Kathianne
08-20-2015, 09:19 AM
History and the present:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422643/obama-failed-foreign-policy
Obama: Earning Contempt, at Home and Abroad by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON August 18, 2015 12:00 AM
From Thucydides’s Athens to 21st-century America, appeasement is not a winner.
The common bond among the various elements of the failed Obama foreign policy — from reset with Putin to concessions to the Iranians — is a misreading of human nature. The so-called Enlightened mind claims that the more rationally and deferentially one treats someone pathological, the more likely it is that he will respond and reform — or at least behave. The medieval mind, within us all, claims the opposite is more likely to be true.
Read Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at Arms or Richard Overy’s 1939, for an account of the negotiations preceding World War II, and you will find that an underappreciated theme emerges: the autocratic accentuation of the human tendency to interpret concession and empathy not as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but rather as weakness to be exploited or as a confession of culpability worthy of contempt.
...
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422643/obama-failed-foreign-policy
Obama: Earning Contempt, at Home and Abroad by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON August 18, 2015 12:00 AM
From Thucydides’s Athens to 21st-century America, appeasement is not a winner.
The common bond among the various elements of the failed Obama foreign policy — from reset with Putin to concessions to the Iranians — is a misreading of human nature. The so-called Enlightened mind claims that the more rationally and deferentially one treats someone pathological, the more likely it is that he will respond and reform — or at least behave. The medieval mind, within us all, claims the opposite is more likely to be true.
Read Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at Arms or Richard Overy’s 1939, for an account of the negotiations preceding World War II, and you will find that an underappreciated theme emerges: the autocratic accentuation of the human tendency to interpret concession and empathy not as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but rather as weakness to be exploited or as a confession of culpability worthy of contempt.
...