2014 is not 1931

There’s only one sense in which American elites have “come close to concluding … that war is … ineffective.” They’re far more reluctant than they were in 2003, or even 2009, to wage land wars. But does that really constitute appeasement? Was Dwight Eisenhower an appeaser because he avoided land wars in the painful aftermath of Korea? Were Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and, yes, Ronald Reagan appeasers because they avoided land wars in the 15 years after Vietnam? (Grenada is Reagan’s sole exception.) For almost a century, American foreign policy has oscillated between periods of greater and lesser enthusiasm for sending ground troops into harm’s way. Since America became a superpower, it has relied during the down times on air power, covert action, foreign aid, and nuclear deterrence, which is pretty much what Obama is doing now. In fact, Obama’s foreign policy has far more in common with American foreign policy in the 1950s and 1970s than with American foreign policy in the 1930s, when the U.S. spurned military obligations outside its hemisphere. But comparing Obama to Eisenhower or Nixon is a lot less alarming than comparing him to Neville Chamberlain.

And why shouldn’t Americans be more skeptical of land wars after the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan? Kagan doesn’t say. For a man so keen that Americans learn from the experience of the 1930s, he’s strikingly uninterested in the experience of the last decade. He doesn’t defend the Iraq or Afghan wars. He doesn’t even suggest that the U.S. should send ground troops into Iraq, Syria, or Ukraine today. He simply suggests that Americans who oppose new land wars because of our recent, painful experience are latter-day Neville Chamberlains.