Promise Inflation

Victor Davis Hanson, writing about a new nuclear "agreement" with Iran, concludes:

There is not a good record, from Philip of Macedon to Hitler to Stalin in the 1940s to Carter and the Soviets in the 1970s to radical Islamists in the 1990s, of expecting authoritarians and thugs to listen to reason, cool their aggression, and appreciate democracies' sober and judicious appeal to logic -- once they sense in the West greater eagerness to announce new, rather than to enforce old, agreements. [bold added]

What are the Islamists sensing? An appeaser's de facto investment in failure. Range-of-the-moment pragmatists like Obama, and Bush before him, are concerned only with staying in "power", which means being able to point to something they can call progress, actual ramifications determined by reference to principles and historical precedent be damned. Each failure becomes, to a rogue state and its enabling Western politicians alike, the chance to "hammer out" a new "agreement". I cannot think of a better way to incentivize a refusal to take our country seriously as the agreements eventually go the same way as another misuse of paper by governments: hyperinflated fiat currency.

Only time will tell what will happen first: (1) the American people (with whom the buck stops) will notice the worthlessness of all this scrip, or (2) some disaster befalls us. We can start insisting on real value now, or we will regret its absence later.

-- CAV