This may be true, but which is more important to Hitler - Revenge for Versailles, or the Lebensraum in the East he has touted for 15 years since publishing Mein Kampf? Which fits better into Goebbel's endless blather about Jewish Bolshevism? Which offers more resources for the Third Reich's remaining 993 years?
I would be interested in the details and analytical process behind the assessment of practicality. As a side, would practicality outweigh ideology in a dysfunctional Nazi Regime?
Not just practicality, scriptural conformity with Mein Kampf if we are taking that as a sacred or semi-sacred Nazi text.
This is the fundamental difference between how Hitler and real Nazis grouped countries and western anti-communists sitting around doing armchair strategic willing to consider the Nazis as a redirected 'tool' or expedient grouped countries.
The anti-communist westerners grouped the Soviet Union, and in extremis, those east-central European countries that had the poor judgment/luck to reside in between Germany and the USSR as fair targets and outlets for Nazi aggression, while Britain, France, and those good civilized countries to the north and west of Germany, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, were to be left alone by a Nazi Germany playing fair and knowing the 'rules of the game' with the civilized powers of the world.
Whereas the only dividing line Hitler was actually willing to make was at the water's edge, to say that he was generously OK with letting Britain dominate the oceans and colonial world, unlike the last Kaiser and Tirpitz, provided Germany would be left unchallenged to dominate the North European plain - thus Russia AND France, and the connecting smaller countries, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Low Countries, as needed. He saw Latin and Slavic peoples as occupying different places in racial hierarchy and Latins as having more cultural value and redeeming qualities, but he wanted political dominance over the whole north European geographic space, and would brook no competition or contestation of it.
Hitler's other concession was at the Alps' edge, unlike many other German rightists/nationalists, he saw German interests eastern Lebensraum and western/northern security as so overriding, and strategic interests with Italy running parallel enough, that he was willing to sacrifice the comparatively small racial interest in the Tyrolean Germans, that animated many other, less compromising figures.
And he respected the Japanese and their pride in their own culture and race, and their martial skill, and their strong front against the Russians going back to 1905. So another contrast with that last Kaiser, Mr. Yellow Peril.
Hitler and the Nazi party formed their views, which had a lot of rehashed material, from a retro 19th century views, when French hostility was pretty constant, but British was much less so. And the formative period of the early 20s, Munich Putsch and year in Landsberg and writing of Mein Kampf mirrored this again, with the Franco-Belgian Ruhr occupation going on, while the British were going much softer on Germany at the time. That almost assuredly shaped Hitler's views of British as basically good, Aryan Anglo-Saxons, prone to some unfortunate errors and misunderstandings, whereas the French were implacable enemies, becoming racially degraded by Jewry and African-mixing as well - here he was getting high on his own supply of German Rhineland occupation propaganda.
Because of these formative political beliefs, and the tendency of the French to be attempting more containment alliances against Germany than Britain, all the way through 1938, Hitler stuck to his worldview, and it hardly occurred to him to view *Britain* as his most implacable enemy, and France and the USSR as countries he could more likely bargain with, which was, or was becoming, the objective truth.
He was starting to sour on Britain a bit anyway by 1937 - not sure why - maybe because it nevertheless was rearming, or because despite its appeasing, it was still meddling, and still allowed a Hitler-critical press, and wrote about war with Britain being inevitable at some point.
By 1939, post Munich, Britain probably was more determined to resist him, and France had greater potential --not high potential, but some---to be tempted to stand aside, but he was too attached to his old thinking and hatreds to take such newer possibilities and opportunities to heart. He had, earlier in the thirties, been projecting/predicting a possibility of a French Civil War. There is a chance, if he was certain that would be a protracted affair that truly would be consuming French energies, allowing none to be spared for abroad, that then Hitler might have considered going east without going west. But even then, he might have intervened to crush the French left decisively, and then asserted Germany as definitive senior partner to the French right.