Appeasement

Appeasement was the diplomatic strategy of making concessions to an aggressive power in order to avoid conflict. The term is most closely associated with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy toward Nazi Germany in the late 1930s — a policy that failed catastrophically and has since become synonymous with naive diplomacy and the dangers of weakness in the face of aggression.

Chamberlain's appeasement was not born of cowardice but of rational calculation. The memory of World War I's slaughter made European leaders desperate to avoid another conflict. Britain's military was not ready for war. Public opinion strongly opposed military action. And many believed that the Treaty of Versailles had treated Germany unfairly, making some revision of its terms reasonable. The Munich Agreement of September 1938, which allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, was Chamberlain's attempt to achieve 'peace for our time.'

Hitler's invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 proved that appeasement had failed. Concessions had not satisfied Hitler but emboldened him. The lesson of Munich — that appeasing aggressive dictators only invites further aggression — became a foundational principle of postwar foreign policy. Whether this lesson has been correctly applied in every subsequent crisis is debatable, but 'Munich' remains the most powerful historical analogy in international relations.