Democrats Vote To Give Trump Obscene $717 Billion Mílítary Budget

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KLAMarine said: 

I can't help but think back to the years prior to WW2. What if Britain and France had exercised greater force against Nazi Germany as Hitler was tearing apart the Treaty of Versailles?

They only would have had 2 real opportunities for that, when Germany reintroduced conscription in 34 and when they reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland in 36.

However, in both cases Germany had the public opinion on their side. France and especially Britain couldn't intervene at the time without extreme backlashes. UK was very pro Germany at the time and the population was protesting in favor of Germany as opposed the perceived hawkish attitude of the french. Both also favored a stronger Germany to oppose the Soviet Union, hence why there were only weak official protests in 34 when conscription got reintroduced.

Both also saw that the treaty of Versailles was too strict as it crippled Germany both militarily and economically (they lost over a third of their iron and coal deposits, the main driving forces of the economies of the time) and wasn't fair to them, so loosening up a bit was understandable. The thing is the Weimar Republic was thinking around the constrains already (The 100k army limit got used to keep all the officers and just released the normal soldiers of their duties, in 1928 over 65k of the 100k were officers; Tanks and planes got produced in dummy or acquired foreign companies and their crews trained in the soviet union, who got equally marginalized; and Germany developed the "pocket battleship" to keep in size constrains but put on heavy armament and engines to be both stronger and faster than comparable ships, and all weaponry developed during that time outside the constrains of the versailles treaty got an 18 at the end of their name for 1918 to hide the fact it was developed under them instead of imperial Germany), so they didn't need to ask to loosen the reins on the treaty. The fact that they didn't however did also cost them the election to more nationalistic entities, being a coalition of DVP (imperialistic, wanted to bring back the Kaiser), DNVP (fascists, but more like Mussolini or Franco and nowhere near as crazed as Hitler) and NSDAP (the Nazi Party) as the leading party of the bloc.

By 38 it was clear that the Germans had been building up a huge war arsenal, but the armament industry in the UK and France were only slowly getting back on track after they basically demilitarized themselves to cut the costs. This was necessary because World War one was so costly it crippled their economies and needed drastic cutbacks to get the economy back on track. Hence why they tried to buy time with their Appeasement politic - and why they didn't attack in 39: Their armies still weren't ready at that point and when they got ready for an offensive, Poland had long fallen.

If France had intervened in 1936 in the remilitarisation of the Rhineland Hitler possibly wouldn't have become bold enough to start a war. But that's a big "IF", it could just as well resulted in Germany waiting longer to be better prepared for war, for instance.