pugsville wrote:foreign exchange. They ran deficits funded initially be German gold reserves. Then Austrian gold reserves, then Czech. Without war in 1939 imports would have ground quickly to a halt, unemployment inflation would follow.
This has been my understanding of it; the big Auto Bahn project was the last gasp domestically. after that, Hitler was at a dead end domestically and it was either start wars and loot the neighbors or sink politically at home.
I'll add that Germany would have been at war with the Soviets even if Hitler had opted for a stagnating domestic economy and eventual removal. The Russians have always been expansionist as a people, and the Revolution didn't do a thing to moderate that aspect of their mindsets, certainly not in the case of any Soviet leader in power from Stalin on. The Soviets were preparing to invade just as Hitler was, and would have regardless of the Pact. The real 'what if' is how the rest of the world would have lined up in that war, whether Hitler was still around or not.
As for the ' perception' of failure re the U.S. and Viet Nam, that's another thread; suffice it to say it caused a complete failure as far as the imperialistic Khrushchev and Brezhnev doctrine ending in miserable failure everywhere around the globe, along with the Israeli victory over the Arabs in 1967 and 1972, bankrupting the Soviet Union and reducing it to dependency on the West, along with driving an even greater wedge in the Sino-Soviet split started in the Korean War, which was the greater goal geopolitically; VN was itself unimportant, only the threat of a major Soviet naval base there was, and that dream was shut down. The U.S. came out very well, actually. McCain is right about the 'modern' Russia, it is just a gas station pretending to be a superpower. Putin is just lucky the West is as full of appeasers as it was in the 1930's, and he can run around bullying the tiny little states around him for fun and profit and pretending to be a big deal. I suspect soon he will get a bullet in the back of his head from some of the oligarchs there, having cost them lots of money over his antics and desperation.