ll tell you why. That’s not the way I evaluate a situation. I do my own research, trying to use sources other than just political pundits or politicians. I actually haven’t read a great deal of what the left has to say on this question, although I’ve read some of it. I don’t think politicians on either side influence me much one way or the other to either agree or disagree with them, although I’m aware of what they generally are saying.

On most topics – and that certainly includes Ukraine and Russia – I attempt to learn as much as I can of the facts (not always easy to ascertain the truth, though) and come to my own conclusions. I also try to read about the history of the conflict, whatever it might be, and often seek out relevant articles that were written before the specific incident or incidents began, in an attempt (not always successful) to get some less-political background.

In the end, I come to a conclusion that is always open to change if new and relevant and reliable information comes out. Sometimes I end up disagreeing with most people on the right. More often – much much more often – I end up disagreeing with most people on the left. But I never reject a position because people I’ve disagreed with most of the time take that position. Nor do I adopt a position because people I usually agree with take that position.

I believe that’s part of the reason I was able to make a political transition. I’m not interested in bandwagons or groupthink, whether positive (agreement) or negative (disagreement). I didn’t start a blog to be a tool of any side, although since my philosophy and outlook skews more to the right I naturally will wind up agreeing with the right more often, even when using my own independent judgment. But I care little what the people listed in that commenter’s quote think about this issue, pro or con, and I certainly don’t use it as a guide to my own opinion.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Biden will now buy oil from Venezuela and Iran instead of from Russia. Nice going, Joe. Very cagey of you.

(2) Please read this article. It’s very frightening, and relates some facts of which I was previously unaware, such as the following:

What Russia does possess is a nuclear arsenal that is capable of destroying the land-based nuclear forces of the United States, American cities and their populations, and American military bases abroad that do play a strategic role in the defense of the United States. They also possess advanced ballistic missile defense systems to protect Moscow and strategic positions throughout Russia.

The Russian S-400 and S-500 air and missile defense systems can deploy nuclear-tipped interceptors to ensure that the Russian homeland is defended from American ballistic missiles. What about America?…

For all of our tough talk about America’s military might, the United States does not possess a missile defense capable of stopping Russian or Chinese ballistic missiles. We are also not able to stop a ship-launched ballistic missile should the Iranians or any other nation choose to serve as a surrogate for such an attack.

The rest of the article discusses why this is so. I checked some of it out with other sources and it appears to be true.

Perhaps most of you already knew this. I most certainly did not.

Seems to me as though Russia has much less to lose than we do from a nuclear attack – that is, if its defensive system works as advertised.

(3) Ted Cruz on the Biden administration’s destructive energy policy.

(4) The DOJ can work mighty fast when it wants to.

(5) More on Biden’s Iran deal, if you’ve got the stomach for it.

A very brief history: Ukraine and Russia, plus NATO and nuclear weapons

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to respond to this recent comment, not in order to especially pick on its author, but because I think it’s an example of the type of thought process and the sorts of analogies we see quite a bit lately, and it represents an opportunity for me to discuss some background to the Ukraine war.

First, the comment. I’ve made some small corrections for grammar/spelling. Then I take it point by point with the commenter’s remarks in italics and my reactions following:

I am sure a righteous democracy like America would be perfectly fine and a good sport about it if a scenario ever arose that Russian/Chinese propaganda had successfully convinced a majority of Californians to demand to secede from America; join forces with Russia, China, and Iran, and have a Russian military base built in Silicon Valley pointing missiles at what is left of America, right? I am very sure America would not take military action to neutralize this threat and just honor Californians’ wish in this factional scenario peacefully.

(1) a righteous democracy like America…
A great many Americans no longer think that America is especially righteous – particularly since this administration but certainly for much of the 21st Century. Nevertheless, its foundational ideals – to which it’s not living up – are among the best or perhaps the best in the world.

(2) that Russian/Chinese propaganda had successfully convinced a majority of Californians to demand to secede from America…
At this point, I’m not at all sure that most Americans would care if California left the Union. The thing is, there also is no clear mechanism by which a state can secede other than armed revolt. The Supreme Court has actually ruled on that:

Some have argued for secession as a constitutional right and others as from a natural right of revolution. In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court ruled unilateral secession unconstitutional, while commenting that revolution or consent of the states could lead to a successful secession.

