Appeasement and Diplomacy
By: Joonyoung Heo ‘25
Throughout the history of global politics, the policy of appeasement has been presented as a viable means of making peace. Arguably, its greatest selling point is that it seems as though it should work. There’s something logical about “appeasing” a sovereign power to avoid direct conflict; as long as the party interested in maintaining peace gives the aggressor what it wants, typically by making key material and territorial concessions, it appears to follow that the aggressor will be satisfied, consolidate its profits, and keep to itself. This simply is not the case. Time and again, foreign diplomacy has been reduced to the barren playing field of appeasement––a pernicious field where tensions are held at bay in the short term, and where the inevitable conflict is only given time to ferment. Once the yellow tape comes undone, diplomacy is entirely impractical. Direct conflict often becomes the singular alternative.
Perhaps the most famous example of appeasement is the 1938 Munich Agreement. This was a last-minute conference between German dictator Adolf Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier in Munich, Germany. Some two weeks before the conference, Hitler had started to move into Czechoslovakia, and the Allies were desperate to stop him. In particular, Chamberlain feared that Hitler’s invasion would spark global warfare. He was willing to do anything to prevent it. With Mussolini’s help, the emergency conference was scheduled and, very shortly, four political giants shook hands in a boardroom. There it was agreed that Hitler could have the Sudetenland, a portion of Western Czechoslovakia whose annexation had been his principal objective; in exchange, Germany would maintain peace with the rest of Europe. Hitler himself put it in no uncertain terms: “The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim I have to make on Europe.” Once the Munich Agreement was signed, the Allies breathed a sigh of relief. Chamberlain returned home to crowds of cheering supporters. Then, about a year later, the Second World War broke out.
Knowing what happened next, it’s not difficult to see where things went wrong. Generally, the problem with appeasement is that the aggressor cannot ever be appeased. It’s as though you are leading a child through a toy shop; the moment you let him buy one, he wants another one, then another one, then another one. This is the fundamental flaw in making concessions as a diplomatic policy. In the short term, the new toy will serve, as intended, to pacify the child, but it very rarely stops there. Now picture Hitler as the child, Europe as the toy shop, and the Sudetenland as the first toy, and all the pieces fall into place. Hitler wanted Lebensraum, “living space” for the Aryan race, and he was never going to keep his promise.
What is more, the semblance of a diplomatic resolution only inflated the magnitude of warfare. Once the Munich Agreement was signed, the European powers believed that the crisis had been averted. In a short speech after returning from Munich, Chamberlain declared to the British populace that he had made “Peace for our time.” In reality, he had merely delayed the conflict for another year––and in that year, Hitler had time to cement his dictatorship at home and consolidate his foreign assets. He had time to plan his multifaceted attack, to think through the contingencies, to supply his soldiers with guns and tanks. It could be argued that, had the Allies struck as Hitler was moving against Czechoslovakia, they had a much higher probability of winning the war. Instead, appeasement took to the stage, and the looming conflict only escalated in magnitude.
Of course, Chamberlain was certainly not a fool. Hindsight bias makes it trivially easy to think him naive; on the contrary, it is understandable that he should have wanted to avoid war at any cost. Europe had just come out of the First World War. Chamberlain was horrified by the prospect of putting a loop on the suffering and the violence he had witnessed firsthand. Yet his attempt at peace was misguided, and it serves as an effective testament to the futility of appeasement.
On occasion, inaction can be the equivalent of appeasement. In 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, both the League of Nations and the United States asked for its withdrawal and offered to mediate a peaceful negotiation. Japan declined, and it eventually occupied the entirety of Manchuria––despite the fact that it had recently signed the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international agreement to outlaw war altogether. And as it continued advancing further into China, Western civilization stood by and watched. The League condemned the administration in Japan, but they did nothing else in retaliation. Japan was a world away; they did not care to be involved in direct conflict. Perhaps it was believed that Japan would simply stop after Manchuria, and when it continued forward, stop after China. Here again we see the pattern of appeasing a foreign power as the West managed to forget its commitment to an international anti-war pact––and here again it was mistaken. Japan’s imperial ambitions, like those of Germany, multiplied tenfold over the course of a decade, and they would ultimately peak in the Second World War with far-reaching consequences.
Appeasement is not a policy of the past, either. Even today there are familiar patterns of concessions and false promises on the global stage of diplomacy. The most relevant example can be found in the Russo-Ukrainian War. When Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, NATO was caught off guard, and its reprisal was minimal at best. Direct military conflict was obviously impractical, but even the sanctions imposed then had little to no effect on the Russian economy; one could essentially argue that Putin went scot-free. As in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the response to the Crimean annexation is not a textbook example of appeasement, but it amounts to the same thing. The West’s reaction––or, more appropriately, a lack thereof––to Putin’s invasion can be likened to a formal concession. After all, one party took what it wanted and the other did little to stop it.
Once this concession was made, it was erroneously assumed that Putin would be satisfied, and that Russia’s imperial ambitions were no longer a threat to Europe. Moscow was quickly forgiven; indeed, many world leaders tried their best to pull Russia out from a state of international ostracization. Throughout his tenure, former US President Donald Trump was always loath to condemn Putin, choosing instead to maintain a relatively friendly, diplomatic relationship with the Kremlin. Several European politicians, including French President Emmanuel Macron, supported Russia’s “unconditional return” to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in 2019––despite Putin’s blatant refusal to amend the issues that led to Russia’ initial expulsion in 2014. At the Munich Security Conference in 2020, a plan to end armed violence in Ukraine was presented to diplomats in attendance, but it seemed to benefit Russia more than Ukraine itself. The twelfth point of the plan even advocated for Moscow’s hand in the search for “a new Ukrainian national identity.”
Now Putin has shown the world that Crimea was never enough. His second invasion of Ukraine in February, less than a decade after the Crimean annexation, proves that the West’s inclination for diplomacy is entirely ineffective when its vessel is a policy of appeasement. When Putin made his first move in Crimea, NATO should have punished him for it. Instead, it let the incident slide, and what began as a small territorial concession at the tip of Ukraine has swelled into a fierce struggle with no end in sight.
This is not to say, of course, that there is something inherently problematic with diplomacy. Countless conflicts have been averted by diplomats at the negotiating table. When two parties get what they truly want, and when neither party is at an immediate disadvantage, a peaceable exchange is feasible. Appeasement, on the other hand, is a one-sided negotiation in which a desperate party bows down to an aggressive power, accepting its terms in an attempt to avoid conflict. Essentially, there is no compromise––and under these circumstances, conflict is usually inevitable. History has taught us the dangers of appeasement in the likes of Munich and Manchuria. It seems as though we have a lot left to learn.
