Appeasement

In the 1930s Britain and France pursued a policy of appeasement: making concessions to aggressive powers in hopes of avoiding war. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain is the figure most associated with this policy. At the Munich Conference (September 1938), Chamberlain agreed to German annexation of the Sudetenland and returned to London declaring he had achieved "peace for our time." Six months later Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia, and the policy was discredited. Appeasement became a synonym for cowardly concession to aggressors.

Why appeasement happened: Appeasement was not just naive. Britain and France had real reasons: horror of repeating WWI, military unpreparedness, the belief that some German grievances about Versailles were legitimate, the hope that Hitler could be contained, and fear of communism (some British and French elites considered Hitler preferable to Stalin). Appeasement was a calculated bet that failed catastrophically. The lesson became part of Cold War strategy: never appease an aggressor.