Ethiopia isnt that big a concern to france and Britian so Im sure
they would let Italy get thrashed there.
The Italian invasion of Abyssinia was something that both Britain and France were opposed to. It was seen as seriously contributing to the collapse of the 'Stresa Front' (the Anglo-Franco-Italian alliance) and Mussolini's seeking of an alliance with Hitler.
This is something that I've been thinking of for many years, and gradually I'm writing a story in which Private Henry Tandey shoots Hitler at Marcoing in September 1918.
The idea is that without Hitler, the Deutscher Arbeiter Partei remain one of many small parties of the extreme right. The right remains fractured, and so the German people turn to the Communists as their saviours from Germany's socio-economic ills.
Basically, the idea is that during the inter-war period, Communism was regarded as a bigger danger than fascism. A large part of the reason for the policy of appeasement towards the Nazis was that Hitler was admired by many as a strong man getting his country back on it's feet and standing up to Communism.
If the Nazis or another far-right alternative aren't there. Germany goes Communist, quite possibly forms an alliance with the USSR.
The USSR and Germany aid the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, meaning a Republican victory with the dominant Communists taking power in Spain. That's going to make France uneasy with Communists to the east and west, and suffering as it did from unstable, shortlived government administrations and waves of strikes. Also, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary are going to feel uneasy with the Soviets to the east and a Communist Germany to the west.
I think somewhere there could easily have been a confrontation or war.
It would have been very different - perhaps not as brutal as our WW2 (an absence of the Jewish holocaust for example), but I think even without the Nazis its very possible war would have occured anyway, because the terms of Treaty of Versailles were harsh and as a result was going to foster hostility and hatred on both sides (particularly amongst the French and Germans).