You know, internally I said to myself "I'll bet this involves bending over backwards to authoritarian Communists like that was a viable idea."
Yup.
"In May 1954 the Western powers rejected the Soviet proposal to join NATO on grounds that the USSR's membership of the organization would be incompatible with its democratic and defensive aims."
It's 2020, and I still think they made the right call.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Perhaps by allowing the Soviets into the Western sphere, the U.S. would have influenced them and nudged them towards democracy. Though perhaps it would have been as much of a disastrous failure as opening markets to China has been, in that respect.
Yeah, and maybe if Britain had played nice and just let Hitler have the Czech border areas, just the one time, and allowed Germany's rearmament, it would have eased political tensions and averted WWII. Errr... Wait.
Actually, the reason for why Chamberlain unfairly gets a bad rap is because Britain needed the time to rearm in response to the growing German threat. Going to war over Sudetenland would not have been the right time. Appeasement was always meant to be a short-term solution, not a permanent plan.
