Right. That's the whole point - there will be beligerent nations, and pacifist nations will get rolled by them unless they've got a strong ally to bail them out.

It was the militant nations (USA, Britain, Russia) that bailed out the appeasement/pacifist nations from Nazi conquest and rule.

No easy answers, indeed!

Over here in europe we have that ally, it's called NATO.

And despite all its flaws it seems like a more reasonable approach, rather than encouraging individual nations to build nationalistic regimes (all the way down to the "standard messages") in order to protect against potentially "beligerent" neighbours.

The UK is known as the appeasement nation. 'I hold in my hand a piece of paper' are the immortal words. When someone says 'appeasement', Chamberlain is the guy who comes to mind.

Russia didn't get a choice to bail anyone out - they were invaded, and through dint of favourable geography and stubborn nationalism, they prevailed.

Russia and the UK were both hastily militarising at the end of the '30s in response to rising German militarisation. And in counter to your earlier idea that in order to be more 'military' a society, you have to have more upper-class people in the military: you claim that Russia was a militant nation at that time, despite the Great Purge removing a solid chunk of the officer corps, including most of the top brass.

Keep in mind that even Russia's allies at the start of WWII considered them a backwater military, unsuited for playing with the 'big boys'.

Honestly, your comments read more as if you're just finding ways to support your predetermined conclusions than incorporating things you should have learned from studying lots of history.

Out of curiousity, who do you frame as an 'appeasement/pacifist' nation in the WWII timeframe? Is it just a jab at the early French surrender, you know, the French who weren't pacifist, but were heavily investing in military defense, just the wrong way? Or is it a jab at (I'll give you these for free) Denmark and Norway, neither of which could stand up to the German military machine, even if they were highly militarised? Surely you're not thinking of Poland, which had a strong-but-outdated military? Certainly not Czechoslovakia - that country had been left to the wolves by the countries you claim 'bailed them out'? Sweden and Switzerland were both pacificst... but didn't need bailing out. Perhaps you mean Benelux... but again, you're talking about small countries being steamrollered by a powerful military using never-before-seen tactics (paratroopers and armored spearheads) which was subsequently able to bring a world power to its knees in only a couple of months?

And despite all this, the US was not highly militarised in the period before WWII, when isolationist politics had led to a reduction in the size of the military. All three nations you report had small or underdeveloped armies (two did have very large navies, but it wasn't the navy that defeated Nazi Germany) in the lead-up to WWII.

When you say you've 'studied lots of history', are you actually delving into the actual events and reading about them, or are you just pulling from 'an interest in the populist zeitgeist mythology'?

Yes, there are no easy answers, but that doesn't mean you should skip the reading requirements...