And so it is possible that if California wished to secede and there was “consent of the states” to that secession, it would happen without all that much fuss. But of course, the comment isn’t just talking about a simple secession; it’s talking about a state that has seceded subsequently becoming an enemy country with an enemy missile base. In addition, because the commenter is apparently trying to make an analogy of California seceding from the US with Ukraine abandoning its former unity with Russia, let’s take a look at the huge differences in the processes involved.

The history of Ukraine is lengthy and I can’t possibly cover it in detail here. But for example, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Poland, Poland-Lithuania, and the Crimean Khanate were in charge there at different times. Then, after a war between Russia and Poland in the mid-17th Century, the eastern part of Ukraine came under Russian rule. This sort of back-and-forth was very common in eastern Europe as well as other parts of the world.

Close to the beginning of the 19th Century, Ukraine was under Russian and Austrian rule for about a hundred years until the Russian Revolution in 1917, when Ukraine became an independent country for a few years. Then Russia (the Bolsheviks) attacked again, and won the war. After that the Ukraine was part of the USSR. Note that this annexation was not voluntary (except that home-grown Ukrainian Bolsheviks supported it and became the new leaders). It was the result of both a civil war and a Russian Communist takeover by force.

At first, Ukrainians in the USSR were allowed to speak and teach in their own language. But then:

Policy in the 1930s turned to Russification. In 1932 and 1933, millions of people, mostly peasants, in Ukraine starved to death in a devastating famine, known as Holodomor. It is estimated by Encyclopædia Britannica that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians.

That famine was real, but its terrible effects were exacerbated greatly by the policies of the USSR in Ukraine.

That’s not really similar to California’s relationship with the US. Not even close. The analogy is mind-bogglingly poor, but I’ve seen it or its equivalent all over the right side of the blogosphere lately.

There’s more:

During World War II the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for Ukrainian independence against both Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1945 the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the United Nations.

So there’s been a long and highly-motivated struggle for Ukrainian independence from Russia when it was the larger entity the USSR:

After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Ukrainian Khrushchev as head of the Communist Party of Soviet Union enabled a Ukrainian revival, and in 1954 the republic expanded to the south with the transfer of Crimea from Russia. Nevertheless, political repressions against poets, historians and other intellectuals continued, as in all other parts of the USSR.

Ukraine became independent again when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

The USSR dissolved in 1991. Repeat: it dissolved. I imagine that if the USA were also to dissolve (not so far-fetched a notion these days), California might indeed decide to become an independent country. But till then, there’s really zero analogy to anything in Ukrainian and Russian history.

(3) Now back to the comment:

…join forces with Russia, China, and Iran, and have a Russian military base built in Silicon Valley pointing missiles at what is left of America…

There is no NATO military base in Ukraine pointing missiles at Russia. Nor are the nations of Europe who form NATO analogous in their rhetoric or their behavior to the aforementioned countries – especially Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism all over the world, and a country whose leaders continue to chant “Death to America!”

But setting all that aside, let’s imagine that Ukraine does join NATO someday and does acquire such a base. Unlike California – which is nowhere nearby its hypothesized nuclear partners Russia, China, or Iran, Ukraine is already just about as close geographically to some NATO countries as it is to Russia. Russia is on Ukraine’s eastern border and the NATO countries of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania constitute Ukraine’s border on the west and south. As for Russia, it already has two NATO nations on its borders, Latvia and Estonia. Finland (threatened recently by Putin and not a NATO nation) also has a border with Russia, but it’s more northerly.

There are already missile defense systems run by NATO in Romania with one under construction; there are none in Estonia and Latvia, those NATO states that border Russia. The one in Romania has been operational for almost six years, and as far as I know there have been no incidents involving it.

The new Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defence system at Deveselu Airbase in Romania is a land-based version of the Aegis-class ships in Spain. It offers an advanced, permanent capability to detect and intercept ballistic missile threats.

After years of construction, the Aegis Ashore facility in Romania was declared operational in May 2016. A similar site is under construction in Redzikowo, Poland.

In response to the growing threat posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles, NATO Allies, decided in 2010 that the Alliance will develop a missile defence capability to protect all NATO European populations and territory against missile attacks.

This is what’s already in place, if Ukraine joined NATO it would bring the possibility of such a system only a very small bit closer to Russia. I believe that one of the reasons Putin has decided to strike before Ukraine might be joining NATO is that NATO membership would pledge other NATO nations to Ukraine’s defense if Russia attacked it. Putin has long wanted to reclaim the lost Ukraine for Russia, and he feared that time was running out.

