The fascination with “Alt.Hist” is to play the game of “what if!” To my mind, there was nothing that could save The Axis or give it victory following the declarations of war from Pearl Harbor. The USofA had such total manufacturing, resources and financial dominance as to be unstoppable once engaged.
Where there was a real cusp was probably Hitler’s decision to start the hot war with the Polish Invasion. Most of the military and particularly the German Navy was still ramping-up. A delay of 3 years could have meant a starved Great Britain even without an invasion. If you have that, maybe Spain joins the Axis and closes the Med and you have a real communication and logistics problem.
Yet there were always counter currents in play. Hitler became convinced of Soviet weakness following the Purge Trials and by his own prejudices. His success at the Sudetenland gave him thought that he could get away with another chomp in Poland, especially since it was as a PARTNER with Soviet Russia, which brought him that much closer to Russia and Balkan Oil!
Things we tend to forget is how brittle expansive dictatorships can be. Nazi Germany was mobilized and had an enormous economic problem with so many men in the military yet not on a total war footing. IIRC, Germany did not go for full woman employment (full mobilization) until around 1942-3! This causes inflation and with the epic examples from the Weimar Republic, there may not have been a comfort zone for waiting another 2-3 years for best conditions. Also, waiting does give that time to your enemies as well.
Just my $0.02 worth!
It was also Stalin's decision. Hitler could not invade Poland without Stalin's assurances. Stalin knew it would mean war in the West, which was in his best interests, since he figured it would result in the Armies of Britain, France and Germany bleeding themselves dry, thus making it easy for the Soviets to swoop in from the East and take the whole continent.
Only one problem, France went down without a fight. Which in the end, was a blessing in disguise.
The sheer scale of the U.S. economy is still hard to comprehend. In 1939, our military was virtually non-existent. Just a few years later, we had pushed the Japanese Empire back to their mainland and we were filling the skies of Nazi Europe with bombers, filling the oceans with ships and material and landing millions of troops on foreign soil with not only enough supplies for the troops but for the liberated refugees as well.
All this without a single successful enemy attack on our soil (Hawaii was not a state at that time). In fact, the war ended as we were just getting ramped up. If the war continued into 1946, we would by then have had triple the resources and if that wasn't enough, we would have tripled them again in 1947.
The atomic bomb made that pretty much unnecessary.