Historical Clichés

In Newsweek, Evan Thomas has a lengthy dismissal of the tendency --popular with John McCain, George W. Bush, and others-- to see foreign policy through a Churchill-Chamberlain prism. Among the more salient passages:

But the only real Hitler was Hitler. Saddam and Milosevic were murderers, but at most local menaces. Hitler, on the other hand, meant to extend the Third Reich over almost all of Europe, from the Urals to the Pyrenees, and he very nearly succeeded.

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The Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin was just as evil, in his own way, as Hitler, and just as megalomaniacal. He was willing to murder millions and he preached the inevitability of the global triumph of communism. But he was probably not preparing to invade Western Europe; indeed, in the late 1940s the Soviets were tearing up train tracks so that the West could not invade Russia.

Damn straight. As Thomas illustrates elsewhere in the piece, leaping to a 1939 worldview, aside from being intellectually suspect, often leads us to act against our interests. Regardless of Hitler's singularity, there will probably never be a situation truly comparable to the run-up to World War II, if for no other reason than simply because the existence of nukes changes the calculus entirely. It'd be nice if the politicians would retire that bit of nonsense. Not likely, though.