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Glen Urquhart /p>

Lord's point that "appeasement" means the making of "anxious overtures and often undue concession to satisfy someone's demands" has an echo of sorts in Washington's Farewell Address.

At the LA Times Book Festival, Howard Fineman cited our first President as warning against foreign entanglements, and accused President Bush of violating that. May 28, 2008, Chris Matthews accused Bush of violating a tradition that goes all the way back to Washington of avoiding foreign entanglements.

1) Washington did not use the word "entanglements."

2) He warned against foreign connections for political purposes; he supported the idea of being faithful to the political engagements we had already made.

3) There were no political parties at the time. Washington feared the effects of a split among Americans about whether to support England or France -- a different kind of party, so to speak.

4) His stated fear was that if we favored one nation over the other we would end up doing things that were not for the benefit of our own nation. If one takes the dictionary definition of appeasement cited by Lord (to make "anxious overtures and often undue concessions to satisfy someone's demands"), one could say, broadly speaking, that Washington was warning of the dangers of appeasement.

5) His stated hope is that the U.S. will eventually be strong enough that it can pursue international relations (yes, connections, engagements) in a way that will primarily benefit our own nation: "Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel."

6) A common interpretation of American international relations is that there has always been an effort by the U.S. to relate to other nations in such a way as to improve other nations. Matthews talks as if he never heard of Woodrow Wilson or FDR and their foreign policy goals. I even heard one anti-Bush analyst say: Well, Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy; but that doesn't mean he wanted to spread democracy to non-democratic nations. And the original idea of the U.N. was that its members would be democracies, not to mention the argument that FDR tended to want to make World War II an extension of the New Deal at home and abroad. (Four Freedoms, anyone?) An indication that historians are right who say that this impulse continues and will continue no matter which party or person is in power is the fact that President Bush rejected the idea of nation-building when he debated Gore; and when he got into office that's what he tried to do -- moved by American tradition and, more explicitly, by Natan Sharansky and his book on spreading freedom and democracy.

7) If Washington's words are so important, why is his idea that religion and morality are indispensable to political prosperity now rejected by so many. Indeed, what about his further idea that religion and morality are what require us to act in international relations with good faith and justice towards all nations and are what require the cultivation of peace and harmony with all. Further, what about his point that religion is essential to preserving morality? "And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

p>8) One can look up some of this in To the Farewell Address by Felix Gilbert (Princeton Press, 1961). br> --

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