# Appeasement **The frame:** Buying peace from an aggressor through concessions, on the assumption that satisfying this demand ends the threat — when in fact each concession funds and emboldens the next demand. The embedded model: **conceding to an unsatiable opponent escalates rather than settles.** As an everyday political frame ("that's just appeasement"), it has detached from its historical specifics and become a compact, all-purpose argument *against* any compromise with an adversary. That portability is exactly what makes it both useful and abused. **Origin:** A descriptive term for [[Neville Chamberlain]]'s policy toward Hitler, crystallized at the 1938 [[Munich Agreement]] (ceding the Sudetenland for "peace for our time"). After the war the word turned into a permanent epithet. Churchill's line is the folk-model in one sentence: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." **Nearest formal models:** Give an Inch Take a Mile (the general concession-invites-escalation dynamic — appeasement is its highest-stakes historical instance) and Camel's Nose in the Tent (incremental encroachment enabled by each accommodation); [[Chicken Game]] (yielding marks you as the one who always swerves). The crucial counter-model is the over-application problem: the "Munich analogy" is one of the most overused frames in foreign-policy rhetoric, deployed to cast *every* negotiation or restraint as cowardice. Distinguishing genuine appeasement of an unsatiable aggressor from prudent diplomacy with a bounded one is the entire analytical difficulty — and the frame itself supplies no test. **KB application:** the rhetorical weaponization of "appeasement" / "Munich" to foreclose diplomacy — branding any negotiated restraint (arms control, ceasefires, de-escalation) as Chamberlain-style weakness. The frame is a genuine warning about unsatiable opponents *and* a standard tool for manufacturing hawkish consensus; the vault's interest is in both the real dynamic and the move that invokes it to shut down deliberation.