I don’t have one spot to draw from but I have enjoyed quite a few long form history lectures posted on YouTube plus a lifelong amateur fascination with the topic so I kinda just Hoover up all sorts of stuff but my hypothesis is basically this: Industrialization and capitalism basically rendered colonial empires obsolete at the end of the 1800’s. But it was still somewhat unsettled what powers would be at the helm of that new structure. WW1 was a dominance struggle that really only American capitalists came out ahead of (and arguably the Russian communists). Germany enters the era where hitler rises to power in a terrible shape. They need oil and they need farm land if they have any hope of surviving or having any world influence going forward. They Hail Mary and it actually works for most of their early objectives but in my mind Hitler makes strategic decisions about who he courts that ultimately put Germany in a situation they never could have won. There’s no real way they could have totally grasped that without the hind sight of today but there was no possible way for them to succeed. Once American capitalists allied themselves with the Russians it was totally inevitable with Germany’s oil and manpower resources. England and France and Italy were complete side shows, the entire “war” was Germany trying to get resources and land from Russia and Japan trying to get resources and land from China, both of whom happened to be supported by the single largest industrial power in the world situated on an untouchable continent with more oil and manpower than either possibly could hope to counter. The Axis powers gambled that bold and decisive military conquests would pay off and rattle the Americans but both completely lost those gambles.