Back to these posts: >>28714 - >>28719 , I've finished just now.
I would oppose Tooze's optimistic view on the "what if they would stop the strained rearmament and change economical direction". Apparently he believes that would have been a viable path to take. However it is a legitimate view that the war was inevitable, it was so that the second WW wasn't even second just a continuation of the first one, and the interwar period was only a phase for gathering strength. If Germany had tuned down the rearmament, she would have been squashed in an months. There were people who saw the second round coming right at the time the peace was signed, so it's not just backward rationalization or something.
While I read this summary Suvorov came to mind. He wrote that if the SU wanted to keep safe from Germany, then they would have kept the buffer zone what an intact Poland and the Baltic states meant. Now this is true the other way around: the Germans were safe from the SU as long as that buffer was intact. So they didn't faced the SU like you (Tooze) wrote, but France, GB and Poland.