Here was NATO’s policy on the use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War years:

After a great deal of debate in the 1960s, in December 1967 the alliance adopted a new nuclear strategy in MC 14/3 known as “flexible response.” NATO formally abandoned the strategy of massive retaliation (which had actually been dropped by the Eisenhower administration before the end of its term) and committed the alliance to respond to any aggression, short of general nuclear attack, at the level of force — conventional or nuclear — at which it was initiated. The alliance retained the option, however, to use nuclear weapons first if its initial response to a conventional attack did not prove adequate to containing the aggressor, and to deliberately escalate to general nuclear war, if necessary.

While adoption of the flexible response policy allowed the alliance to avoid a policy of prompt and mutual suicide (as many of NATO’s tactical nuclear weapons would have detonated on alliance territory), NATO still continued to rely on the first use of nuclear weapons to deter or counter a major conventional assault.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO reduced its force and changed its policy:

In early 1991, after the withdrawal and destruction of its INF systems and the voluntary retirement of about 2,400 excess tactical nuclear weapons, NATO’s European-based nuclear arsenal stood at approximately 4,000 tactical warheads. Then, in September of that year, in the aftermath of the failed coup in Moscow, President Bush announced a major unilateral withdrawal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons worldwide. Gorbachev announced reciprocal Soviet withdrawals the following month. All U.S. ground-based and sea-based tactical weapons were affected, leaving only several hundred (around 400) air-delivered gravity bombs in NATO’s European-based nuclear arsenal by the end of the decade. (France and Britain subsequently decided to phase out their own tactical nuclear weapons.)…

…[NATO’s] 1991 concept noted that “the fundamental purpose of the nuclear forces of the Allies is political: to preserve peace and prevent coercion and any kind of war.” It stated specifically that “the circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated by [NATO] are…remote.” The allies “can therefore significantly reduce their sub-strategic nuclear forces.”

It was only after that change that NATO began to expand eastward:

The new member-states — the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland — all sought protection under NATO’s nuclear umbrella without pressing for actual nuclear deployments on their territories…

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, for example, stated in April 1997 that he could “perceive no security requirement for stationing nuclear weapons on Polish territory.” In the end, the NATO allies explicitly stated in the May 1997 so-called Founding Act that “they have no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members…..

…[T]he current understanding [is] that the use of nuclear weapons [by NATO] would be considered only in “extremely remote” circumstances…

This was written in the late 1990s, when as far as I can tell Russia was seen as a failed empire with no designs on its neighbors.

NATO still reserves the right of “first use” of nuclear weapons in the event of chemical warfare or a large-scale invasion. Significantly, Russia has a “first use” policy as well.

The point is that NATO has never used nuclear weapons, nor has any other country except the US against Japan to end WWII. However, if you are Putin and are planning offensive attacks to take over a NATO country (if Ukraine became a NATO country, for example, or if Russia wanted to get back some of the previous Soviet satellites that hate its guts, such as Poland which is already a NATO member), you would be upset about the mere possibility of NATO putting nuclear weapons in Ukraine even – or maybe especially – for defensive use or as deterrent.

Again, under the supposedly analogous scenario postulated in the blog comment about California, it seems logical to assume that the reason Russia, China, or Iran would put a nuclear facility in California would be for offensive reasons. California has no proximity to Russia, China, or Iran, nor does any portion of the US have such proximity (except Alaska is near far far northeastern Russia).

(5) I’ll dispense with dealing with the last sentence in the blog comment I quoted – I am very sure America would not take military action to neutralize this threat and just honor Californians’ wish in this factional scenario peacefully – because I think any attempted analogy with Ukraine has been sufficiently critiqued.

A few more things: on the 25th of February, about a week ago, NATO did the following [emphasis mine]:

NATO, for the first time in its history, is activating its NATO Response Force (NRF) in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

The leaders stressed the moves “are and remain preventive, proportionate and non-escalatory.”

These are conventional NATO troops, not nuclear weaponry. In contrast, on February 27th Putin put his nuclear forces on “high alert”.

Also, the announcement of NATO’s Response Force activation was one day after a threat Putin made:

In a Feb. 24 speech, Putin warned that any interference in the attacks would lead to “consequences you have [never] seen,” AP reported.

