re: What if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union

quote:

---

Why's that?

---

Hitler's view of history was of a fight to the death between races. The Germanic race needed land in the east, both for food, and to engage in struggle to keep itself vigorous. He wrote about this from the very earliest, and he wasn't the first one-a number of German ideologues had been writing about it since the mid 19th century. Eastward expansion was Nazism. Without it, it would have been a different ideology altogether.

Keep in mind that this was before the agricultural revolution of the fifties and sixties. The amount of acreage needed to grow food for a given population was seen as more or less a fixed number, and Germany didn't have enough land to be self sufficient. Germany had nearly starved during WWI when the British blockade cut off food imports. Hitler was determined not to let it happen again. He saw the vast agricultural lands in the East as a strategic asset, much like leaders in a later era saw the middle eastern oilfields.

I think this is also one of the motives driving China's current aggressiveness. They think climate change will make feeding themselves difficult, and they need more territory. It doesn't matter whether you believe in climate change, or if climate change is in fact true. They believe it, and that is sufficient to drive their foreign policy.