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The primary cause of WW2, as opposed to a German-Polish or German-Soviet war. was British and French leaders being terminally stupid and lacking basic concepts of strategic thought such as 'do not start major wars without offensive capabilities' or 'make alliances with the strongest nearby powers before starting a war'. For some reason they believed that the borders they'd drawn up in 1919 at Versailles were sacred, precious, perfect creations that had to be defended at all costs. Nobody who lived in Eastern Europe liked those borders and they were nearly all later revised by Germany and then the Soviet Union. Poland was very happy to rip some land off Czechoslovakia, Ukraine did the same to Poland later on... It was a feeding frenzy.
The 'Czechoslovakians' didn't even like Czechoslovakia. The country broke up once Germany took the Sudetenland and it broke up again in the 1990s.
And as the cherry on top, European leaders have now totally dissolved the normal meaning of borders with mass migration. The population of London is something like 30% British! It's bizarre to go to so much effort defending Ukraine's borders when it is apparently impossible for the British government to prevent random people coming over the channel and living in their country.
The result of artificially creating and defending this weird equilibrium isn't that it stays perfect and static forever. It's that change happens suddenly and chaotically in a vast storm surge that smashes every bulwark and barrier established against it. WW2 is one example. No static system can survive a dynamic world.
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