The Obama administration chose an historic month to inflatable slides appease the Russians by reneging on the U.S. proposal to place ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. September 1st of 2009 was the 70th anniversary of the Nazis' unprovoked attack on Poland. In the middle of the same month the Red Army invaded Poland--70 years ago to the day. At the end of this month is the 71st anniversary of the Munich agreement in which England and France agreed to allow Hitler to annex large portions of western Czechoslovakia. The administration's decision was made public on the same day that the Associated Press reported on an International Atomic Energy Agency secret assessment that Iran has "sufficient information" to build a bomb, and is likely to "overcome problems" in developing the accompanying delivery systems.

Obama's appeasement of the Russians in the inflatable water games same two countries is an eerie recapitulation of Western weakness. It accepts the Russians' unsupportable assertion that ballistic missile batteries in Central Europe were intended to defend the U.S. against Russian missiles: They weren't--Russian missiles aimed at the U.S. would travel over the North Pole, not Poland or Central Europe. War may not be the likely outcome. But a global reconsideration of American resolve and the wisdom of relying on our security guarantees lead neither to a safer United States nor a more secure world. Rather, they invite aggression.

As with Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, appeasing the Russians is not likely to produce any 
positive results. There is no reason to inflatable tent think that--as the Obama administration evidently hopes--Russia will cooperate more fully with U.S. efforts to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power because we undercut leaders in Poland and the Czech Republic who expended considerable political capital in defense of military cooperation with the U.S? Once those defenses are cancelled, what incentive does Vladimir Putin have to pressure the Iranians? Is the elimination of a handful of ballistic missile interceptors and radar tracking systems likely to change Russia's strategic evaluation of a nuclear-armed Iran?

The administration's ostensible reason for cancelling the missile defense system is all the more dubious since Obama's own National Intelligence Strategy, published last month, listed Iran's "nuclear and missile programs" first in its catalogue of "nation-states that have the ability to challenge U.S. interests."

The administration's subsequent claim--that Iran's long-range missile program has not progressed as rapidly as expected recapitulates the National Intelligence Estimate's (NIE) finding in December 2007 that Iran had halted its effort to produce nuclear weapons. Who believed the NIE then, and does anyone still believe this to be true today? Should we soon expect an intelligence estimate that Iran doesn't actually exist? What reason is there to think that if Iran failed to achieve all it hoped for with its long-range missile programs to date, the deficiency will not be addressed in the future? The vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is quoted in the 17 September issue of the Wall Street Journal saying that Iran and North Korea's long-range missile capabilities "are not there yet." Would it make better sense to wait until these capabilities are "there" before defending against them? If North Korea's long-range missile abilities are now in question, will the effort to construct our own defenses against such attack be put on hold until we are satisfied that they represent an imminent threat?

WHAT EXACTLY IS NEOCONSERVATISM? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is "neoconservative," and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of rice pearl strand us who are designated as "neocons" are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: Is there any "there" there?

Even I, frequently referred to as the "godfather" of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of wheat pearl strand American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a "movement," as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a "persuasion," one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.

Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to gray pearl strand convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against 
their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility.

Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the "American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.