In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned home from the Munich Conference, victoriously waving an agreement with Adolf Hitler. The deal allowed Hitler to take over part of Czechoslovakia if he promised not to seize any more European territories. Chamberlain declared he had achieved “peace in our time.”

A few weeks later, Hitler broke his promise, and World War II followed shortly after. Chamberlain and Munich have forever since been associated with the naiveté and folly of appeasement.

That memory, oddly enough, seems far stronger in America than it does in the UK. As a British reporter who previously covered politics in London, I almost never heard the words “Chamberlain” or “Munich.” But in the month since I relocated to the United States, I’ve heard them cited nearly constantly by American politicians.

Nearly everything, it seems, is another “Chamberlain in Munich” moment. Republican Senator Mark Kirk, for example, said of President Obama’s framework Iran nuclear agreement, “Neville Chamberlain got a lot of more out of Hitler.” In a telling moment in 2008, a conservative radio host compared Obama to Chamberlain, but when pressed was unable to say who Chamberlain was or what he did.

As a Brit, this American obsession with Neville Chamberlain is pretty baffling. We just don’t think about him that much in the UK, but in the US he’s referenced so frequently in politics it can sometimes feel as if the Americans have enlisted him as their own, to better renounce him.

What is going on? Why are Americans so fixated on a man that led my country for all of three years?

Churchill vs. Chamberlain in America's Cold War politics

Postwar leaders looked to another British prime minister, Winston Churchill, as a better model than Chamberlain. (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In American politics, the habit of accusing one of another of being just like Neville Chamberlain began shortly after the end of World War II, but in a different context: the Cold War. It was this bipolar struggle against the Soviet Union, which began immediately after the end of the WWII, that set the American obsession with avoiding appeasement at all costs.

“The major presidential candidates almost ritualistically smeared their opponents as ‘weak,’ as insufficiently vigilant, as likely to give away the store to the wily and cunning Soviets,” Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood wrote in 2010 for the World Affairs Journal. “Republicans did it; Democrats did it.”

Positioning oneself as tough and unbending toward American adversaries went down well with the Cold War public. Joseph M. Siracusa, in another account of the Munich obsession’s roots, cites a 1946 poll in which 60 percent of Americans considered US policy toward the Soviet Union “too soft.”

All of this created an environment in which an uncompromising approach was seen as a vote-winner. Anything else opened you to accusations of “appeasement.”

And it set the tone for the foreign policy debates in the US for decades. Presidents seeking to justify military action have done so by presenting themselves as anti-Chamberlains, recognizing the terrible danger facing the world in good time. It became common to cite another WWII-era British prime minister, Winston Churchill, as the model.

“Appeasement does not work,” George H. W. Bush said on the eve of the First Gulf War in 1990. “As was the case in the 1930s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors.”

President Clinton’s justification in 1999 of the bombing of Yugoslavia was another example. ”What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?” he said.

Presidents who’ve sought to negotiate with American adversaries have faced constant accusations of Chamberlain-style appeasement. Critics of Obama’s Iran outreach, for example, say he fails to recognize that the Islamic Republic is a foe that cannot be trusted; any deal will make it stronger, and history will judge him as a fool.

America's rapid rise to superpower

America came out of World War II with the world’s most powerful military. (Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

America came out of World War II as the world’s richest and most powerful democracy. It’s armed with the world’s most powerful military, one that’s been highly active in foreign conflicts in the eight decades since the Munich conference.

So it’s not really that surprising that the foreign policy debate here tends to portray identifying and neutralizing any Hitler-style threats as a job that largely falls to America. Perhaps Chamberlain doesn’t dominate foreign policy debate in the same way in Britain because we simply don’t play that kind of dominant global role any more.

It may also be the speed of America’s rise to superpower status, Logevall and Osgood suggest, that helped generate the obsession with avoiding a repeat of Munich.

