I think there should be some kind of distinction between "holding Germany accountable" and "being forced into war." The allies acted because it eventually became clear that Hitler wasn't going to stop at anything short of the domination of Europe. They acted, largely, in their own self-interest.

Holding somebody accountable, is acting when you aren't forced to.

And while nobody could call 80 million dead a successful outcome, it obviously did work out. Otherwise you'd be speaking German, I'd be doing God knows what, but certainly not writing articles on the internet, and all the Jews would be dead.

But the point I'm really making is about options. Ther einevitaby comes a point where war is your only option. We may find ourselves reaching that point with Russia. But that point can only be reached if opportunities to act are missed earlier down the line. War, as they say, is the final form of diplomacy.

Russia has been guilty of open, illegal aggression for over 20 years. What if, at any one of this stages, these kind of tough sanctions had been imposed? What if Europe and the US had made their reliance on Russian energy conditional on a deescalation of his war crimes in Eastern Europe and the Middle East? You can see the panic that these tough sanctions are producing in Putin. What if they'd been imposed before he started dropping bombs on Ukraine? Or preferably, before he levelled Grozny in 1999.