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Rumsfeld's "appeasement" speech seems to have sparked some serious historical analysis. Keith Olbermannn, Matthew Yglesias, Fred Kaplan, Glenn Greenwald, and now Justin Logan over at CATO:

The NRO editorial on Iran is predictably alarmist, but there’s one line in particular that stands out:

[Iran’s acquisition of a bomb] would effectively give Tehran a veto over U.S. military action in the region.

Simply put, this just isn’t true. The Soviet Union’s and China’s possession of nuclear weapons didn’t prevent the US from invading Vietnam. US possession of nuclear weapons didn’t prevent the Soviet Union from invading Afghanistan. Israeli possession of nuclear weapons hasn’t prevented a series of attacks on Israel’s peripheral interests. We could go on.

This kind of reasoning at NRO betrays how much we have forgotten about deterrence theory. Since I’m probably younger than any of NRO’s editorialists, youth is no excuse.

Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would indeed give Iran a veto over one prospective US policy: regime change in Iran. Nuclear deterrents are useful in protecting vital interests. But the notion that an Iranian nuclear weapons capability would somehow give Iran a veto over the range of available US policies in the region is silly. It would definitely make the US think twice about the implications of its policies in the region, and perhaps make America more cautious, but given recent experience, one has to wonder how bad that would be. In the end, we don’t have evidence that Iran would be any more likely to risk escalation to the nuclear level than would any other state.

It really does seem as if the right has forgotten entirely the lessons of the Cold War. Deterrence worked, and it worked brilliantly. Although the United States was both strong and dominant coming out of WWII, our position was even stronger at the end of the Cold War. But along the way, it was often the moments when we engaged in open warfare that our position was at its weakest. Vietnam wasn't just an unnecessary war, it was also a war that weakened our strategic geopolitical position. I would have thought that was common knowledge....

The choices are not between appeasement and open war, and anyone who believes that knows nothing of their own nation's history.