The implication is a threat of either nuclear attack or some other catastrophic type of attack such as chemical or biological warfare, or perhaps cyber or electrical grid attacks. As I’ve written before, whether Putin’s threat is serious or not is unknown.

Looking back: remember that debate between Romney and Obama about Russia?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s something I wrote around the time of Putin’s Crimea grab in 2014:

Why was our intelligence community caught flat-footed about Putin’s moves? That’s a question being asked on Capitol Hill, and in Politico…

The tone was set by our president and his entire administration, followed slavishly by most liberal journalists, who have spent a great deal of time and effort saying what a pussycat Putin is, and ridiculing as outdated (Obama to Romney: “the 1980s are calling to ask for their foreign policy back”) anyone who might say otherwise. This began in 2008 with mockery of Sarah Palin, and reached a crescendo with Romney during the 2012 campaign.

To take any other scenario seriously would mean giving credence to those troglodytes Palin and Romney, agreeing with them instead of mocking them, and admitting that the world hadn’t turned into the fantasyland that suited Obama’s, Democrats’, and the MSM’s own rhetorical and political purposes.

A day prior to that, I had written a post that quoted this Slate article as follows (written by David Weigel, not on the right):

Romney was right. Why was Obama wrong?…

Romney really did maintain a more cynical long-run view of Russia than Obama did. Obama saw Russia as a declining power that he could do business with, as he did with the New START treaty. Romney, as he laid out in his pre-campaign book No Apology, saw Russia as a recovering power. Its “rediscovered ambition for superpower status,” he wrote, “is fueled by its massive energy reserves.” This wasn’t as sustainable as China’s free-enterprise empire strategy, but it was an empire strategy, and that was enough to get spooked about.

Say what you will about Romney. He’s been a bitter disappointment in many ways, but when he’s right, he’s right.

It wasn’t that hard to see at the time that he was right, either. But Democrats and the MSM praised Obama highly for his sophomoric snark. And that’s even more common today, isn’t it? Sophomoric snark passing for wisdom among our “elite.”

And that’s on their better days.

One January 6th defendant’s ordeal may improve soon

The New Neo Posted on by

This court case is ongoing:

… Lucas Denney, is being held illegally. He was arrested in Texas on December 13, 2021, and brought before a federal magistrate, who ordered him detained without bond on a criminal Complaint. It then took six weeks to transfer him to DC, where he is currently being held. He has not appeared before a federal judge in DC since his arrival, although that will change Monday afternoon as a result of his lawyer seeking his release…

Denney’s case involves two distinct, major screwups. The first is that he was not afforded a Preliminary Hearing, to which he is entitled under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Constitution. The second is that he has not been indicted by a grand jury within 30 days of his arrest, as required by the federal Speedy Trial Act. Consequently, Denney’s detention has been unlawful since at least late January 2022.

Many of the January 6th defendants have been treated abominably, and I believe this has been done in order to intimidate the right – or perhaps anyone who might want to cross the government.

What’s going on in Joe Biden’s mind?

The New Neo Posted on by

I know; I know – the jokes write themselves.

Biden’s mind? What’s that?

But I continue to think that Biden has more input into all of this than most people believe. And of course, whether he does or doesn’t, the same question can be asked about “Biden’s” mind – that is, the mind or collective minds of those behind-the-scenes people who actually may be running the show.

It was glaringly obvious even while Biden was running for president that his plan was to end our energy independence. To me, that alone should have been enough to ensure that virtually no one would be voting for him, but of course I knew that wasn’t the case. Whether you believe that Biden won because of fraud or whether you think he won fair and square, there isn’t any doubt that a lot of people did vote for him. I certainly know plenty who did.

Why were the Democrats so intent on this obviously destructive path that would weaken the US and its economy, give more power to Putin and Russia, and actually do nothing for the environment (only changing the source from which we get fossil fuels rather than usage)? I believe that, for some of them, weakening the US was a feature rather than a bug. Great Reset and all that.

But for others – and I tend to think Biden was among them – the motives were these:

(1) Whatever Trump did, do the opposite. This was in part reflexive and in part spiteful.
(2) Whatever Obama did, do more of it and go that extra mile.
(3) Virtue-signal to your leftist base and give them what they want, or you will lose them.

Even now, with this Russia invasion of Ukraine, they’re not going to reverse direction.