“In short order, the United States went from being a junior member of the Great Power club to possessing informal hegemony over a sizable part of the globe. Neither before nor after attaining immense international clout, therefore, did Washington have to negotiate and compromise continually to prosper,” they write.

For much of Western history, great powers such as France and Britain existed in competitive multipolar worlds where it was necessary to compete, negotiate, and compromise to survive. The US never really had to deal with that: during WWII, it had to outright defeat its enemies. After the war, it has been either locked in the bipolar existential struggle of the Cold War or dominated the globe as its sole superpower.

This dynamic, Logevall and Osgood say, helped feed an idea that is still central to American foreign policy conversations: the only answer to competing powers is total victory. Compromise or tolerance, in this view, is folly.

The threats America has faced since the end of the Cold War are, obviously, nowhere near as dire as when Hitler’s Germany and its allies seemed on the verge of snuffing out freedom worldwide.

But that’s not the point: the point is that for many Americans, the lesson was that foreign threats can never be managed or contained, but can only be defeated outright — and that failing to do so will only make the problem worse. If this seems bizarre to non-Americans — and believe me, it does to Brits — that’s because just about every other country had to learn how to cope with geopolitical adversaries through means other than vanquishing them outright. That is not something the US has really developed a familiarity with. It’s great to have strength and resolve, but when this is the only tool in your toolbox, that lack of flexibility can become a weakness, as well.

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Here’s a statistic that helps put the world’s current conflicts into grim perspective: there haven’t been this many people seeking asylum in developed countries since 1992, when Yugoslavia dissolved in war.

That’s according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which tracks the number of people who register for asylum every year in 44 developed countries. That total number of asylum claims per year is shown in the chart above.

The number spikes twice: to 898,000 in 1992, with the catastrophic breakup of Yugoslavia, and again now. Yugoslavia was right in the middle of Europe and sent many of its citizens fleeing into neighboring countries that classify as developed, so it’s telling that conflicts in far-off places such as Afghanistan and Eritrea are today producing so many asylum seekers.

There are two other, smaller bumps you’ll see in the chart: The first was in the late 1990s, with the conflict in Kosovo. The violence of the Arab Spring helped raise the number again. But it’s since spiked dramatically, from 597,000 in 2013 to 866,000 in 2014.

These figures, to be clear, only include people who sought asylum, and who did so in those 44 developed countries (UNHCR classifies those countries using the somewhat outdated term “industrialized”). They do not include, for example, the huge numbers of refugees living in camps in countries neighboring Syria or the Central African Republic. Still, this is a worrying metric of the toll of conflict on people around the world.

Here are a few factors driving the rise.

1) The disasters in Syria and Iraq

It’s not surprising that Syria and Iraq would lead the trend, but you can see by just how much when you look at the asylum seekers’ top five countries of origin in 2014:

1. Syria (149,641)
2. Iraq (68,719)
3. Afghanistan (59,472)
4. Serbia and Kosovo (55,668)
5. Eritrea (48,402)

The number of Syrians claiming asylum almost tripled between 2013 and 2014, from around 56,300 applicants in 2013.

Meanwhile, the number of Iraqis claiming asylum in 2014 was almost double that of the previous year. Continuing violence in Afghanistan also saw a jump of about 23,000 more asylum seekers coming from there.

2) People from Kosovo keep trying and failing to claim asylum

Then there’s the surprisingly large flood of people trying to leave Serbia and Kosovo. Both Balkan nations were involved in the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, but they’ve officially been at peace for 16 years. What is going on?

It’s difficult to say for sure, partly because the two countries’ figures get lumped together. Tiny Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but not all governments recognize it — so some governments count arriving asylum seekers from Kosovo as Serbians, and the UN is unable to officially separate the two.

But what’s clear is that a massive exodus from Kosovo is underway. Kosovo is one of the poorest corners of Europe; youth unemployment is reported to be 60 percent or more. In recent years, tens of thousands of Kosovars have been heading to Western Europe, especially Germany, in search of work — hoping to get in by claiming asylum.

