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@stephanie Appeasement was undertaken to buy time to rearm.
Due to the memory of the Great War, no prospect of war was popular, but Chamberlain came back from that conference, gave the "peace in our time" speech, and then convened a cabinet meeting where the agenda approximated "there's going to be a war, we have to get ready".
The getting ready part was a notable success.
Canada is not the British Empire and has many fewer options by itself, so the process is necessarily slower.
Most people in notional democracies have far less agency than they did sixty years ago; the allowable range of political discourse is much less, the scope of proposed policy has collapsed into a single beige dictatorship of preserving incumbency (effectively, established wealth) at all costs, and while the VLSI revolution was very distracting it was no kind of revolution in practice.
Effective responses, by definition, have to stick the root cause; get rid of incumbency.
This got us Reagan, in large part because their incumbency also relies on being able to organize society to force people to buy gas; it got us a much less stable world courtesy of authoritarian petrostates having their power expanded, and it created the time of angry weather.
As a security-increasing policy, "failure" won't cover "create extinction threat". (Greatest display of incompetence in human history, and it's not close.) As a "preserve incumbency" policy, it's a success.
So, the purpose of the system is what it does, but "do not make simple things complex".
In the 1970s, a bunch of incumbents with control over some oil production reacted to the OPEC oil embargo by concluding that the route to security was control of every piece of dirt where oil could be found. (Rather than the much better "why are we relying on this stuff? The world is raining energy, why don't we build a bucket?" approach.)
They picked the approach that preserved their incumbency.
@cstross One cannot imagine that the C-suite at Mozilla don't know they existed strictly and solely to provide a legal argument against Chrome functioning as a monopoly.
That's not a concern anymore. (Whether because of sufficient regulatory capture or the acknowledgement that once MS started using Blink there was no judge who would buy it or both.)
The resulting existential terror at ceasing to exist due to cessation of funding has led them to do a magic, and AI is the fashionable magic.