History does not teach lessons. Lessons are distilled at best, often selectively. The standard lesson of the 1938 Munich Agreement is that any compromise with aggression will lead to more aggression. But the danger of “conciliation” or “appeasement” admits degrees depending on the circumstances or genesis of the violation and the security arrangements that follow conflict. The counsel of Munich needs to be contextualized, as the following articles argue:
Stephen M. Walt, “Appeasement Is Underrated,” Foreign Policy (29 April 2024)
Mark Episkopos, “It’s time to retire the Munich analogy,” Responsible Statecraft, 13 Dec 2024.
Andrew Latham, “This is not 1938 — so stop talking about appeasement,”The Hill (16 Dec 2021)
Tom Switzer, “In defence of (occasional) appeasement,” The Quadrant, US Studies Center, University of Sydney, 6 Oct 2015.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “On the Use and Abuse of Munich,” TNR (3 Dec 2013).
Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, “The Ghost of Munich: America’s Appeasement Complex,” World Affairs Journal (July / August 2010)
Marisa Morrison, “The Misappropriation of Munich,” The National Interest (3 Nov 2006)
Jeffrey Record, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Carlisle PA: US Army War College, 2005) h
Samuel Azubuike, “To Appease or to Concede? Contrasting Two Modes of Accommodation in International Conflict,” International Relations, Vol 20, No 1 (Mar 2006)
Daniel Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” International Organization, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Spring, 2004)
Jeffrey Record, Perils of Reasoning by Historical Analogy: Munich, Vietnam, and American Use of Force since 1945, Occasional Paper No. 4 (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Center for Strategy and Technology, Air University, March 1998) – PDF file
