Why Do Those on the RIght Fancy Becoming a Crocodile's Lunch?

It's strange to see aspiring tough guys like Trump stepping into a role that is traditionally held by wimps and cowards.

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A comforting delusion lulls great nations into decline: the belief that enemies can be reasoned with, dangers can be wished away, and that if we simply retreat from the world, it will leave us alone.

The old saying that tall fences make good neighbours has never worked.

We might not see the neighbours, but we hear them, and hoping their thumping on the fence won’t soon knock it down does not shield us from their sledgehammers.

We think retreat is the best solution when faced with a complicated world that seems beyond our easy fixes and influence and where, in an interconnected world, isolation is falsely assumed as the best solution for survival.

With this psychological crutch, we convince ourselves that outcomes depend on forces beyond our grasp and that we can appease the unappeasable or ignore the inevitable. In our personal lives, retreating into delusion or liquid relief only obscures the problem; it doesn’t remove it.

The same is true in world affairs - yet in politics, many cling tightly to a fatal conceit of appeasement and isolation—the notion that weakness will buy peace, that accommodation will sate the ruthless, and that, as Churchill warned, “An appeaser feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

It’s a conceit that flatters our vanities: we fancy ourselves clever enough to negotiate our way out of danger, that those leaders and that country will glimpse our pure hearts, melt, and leave us alone while they pursue their dark Machiavellian pursuits.

Except it won’t work. It’s the mentality of the man who thinks the bully respects him more for being unthreatening—a belief rooted in the delusion that external forces, not our resolve, dictate our fate.

It is fatalism, a belief that all our good intentions will only cost us our blood and that our efforts are wasted with circumstances beyond our control. It is better to isolate and let the world rage around us; by this, we can stay strong in retreat.

This illusion is as old as an empire and deadly as it has always been.