The problem is that the asylum system is designed for people fleeing conflict and persecution. And because Serbia and Kosovo are now considered safe, almost all of these migrants are sent back.

But people keep trying. William Spindler of the UNHCR told me that 95 percent of the 35,000 Serbians and Kosovars who claimed asylum in 2013 were unsuccessful; the next year, more people tried anyway. If anything, it’s a sign of just how dismal people’s opportunities in Kosovo are.

3) Thousands of people are fleeing Eritrea's crazy dictatorship

A group of Eritrean asylum seekers who have sought refuge in Switzerland. (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)

There’s another country that’s witnessing a huge exodus: Eritrea, a nation that human rights organizations sometimes describe as Africa’s own North Korea. President Isaias Afewerki, in power for the last 24 years, runs one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet.

“The main reason for the mass flight is that a growing number of Eritreans feel they are living in a prison camp,” the Economist wrote in 2013.

In just one example of the government’s appalling rights abuses, “All males up to the age of 50 have to do national service on starvation wages in an army whose senior ranks are brutal and corrupt,” the article said.

It’s testament to Eritreans’ desperation that they take often horrific risks to escape: after Syrians, they make up the biggest numbers trying to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean in rickety boats, a journey that ends all too often in tragedy.

1. Four gunmen from the Somali militant group al-Shabaab stormed a university in northeast Kenya on Thursday, in an attack that has left at least 147 people dead.
2. Students said the attackers burst into their residential blocks at dawn and targeted non-Muslims. One survivor told the Associated Press: "If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot."
3. All four gunmen have been shot dead by Kenyan security forces after a siege that lasted nearly 15 hours.

The gunmen targeted non-Muslim students

67 students were injured in the attack. (CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images)

The four militants entered Garissa University College, around 90 miles from the border with Somalia, at around 5:30 a.m. They headed for the students’ residential blocks and took hostages.

“We sorted people out and released the Muslims,” Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al-Shabaab’s military operations spokesman, told Reuters.

One student, Collins Wetangula, told the AP that when the militants entered his hostel he could hear them opening doors and asking if the people inside were Muslims or Christians.

“If you were a Christian you were shot on the spot. With each blast of the gun I thought I was going to die,” he said.

Along with the 147 killed, officials said 79 people had been injured, according to the BBC.

This is the worst terror attack in Kenya since the 1998 US embassy bombing

There hasn’t been an attack this deadly since the embassy bombing in Nairobi, in which 213 people lost their lives.

Kenya has been hit by a wave of grenade and gun attacks since Nairobi deployed troops in neighboring Somalia in 2011 to fight the al-Shabaab insurgents, who are linked to Al-Qaeda. Many of these attacks have been blamed on al-Shabaab or its sympathizers.

Until today, al-Shabaab’s most high-profile attack was its four-day siege at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall. That incident, in September 2013, left at least 67 people dead.

Since then, there have been numerous other attacks, including the massacre of dozens of bus passengers in November. The Islamist group separated the passengers according to religion, murdering 28 non-Muslims.

1. Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria's opposition leader and a former military dictator, has won the country's presidential elections, the BBC reports.
2. This is a major moment in the history of Nigeria's young democracy: the first time an opposition candidate has ever beaten a sitting president, in this case President Goodluck Jonathan.
3. There are still fears that the result could be disputed and could potentially lead to violence between Buhari and Jonathan supporters, exacerbating pre-existing tensions along religious and ethnic lines.

Jonathan would be the first Nigerian president to lose office in an election

Nigeria is a young democracy. Since independence from the United Kingdom in 1960, the country has been mostly ruled by military juntas; civilian rule was only restored in 1999.

Since then, no sitting president has ever been kicked out of power by an opposition candidate. Nigerian politicians have often used the power of their office to sway things their way in elections.

