This isn't King Lear's world

World chess genius Garry Kasparov pens a fine piece for OpinionJournal.com in which he righteously challenges the notion of weak leadership and appeasement of terrorists.

“Nothing comes of nothing,” a staple line of Shakespeare’s King Lear, was the mantra of European appeasers in early 20th century Europe, and that ideology has resurfaced again today. Appeasers believe that by doing nothing -- that by taking no military action against growing and impending threats -- transgressors will leave them alone.

How wrong they are. History has proven time and again that, with regard to appeasement, something does come of nothing, and often it is the blood of civilians shed on their own homeland. This has happened before, and it will happen again.

I vividly remember my British history professor’s lecture recounting the 1938 Brown House negotiations in Munich and Neville Chamberlain’s stoic revelry at “winning” an agreement with Adolf Hitler. “Chamberlain took that document, folded it, and placed it in his jacket pocket like it was a ticket stub to the second coming of the Lord,” Dr. Adams said.

That ticket was, instead, to the coming of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and Chamberlain failed to see the devil in front of him. Faced with a tangible enemy, he refused to take a stand. He was bullied by a maniac whose only interest was gaining more power. And history has written Chamberlain into a fitting role: that of a spineless leader who chose appeasement over confrontation. In essence, he chose the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

Today we are at war with Jihadistan, a borderless and intangible network of terrorists whose interest is not power but total annihilation of Western thought and ways of life. They resent our liberties, our religious free will and the economic prosperity of capitalism. They resent our very existence, and they have brought to bear all their warring resources. And despite the threat they pose -- and the bloody proof therein already shown -- leaders at home and abroad forget the lessons of the past.

Spain is the latest victim of appeasement, and its soils surely will be blood soaked again. Who will choose tomorrow to ignore the threat of terrorism -- who will choose to let people live under the threat of death by those who kill for no reason other than hatred?

“In this fight the enemy does not play by our rules, or by any rules at all. WMD will be in terrorist hands eventually; conventional wisdom recognizes this reality. Concessions and negotiations at best only delay catastrophe,” Kasparov writes. “Europe and its people are in this war whether they acknowledge it or not. Those who would appease terrorists must realize that by pretending that this battle does not exist, they will soon have blood on their hands--both real and metaphorical.”

Right he is. Let us yearn for peace -- and achieve it with superior firepower.