For Biden, almost everything is political. He’s been in politics nearly his entire adult life, which has been a very long time. I don’t think he has many principles except winning and self-aggrandizement, and though history may not be kind to him he mostly looks at short-term gains. His judgment over the years has proven abominable except in the political sense of landing on his feet.

But now that Biden’s finally achieved his lifelong ambition of becoming president, his actions have a lot more consequences than they did when he was a mere senator. Too bad we all have to suffer as a consequence.

In addition, we are presently poised on the brink of a reportedly disastrous Iran deal. Why is that happening? The short and probably too-simplified answer is that it fulfills all three of the criteria I listed above. An additional answer is that some people in the Biden administration seem to want to do their best to hurt the US and the western world and empower our enemies, and that this isn’t motivated by stupidity but rather by malevolence.

Neville Chamberlain: let’s take another look

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently I’ve made some comparisons to Munich and Neville Chamberlain’s surrender of the Sudetenland to Hitler. But I didn’t go into any real depth while referencing him.

But then I realized that his name has become synonymous for “surrender” and even (for some) “shortsided stupidity.” Actually, I don’t think that’s the whole story, and I want to attempt to correct the perception that it was.

It’s so easy – in retrospect – to simplify a situation and think the answer would be clear. But history is lived forward, not backward. First, a summary of the perception, and Chamberlain’s tragic words afterwards:

After this monumental failure of policy Chamberlain’s name became an abusive synonym for vacillation, weakness, immoral great-power diplomacy and, above all, the craven appeasement of bullies – whatever the price in national honour. Despite his many achievements in domestic policy, therefore, ultimately Chamberlain’s reputation remains indelibly stained by Munich and the failure of his very personal brand of diplomacy.

As he confessed in the Commons at the outbreak of war, “Everything I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.”

Posterity has judged him accordingly…

As he noted stoically in January 1938, “In the absence of any powerful ally, and until our armaments are completed, we must adjust our foreign policy to our circumstances, and even bear with patience and good humour actions which we should like to treat in a very different fashion.”

His pragmatic response to this conundrum was a “double policy” of rearmament at a pace the economy could sustain, while simultaneously seeking better relations with the dictators in the belief that only by redressing Germany’s legitimate grievances would it be possible to remove the military threat – or failing that, to expose Hitler as an insatiable megalomaniac bent on world domination. As Chamberlain told Lord Halifax, his foreign secretary, the underlying strategy was to hope for the best while preparing for the worst.

I do see Chamberlain as naive and too trusting regarding Hitler and the strength of diplomacy to stop a person like that. Yet, in Chamberlain’s defense, his own options weren’t strong, and Hitler had not yet utterly revealed himself for what he was – although more perceptive minds such as Churchill were able to see it. But here is the situation Chamberlain had faced at the time of the conference:

By the mid-1930s Britain was defending a vast and vulnerable empire encompassing a quarter of the world’s territory and population, with the dismally depleted military resources of a third-rate power.

Worse still, since 1934 the Cabinet had grimly recognised that it was “beyond the resources of this country to make proper provision in peace for defence of the British Empire against three major powers in three different theatres of war”. Furthermore, the threat posed separately by Japan, Germany and Italy was compounded by the conviction that war with any one of them would inevitably provoke opportunistic “mad dog” acts by the others.

As the leader of a militarily weak and overstretched empire, such fears were crucial in shaping Chamberlain’s strategy, but this meant steering a course within the relatively narrow parameters defined by a complex inter-related web of geo-strategic, military, economic, financial, industrial, intelligence and electoral constraints.

Churchill actually praised Chamberlain later in a speech Churchill gave on the latter’s death in 1940. Here’s part of it:

It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong.

Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values.

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days…

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed?

‘What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused?

‘They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.

Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged.

‘This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned…’

When, contrary to all his hopes, beliefs and exertions, the war came upon him, and when, as he himself said, all that he had worked for was shattered, there was no man more resolved to pursue the unsought quarrel to the death.

The same qualities which made him one of the last to enter the war, made him one of the last who would quit it until the full victory of a righteous cause was won.

I had the singular experience of passing in a day from being one of his most prominent opponents and critics to being one of his principal lieutenants, and on another day of passing from serving under him to become the head of a Government of which, with perfect loyalty, he was content to be a member.

We all voice opinions here and often make analogies to historical events. But – as Churchill correctly said – none of us can see the future. And none of us bear the burdens of actually having to make such decisions and seeing them affect history, sometimes for the worse.