The Second World War was one of the most devasting wars in recent history, costing millions of lives and widespread destruction of property and infrastructure. This essay will identify and outline the factors that contributed to the outbreak of this war both from East Asian and European contexts in a bid to find out who was the most responsible for the outbreak of World War II. World War I had altered the political map of Europe radically with the defeat of Central powers- the Ottoman Empire, Germany and Austria-Hungary- and the 1917 Bolshevik capture of power in Moscow[1]. The victorious states such as Romania, Greece, Italy, Belgium, and France gained territories, and new nation-states were created from the collapse of Russian, the Ottoman, and Austria-Hungary empires.