Lost in the spectacle of the high decibel State of the Union speech, and the quadrennial carnival of a presidential election, there was some dangerous news last week that was mostly ignored. Iran, for 46 years a sworn enemy of the U.S. whose citizens it has murdered and interests thwarted with impunity, now possesses all the components for quickly assembling several nuclear bombs.

This development could mark the return of the 1939 diplomatic disaster of England’s and France’s abandonment of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany, which lit the fuse of the most destructive war in history.

Often considered a mere foreign policy cliché for feckless diplomacy, Munich’s lessons are much more complex, widespread, and consequential than a parable about “a timorous, bumbling, and naïve old gentleman, waving an umbrella as a signal of cringing subservience to a bully,” as historian Telford Taylor described the caricature of England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

Rather, Munich is the premier historical paradigm for illusory ideals about foreign policy and diplomatic engagement that rationalize ideological prejudices, partisan interests, and received institutional wisdom––in our times, all at the cost of the exorbitant risk of a global conflict with nuclear-armed autocratic enemies.

And that threat has just intensified with the news about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The Wall Street Journal last week reported “troubling news” from Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency: “The Agency has lost continuity of knowledge in relation to [Iran’s] production and inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows, heavy water and uranium ore concentrate.”

Moreover, the Journal continues, the “Institute for Science and International Security, which has followed Iran’s program for years, says Iran can enrich enough uranium for 13 nuclear weapons, seven in the first month of a breakout. ‘Iran is able to produce more weapon-grade uranium (WGU) and at a faster rate since the IAEA’s last report in November 2023,’ it finds.”

This is worrisome news, and a strong de facto rebuke of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, colloquially known as the “Iran nuclear deal” that was signed by Barack Obama without the Senate’s approval. This multinational agreement, which at most merely delayed Iran’s progress, illustrates the fetish of diplomacy that also contributed to the September 1939 Munich debacle.

The “rules-based international order” that today’s Western globalists chant like a mantra had been established by the 1919 Versailles settlement after the “war to end war,” as H.G. Wells put it. The following two decades saw the creation of the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaties of 1925, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, all intended to make good on the promise “never again” to repeat the industrialized carnage of the Great War, and instead settle conflicts with diplomatic engagement, treaties, multinational institutions, and non-lethal means like economic sanctions.

And all were signed by the future aggressors Germany, Italy, and Japan, whose invasions and occupations of other countries should have put paid to these utopian delusions.

This naïve idealism, however, was turbocharged by other dubious ideas like socialism and pacifism, which exacerbated antimilitarist attitudes, encouraged the disarmament movement, and promoted antinationalist globalism. For example, in 1935, two years after Hitler came to power, Labour Party leader Clement Attlee said, “Our policy is not one of seeking security through rearmament but through disarmament.” In the same year, historian Arnold Toynbee explained how this would work: “International law and order were in the true interests of the whole of mankind,” whereas the “region of violence in international affairs was an anti-social desire which was not even in the ultimate interests of the citizens . . . who profess this benighted and anachronistic creed.”

War and militarism, then, were contrary to the progressive improvements in human nature and well-being brought about by science, technology, and expanding liberalism. War was a primitive throwback redolent of our savage, unenlightened past. “For years after the war,” George Orwell observed in 1940, “to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters, even to know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, was suspect in ‘enlightened circles.’”

Contra 2500 hundred years of realism about humanity’s universal violent impulses, war now became a correctable anomaly, if only enlightened international statesmen directed foreign affairs, rather than ambitious politicians seeking power and indulging their nationalist passions, the short-sighted voting masses, and the “merchants of death” who grew rich by manufacturing ever more destructive armaments.

These ideals flourished in the postwar period still stunned by the massive destruction and shock at the war’s toll. Much of British society, particularly the intellectuals, turned against the empire and principles like patriotic duty and service to one’s country. These were no longer  virtues, but parochial preferences and atavistic impulses serving greed, profit, and power. Popular writer H.G. Wells, for example, protested against “the teaching of patriotic histories that sustain and carry on the poisonous war-making of the past.”

The result, as both Winston Churchill and George Orwell observed, was a dangerous failure of civilizational nerve that led to an animus against England itself, whose “intellectuals,” Orwell wrote in 1941, “are ashamed of their own nation: In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is the duty to snigger at every English institution.”

Earlier in 1933 Churchill had identified the same toxic development among the cognitive elites: “Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible utopias?” Such attitudes turned dangerous appeasement into a moral duty.

A very similar climate of opinion has flourished in the U.S. especially since the Sixties. Disdain for the military, contempt for patriotism, a naïve idealistic foreign policy, and a fashionable “unwarrantable self-abasement” permeate our cognitive elites. Progressive Democrats and some establishment Republicans have subordinated military preparedness and decisive action to “diplomatic engagement,” the politicized U.N, and unenforceable treaties and agreements. A standard political charge leveled against conservative Republicans is their “failure of diplomacy” and an unseemly preference for using force to resolve conflict.

A quasi-pacifism dominates much of our culture, and antiwar sentiment permeates our institutions. The defense industries, or “merchants of deaths,” are demonized, and intellectuals in the universities, popular culture, entertainment, and media “snigger” at patriotism, the love of our country, and pride in our nation and its unalienable rights that all bind the “pluribus” into the “unum.”

Instead, for “woke” leftists, John Lennon’s juvenile pacifist hymn and its belief that there’s “nothing to live or die for, and no religion too,” is their noblest principle, not to mention a fashionable virtue-signal. And like England in the interwar years, the “woke” blatantly express their hatred for our country and its alleged global crimes like “settler colonialism,” “imperialism,” “racism,” “Islamophobia,” “climate change,” and other markers of “unwarrantable self-abasement.”

Indeed, even the sadistic butchers of Hamas are celebrated, as our addled president pressures Israel––the “little snake,” as the mullahs put it, to the American “big snake”––to stop its eradication of Hamas, giving the killers and their Iranian enablers a victory that will be reckoned in more Israeli blood.

Given this widespread oikophobia for our country, the widespread “sniggering” at America’s institutions, and the current administration’s de facto anti-Americanism, is it any wonder that our enemies sneer at our power of deterrence? And when the president appeals to Iran with cringing solicitude, beseeching the clerics to renew the “nuclear deal” on which his party already has spent multiple billions of taxpayer dollars, and the terms of which Iran has serially violated with impunity, why would they change their behavior?

These cultural, political, and policy dysfunctions are the predicates of appeasement, just as they were for England during the interwar years. The recent news about how close the mullahs are to possessing 13 nuclear weapons––news the nation seemingly is disregarding––threatens consequence for our foreign policy failures much closer to those of Munich than we think possible.