How did countries afford to stay neutral in wars, primarily WW1 and WW2?

Question

In WW2 the likes of Spain, Portugal and Switzerland remained neutral, how could these countries stay neutral?

What stopped the Axis powers from invading these countries to add to their countries?

In: 278

Answer 1

In WW1, for the countries you mentioned had to either get through France in the case of Spain and Portugal or were not worth the troops in case of Switzerland.
In WW2, neither of the 3 countries were worth the effort. They didn’t declare war on Germany and Germany main goal was to take land to have their own farms because Hitler believed that once the agrarian countries will develop their industry they will not sell their food to countries like Germany that don’t produce enough food to feed their population. That why they went after the Soviet Union and not other countries, because the soviets had a lot more land.