Appeasement: A Historically Failed Foreign Policy Approach
On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a piece of paper to the cheering crowd gathered at Heston Aerodrome. He had just flown back from Germany, and that paper had the signatures of himself, and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. They had signed the Munich Agreement. In essence, it allowed Germany to annex the Sudetanland in western Czechoslovakia, in exchange for no more land grabs or aggression from Germany. "I have returned from Germany with peace for our time", declared a jubilant Chamberlain. His harshest critic, Winston Churchill, responded, "You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war." Churchill was right. On September 1, 1939, German panzers rolled into Poland in a "Blitzkrieg", a lightening war, and took over Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. What Chamberlain and the rest of Europe found out, was that appeasement never works and h...