In reality, North Korea's Kim

Jong Il recently signaled a new willingness to enter into multilateral

negotiations with the United States and its allies. And, a former leader

of Iran's government urged his country's leaders to foster closer relations

with the U.S. as well. The dire predictions that these nations would become

more aggressive as a consequence of our actions have proven false. We

should not be surprised, however, because history has taught us that peace

is best maintained through strength rather than through appeasement.

In the 1930s, western nations

pursued appeasement of the Hitler regime to promote international stability.

Neville Chamberlain, a leading architect of this policy and prime minister

of Great Britain, proudly proclaimed to his countrymen in 1938 that England

and France's decision to surrender Czechoslovakia to Hitler had produced

"peace in our time." Winston Churchill, a critic of the British

government who would succeed Chamberlain two years later as prime minister,

replied, "The British government was confronted with a choice between

shame and war. It choose shame and it will have its war as well."

History proved Churchill's interpretation of events to be the correct

one.

In the mid-1990s, the United

States pursued a policy of containment in Iraq and engagement in North

Korea. In both instances, dictators concluded that the United States lacked

the necessary resolve to pursue peace through strength. In the case of

Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator expelled the United Nations weapons

inspectors. Having done so successfully, he concluded that his regime

could begin to safely reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programs.

In the case of Kim Jong Il, the United States provided economic assistance

in the form of food, nonnuclear energy supplies, and increased access

to international financial aid. Like his counterpart in Iraq, Kim concluded

that he could restart his nuclear program since the U.S. had no stomach

for a military confrontation.

In both instances, critics

of the current administration heralded containment in Iraq and engagement

in North Korea as evidence that the United States was pursuing a reasonable

and rational approach to dealing with global threats to peace and security.

Regrettably, as in the case of previous tyrants, what some of our leaders

perceived as a reasonable and rational response, opponents of free institutions

and democratic values saw as weaknesses to be exploited.

That we would not choose to

label containment in Iraq or engagement in North Korea as appeasement

is irrelevant. What is relevant is how these policies were perceived by

our potential adversaries that ultimately mattered most in their dangerous

calculations. We must avoid the temptation to always assume that others

will see the world as we do. If, indeed, they did then why would their

regimes be based on fear and repression?

Aldous Huxley once wisely noted,

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the

most important of all lessons that history has to teach." In an age

in which nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons are proliferating around

the globe, we no longer have the luxury of failing to learn from the lessons

of the past. As George Bernard Shaw once said, "The golden rule is

that there are no golden rules." We must therefore apply this lesson

in all of our dealings with current and future adversaries. To do otherwise

would be to invite aggression and potential disaster in an age in which,

as John F. Kennedy so eloquently stated during the Cuban Missile Crisis,

"the price of victory would be ashes in our mouths."

Tony Pattiz

Peachtree City