If Jonathan leaves office peacefully, it would be a major victory for democracy in a country where elections are often plagued by rampant vote-buying, as well as the use of political thugs to intimidate or even kill rivals and to rig ballots.

How Buhari won

Buhari’s All Progressives Congress party ran by uniting several smaller opposition parties together and campaigning against Jonathan’s lackluster record on the economy, corruption, and the fight against Boko Haram.

Buhari sought support from dissatisfied voters across Nigeria’s diverse ethnic and religious groups, including people who might otherwise have voted for Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party.

Jonathan’s critics say it has taken him years to fully take on the Boko Haram insurgency that has largely caused suffering to people in the predominantly Muslim north, where Jonathan, a Christian, is less popular. Buhari, as a northerner, was seen by many voters as more likely to end the conflict. His supporters also say his military past would make him a more competent commander in chief.

Nigerians are sick of the corruption that has spiraled under Jonathan — in one example of how bad things have gotten, the central bank chief admitted last year that $20 billion had disappeared from its reserves — and Buhari’s strong anti-corruption message appears to have hit home.

Another factor that may have helped Buhari is that this vote appears to have been cleaner than past Nigerian elections. International observers have praised the election, saying new biometric voter ID card readers helped limit fraud.

Why there are fears of violence

In 2011, when Jonathan and Buhari last faced each other in a presidential election, 800 people lost their lives in clashes between their supporters that spiraled into sectarian killings. So far, this week has been largely peaceful, but the concern of a repeat of 2011’s violence speaks to the deep divides in Nigerian politics, which overlap along regional, ethnic, and religious lines.

Buhari is a Muslim from Nigeria’s north, while Jonathan is a Christian from the south. Support for both men is partly aligned with these regional and religious identities, though not entirely.

“The fault lines of region, ethnicity and religion run deep in Nigeria,” Jideofor Adibe writes in a paper for the Brookings Institution. “There is a pervasive fear that the president of the country will abuse the powers of his office to privilege his region, ethnicity or religion — if not to punish or deliberately disadvantage others.”

The result certainly appears to be a likely victory for Buhari. But the situation remains a tense one. If Jonathan disputes the result, or if his supporters allege they have been robbed of victory, there are very real fears that violence could break out. If it does not, though, that would be a good sign for democracy in Africa’s most populous country.

1. Yemen’s US-backed President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi may have fled the country on Wednesday, according to one report by AP, which cites senior officials stating that Hadi left Yemen by sea. However, other news organizations, such as the BBC, say that he is still in the country but has fled his palace in the city of Aden for a secure location.
2. AP’s report says Hadi’s entourage fled in two boats after 3:30 pm on Wednesday, under heavy security. It has not been confirmed by other outlets.
3. Hadi’s government has been losing territory to Houthi militants based in Yemen’s north since last summer. In September, the Houthis seized the capital of Sanaa, forcing Hadi to flee the city. If he has fled again, either from his palace or from the country entirely, it would be a sign of his deteriorating hold on his own country.

Yemen's government has been losing control for months

Regardless of whether Hadi has actually had to flee, even the suggestion reflects something that has been true for a while: his government is losing control.

The Houthi rebels, who have been fighting the government on and off since 2004, pushed Hadi out of his own capital in September — and are now close to overrunning Aden in the south, where he had been taking refuge.

The rebels have seized an air base 35 miles from the city, and there are reports they may have taken control of Aden’s airport, too. Unidentified warplanes have been targeting Hadi’s presidential compound in Aden this week.

Hadi has asked the UN Security Council to authorize a military intervention by any willing countries to stop the Houthi advance. The Arab League is set to discuss the request on Friday.

Iran and Saudi Arabia both see Yemen as a proxy for their competition

Iran’s government is widely believed to be providing support to the Houthi rebels, though the extent of that support is unclear. Yemeni and Western officials say their intelligence indicates Iran has been training the fighters, as well as sending them weapons and cash; Reuters cited one senior Iranian official as admitting this was indeed the case, although the Houthis themselves deny they are receiving Iranian help.

