Was World War 2 preventable

Answer 1

No! Probably not although the details of the war could have been altered. Some sort of conflict was almost certain to happen between the fascist states of Europe (fascist being a belief in the state ruling supreme over the individual) and communist Russia (communism being the ultimate belief in the destruction of the state and a one world government). These two camps were ideologically opposed and both heavily armed. The war in the west was avoidable IMO. France and Britain made guarantees to Poland that they could not support and in fact, never did. However these guarantees (which were attempts to keep Germany from expanding), did trigger a wider war in 1939. In the wider war quickly led to the poorly led French army quickly collapsed. This in turn enabled Germany to greatly expand her plans for conquest beyond the more local, limited goals of 1939. The French collapse also affected East Asia, in that the various colonial powers of west Europe were no longer in a position to defy an expansionist minded Japan. Japan took full advantage of this weakness and ultimately entered the war in a major way, bringing the USA with her. Thus, what could have been a local conflict in central Europe, with a likely expansion to European Russia at the most, became a total world wide war with every major nation involved by 1941.