The latter is what militant regimes do and did.
Trade imbalance is responsible for nearly 100% of wars. It is always about backing a nation into a corner where their status quo is untenable.
And despite nationalism being part of the fuel of WWII, trade imbalance was both the biggest log and the match.
Weimar Republic's economic problems were mostly related to hyperinflation caused by their unsustainable debt, not sure how you're factoring trade deficits into that.
I agree nationalism is just an excuse like any other, but it's a remarkably good one: it's a cancerous mind virus that makes solving problems impossible, everyone is too busy calling everyone else unpatriotic or something.
It caused central banking failures all throughout Central Europe. Germany's banking system collapsed in the early 30s. In the wake of the Depression, European nations had very protectionist trade policies. With weakened international trade as a result of such policies, countries like Germany that did not have global empires had to resort to military force to acquire raw materials.
WWII was inevitable and that summary of the Weimar Republic's problems is overly-simplistic to the point of being misleading.
It's not enough just to look at trade imbalance from the lens of balance sheets. It's about what resources markets are (un)able to provide. You can look at the Opium wars similarly, which we think based on the name are about Opium but really were largely about the Silver trade from West to East and China's refusal to circulate that Silver back into the market.
Defecits are fine as long as everyone thinks they have reasonably fair access to the same resources. Notice the soft trade war that started mostly as a result of global manufacturing shifting to China and China's theft of IP...
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Hermann Goering
The sexist language is historically correct. Sorry ladies, history wasn't kind to you in general.
Nationalism is about building a strong us/them split, about having people internalize clear categories of Our Nation and The Others. This directly facilitates war.
