If the 1938 scenario plays out, what happens to defeated Germany? I'm skeptical that the French/British would be nearly as harsh on it as OTL WWII.
It's hard to be much harsher than the Allies were after WW2. Especially before the cold war caused the WAllies to change their treatment of Germany.
Germany could still end up entirely occupied, looted, her leaders tried and executed and her size much reduced by annexations. Britain and France were weaker in 1938, but Germany was much weaker and they'd have Czechoslovakia and perhaps Poland fighting them too.
It would be interesting to find some way that the Nazis could hold onto power and Germany could remain an independent great power after losing a 1938 war.
Japan can go to their suicide run as OTL in any scenario.
I strongly suspect that Japan would stay away from fighting the European powers in any of the scenarios we're discussing. Japan's great gamble was only remotely feasible with Western Europe under German occupation and German armies in the Moscow suburbs, apparently about to end the Soviet Union as a great power. If Germany doesn't seem like it is about to fix all the other European powers, there's no sense in Japan rolling the dice against the USA and Britain's eastern empire.
Do those ties include the massive war-debts both counteries are going to be in by war's end... after failing to pay back their similar debt-loads from the LAST war? Because I fully expect America to continue its strong neutrality policy, both due to not seeing the economic benefit of propping up Europe's captive markets AGAIN after they've already demonstrated their credit unworthiness and public sentiment making such stances politically unpopular.
Well, there's the old saying - when you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you; when you owe the bank $1,000,000, you own the bank.
The more the US loans to the WAllies, the bigger their interest is in seeing that Europe remains stable and prosperous enough to pay those loans back.
Even in the supposedly isolationist 1920's in OTL the US quietly but (for a while) effectively worked to improve Anglo-French relations with Germany. This culminated in Locarno, which was at least seen by the Soviet Union as a move to create an anti-Soviet west-and-central-European bloc.
US isolationism is indeed a pernicious myth - a better description might be "US aversion to entanglements", which is an old Anglo-Saxon predilection.
I hadn't heard that the Soviets saw Locarno as being aimed against them...
fasquardon