The prospect of growing Iranian influence in Yemen has deeply worried Saudi Arabia, Iran’s great regional rival and Yemen’s neighbor.

The Saudis, who have backed Hadi, are unnerved by the prospect of a Shia takeover on their southern doorstep, and there are indications that the Saudi government is building up its military on the border.

“The Saudis are particularly concerned that, should the Houthis come to control Yemen for the longer term, the group’s next target could be its northern neighbor – with or without Iranian support,” Peter Salisbury wrote in a policy paper for the Chatham House think tank last month.

The US fears this chaos could strengthen Al Qaeda

The ongoing unrest in Yemen has forced the US to scale back its operations against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a group in Yemen that has shown it can strike abroad. The US National Counterterrorism Center has called AQAP the terrorist group “most likely to attempt transnational attacks against the United States.”

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the Houthi surge since September has pushed local Sunni tribes into alliances with AQAP, enabling the jihadists to make territorial gains.

The US pulled its remaining special forces out of Yemen this week because of the deteriorating security situation; it had already closed its embassy in Yemen. US officials have voiced concern over the impact this lack of personnel on the ground will have on the ability to collect intelligence on AQAP.

“With the evacuation of the embassy and now the evacuation of these special forces, our intelligence on AQAP is going to go down,” Morell told CBS.

1. An Airbus A320 airliner crashed in the French Alps with 150 people on board on Tuesday morning.
2. French President François Hollande told reporters, “There are not thought to be any survivors.”
3. The plane was operated by German discount airline Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa.
4. Flight 4U 9525 was on its way from the Spanish city of Barcelona to Dusseldorf in Germany when it crashed in the Barcelonette area of the Alps.

The crash site is in a mountainous area that is difficult to access, but at least one helicopter has reached the scene of the disaster and the plane’s black box has been recovered, the BBC reported.

The cause of the crash is still unknown. Germanwings has reportedly stated that the plane’s crew did not issue a distress call and that it nosedived for eight minutes. The pilot had 10 years’ experience, with 6,000 hours of flying time.

The weather was calm at the time of the crash, and the White House has said there is no sign that the plane crashed as the result of a terrorist attack.

Germanwings has a strong safety record with no previous history of accidents. The plane that crashed was 24 years old; the airline said it had undergone a safety check in 2013.

The A320 is a popular model used by airlines around the world for short-haul and medium-haul flights.

The body of the plane is believed to have been totally destroyed, with officials saying no one could have survived the impact. The victims are thought to have been mostly German and Spanish; they include a group of 16 German children who were returning home after a school trip.

Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, died this weekend. He’s being remembered as the man who transformed Singapore, since taking over in 1959 until leaving power in 1990, from an island with few natural resources into one of the wealthiest nations in the world by per-person average.

His rule combined capitalism and pragmatism, as well as authoritarianism (he banned critical media and crushed his opponents with defamation lawsuits, for example). Often, at the heart of his approach was attention to detail: get the basic conditions for prosperity right, and success will come.

There’s a great example of this in an interview he gave for New Perspectives Quarterly’s fall 2009/winter 2010 issue (thanks to Branko Milanovic for the tip). Asked about the secret to Singapore’s success, Lee highlighted the importance of tolerance among different ethnic groups (the country is Chinese-majority, with sizable Indian and Malay minorities). But he also flagged up another factor that might surprise you: air conditioning.

Question: Anything else besides multicultural tolerance that enabled Singapore’s success?

Answer: Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.

Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.

Air conditioning might seem like a strange thing for Lee to cite in Singapore’s 100-fold increase in per capita GDP between 1960 and 2011. But it’s typical of his thinking: the basic things really matter.

It’s a philosophy that can be seen elsewhere in the way he shaped this nation. Take his attitude to corruption: Lee believed that if he paid civil servants highly enough, they’d be less likely to steal from the public purse. Indeed, today Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries in the world.