Bret Stephens wonders, in the Wall Street Journal, what possible benefit might have incurred if Columbia University had invited Adolf Hitler to speak in 1939, just prior to his invasion of Poland. It’s tempting to give such discussion the back of my hand, as it seems intended to create some kind of false equivalency between the undisputed dictator of Nazi Germany and the president of Iran, who has no control over his country’s armed forces. A better thought experiment would involve not Hitler, but his Minister of Interior Wilhelm Frick.

Stephens concludes:

Let’s assume, however, that Hitler had used the occasion of his speech not just to dissimulate but to really air his mind, to give vent not just to Germany’s historical grievances but to his own apocalyptic ambitions….So there is Adolf Hitler on our imagined stage, ranting about the soon-to-be-fulfilled destiny of the Aryan race. And his audience of outstanding Columbia men are mostly appalled, as they should be. But they are also engrossed, and curious, and if it occurs to some of them that the man should be arrested on the spot they don’t say it. Nor do they ask, “How will we come to terms with his world?” Instead, they wonder how to make him see “reason,” as reasonable people do.

In just a few years, some of these men will be rushing a beach at Normandy or caught in a firefight in the Ardennes. And the fact that their ideas were finer and better than Hitler’s will have done nothing to keep them and millions of their countrymen from harm, and nothing to get them out of its way.

If, as Stephens postulates, Adolf Hitler had come to New York City in the summer of 1939 and explained exactly what he intended to do, it would have changed history. As Jack Goldsmith details in his new book, The Terror Presidency, Franklin Roosevelt was compelled to resort to illegality in order to overcome Congress’ isolatationism and provide Great Britain with fifty outdated destroyers they needed at a desperate time.

Congress in 1935 enacted the first of several neutrality laws that barred the United States from sending arms, munitions, credits, and most other forms of support to any of the belligerents in the growing wars in Europe and Asia…as Germany gobbled up countries in central Europe and Japan invaded China, Roosevelt believed (as he said in his 1937 “Quarantine” speech) that there was no escape from the growing global wars “through mere isolation or neutrality,” and that only “positive endeavors” could preserve peace.

But American isolationism remained steadfast, and Roosevelt’s weak attempts to loosen neutrality restrictions to aid countries that opposed Germany and Japan failed.

It was only after Hitler overran the Low Countries and chased the British out of Dunkirk that Roosevelt decided to take decisive action. But here again he was severely constrained. First FDR named two prominent Republicans as secretaries of the Army and the Navy. With some bipartisan cover, he pushed the envelope.

One of Roosevelt’ most controversial actions was his decision in September 1940 to give Great Britain fifty overaged destroyers in exchange for military bases in the Western Hemisphere. Churchill had been begging for the destroyers since May, arguing they they were critical to prevent Germans from invading Great Britain. Roosevelt hesitated. It was a presidential election year in which isolationism still dominated and any move toward war could bring political harm…

…Finally, Roosevelt believed the neutrality laws forbade such a transfer in any event. “[A] step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of Congress, and I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at the moment,” Roosevelt wrote a disappointed Churchill in May 1940.

By August 1940 the British position had become so perilous that Roosevelt instructed his Attorney General to come up with some theory that would justify doing an end-run around Congress. It wasn’t exactly the ‘Unitary Executive’ theory, but it definitely involved a novel interpretation of the separation of powers.

My question for Stephens is: might the country, and Congress, not have been more congenial to helping the British if they been warned of the danger at Columbia University by none other than The Fuhrer himself?

It’s hard to see how the country could not have benefited from such a lesson.

Stephens wonders why Hitler might have been invited in 1939 and references the justification made for Ahmadinejad’s appearance:

What, then, would be the purpose of such an invitation? Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, offered a clue in a statement issued last week: “Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas–to understand the world as it is and as it might be,” he said. “Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through dialogue and reason.”

But there is nothing in that statement that precludes the students (and the nation) from concluding that the ‘occasion’ calls for more than dialogue and reason. They could assess that a threat exists and, in the theoretical case of Hitler, they surely would have made such an assessment.

In the current case…the case of Ahmadinejad, it is far more likely that the students, and the nation, will conclude the opposite. And that is why so many advocates of war with Iran are so passionately opposed to listening to their president’s ideas.