{"id":7,"date":"2003-10-30T14:07:03","date_gmt":"2003-10-30T19:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=7"},"modified":"2003-10-30T14:07:03","modified_gmt":"2003-10-30T19:07:03","slug":"great-war-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7","title":{"rendered":"Great War II"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Donald Sensing has suggested that it may have been a bad thing that<br \/>\nthe Allies won the First World War, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.donaldsensing.com\/2003_10_01_archive.html#106729189888046907\">sketched<br \/>\nan alternate history<\/a>.  Stephen Green has <a href='http:\/\/www.vodkapundit.com\/archives\/004514.php#004514'>replied<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Donald, I buy your scenario in the West (Germans go home, keeping<br \/>\nAlsace-Lorraine) but I think Steve is right that your take on German<br \/>\nwar aims in the East was too benign.  What we&#8217;d have been looking at here<br \/>\nis a continuation of the Age of Imperialism, which in our history was<br \/>\nfinished off by the exhaustion of the victors after WWI and WWII.<\/p>\n<p>Steve writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The situation in 1915 Europe would have been 1942 all over again,<br \/>\nbut with one important difference: The United States would never have<br \/>\ngotten involved, never mobilized, and never had the opportunity to get<br \/>\nused to the idea of acting like a Great Power.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Right enough.  Let&#8217;s carry this forward.  As Donald has pointed<br \/>\nout, the drive on Paris revealed serious problems in Germany&#8217;s C3 and<br \/>\ninfrastructure.  There would have been a pause of, I think, about six<br \/>\nto eight years while the Germans consolidated their gains and built up<br \/>\ntheir road and rail net.  Their most serious internal problem in the<br \/>\nshort term would have been sporadic anti-German revolts in the eastern<br \/>\nclient states.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, after the defeat of the Allies, isolationist sentiment<br \/>\nin the U.S. would have become stronger in the U.S. than it was<br \/>\nin our history.  The Wilsonian &#8220;War Party&#8221; and anyone associated with<br \/>\nthem would be completely discredited.  American ethnic Germans who in our<br \/>\nhistory were finished off as a coherent political force by WWII, would<br \/>\nhave gained more clout.  President Lindbergh, maybe?<\/p>\n<p>With the U.S. neutralized, the big fault line in geopolitics would<br \/>\nhave been the British Empire versus the German Reich.  One important<br \/>\nthing that would probably *not* have changed would have been the<br \/>\ndevelopment of Italian Fascism &#8212; but it wouldn&#8217;t have taken root in<br \/>\nGermany without the post-Versailles disaster.<\/p>\n<p>The Tsarist regime in Russia was on its last legs.  But Germany,<br \/>\nas victory, would have been in a position to turn on its agent<br \/>\nLenin and back the White Russians just enough to keep Kerensky&#8217;s<br \/>\ngovenment in power (but not enough for them to actually end the<br \/>\nsimmering civil war).<\/p>\n<p>About 1922 or so, the line-up might have looked like this: The<br \/>\nBritish Empire and a weakened, fractious Russia against a more<br \/>\npowerful Imperial Germany allied with Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the<br \/>\nOttomans.  But there&#8217;s something wrong with this picture; it ignores<br \/>\ngeopolitical rivalries within the Central Powers themselves.  So,<br \/>\nremembering the British grand strategy of sea control and alliances of<br \/>\nconvenience with land powers, I&#8217;m going to suggest that England&#8217;s<br \/>\ncourse would be to snuggle up to the Ottomans and pry them loose from<br \/>\nthe Axis.  This would have made sense to the Ottomans, too; they<br \/>\nwould want to constrain the rising power of Germany and Austria,<br \/>\nand I can imagine the British Foreign Office handing them back<br \/>\nsouthern Persia as a sweetener.  <\/p>\n<p>So the next confrontation would open with an Anglo-Russian-Turkish<br \/>\nalliance against a Germano-Austro-Italian one.  France, even more seriously<br \/>\nmired in defeatism than in our history, would hardly be a player.  The<br \/>\nU.S. would be neutral, possibly with a slight pro-German tilt.<\/p>\n<p>Before general war broke out there would probably have been a<br \/>\npattern of escalating friction on the imperial margins.  Germany<br \/>\nwould probably have flexed its muscles in Africa, first.  Another<br \/>\nleading indicator would be the size of the German fleet.  With no<br \/>\nTreaty of Washington in 1921, a serious naval arms race among<br \/>\nGermany, England and Japan would have been pretty much inevitable.<\/p>\n<p>Imperial Japan would have been in a much stronger position than<br \/>\nhistorically, as well.  With Russia weaker and the U.S. isolationist,<br \/>\nher main rival for influence in the Pacific would be the British.  So<br \/>\nshe would likely wind up on the Axis side, expanding onto the Asian<br \/>\nmainland even more agressively than in our timeline.<\/p>\n<p>So the eequivalent of World War Two would have have been a bigger<br \/>\nand bloodier clash of empires.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Somebody commenting on VodkaPundit&#8217;s blog said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p> Take your scenario a little further. With France as the<br \/>\ncrippled defeated party, internal French politics mirror what<br \/>\nhistorically happened in Germany. I think you get the rise of French<br \/>\nfascists, who in turn blame French Jews for a &#8220;stab in the back&#8221;<br \/>\n(Dreyfus redux). The Holocaust has a Gallic flavor. Instead of<br \/>\nTeutonic efficiency, you get spontaneous mass killings by &#8220;citizen&#8217;s<br \/>\ncommitees&#8221;. Horrendous to ponder, but anti-semitism is not an<br \/>\nexclusively German trait.  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Very plausible.  I can take this further still: on their way to<br \/>\npower the French Fascists have an ugly, low-level civil war with<br \/>\nconservative royalists that resembles the Spanish Civil War in our<br \/>\ntimeline, except in this one Germany backs the royalists.  The Spanish<br \/>\nCivil War itself happens more or less on schedule, but plays out<br \/>\ncompletely differently, too. Kerensky&#8217;s Russians would have had<br \/>\nneither the means nor the motivation to intervene that Stalin did, but<br \/>\nthe Germans might very well have still backed Franco in restoring the<br \/>\nSpanish monarchy against the anarchists.  So the likely outcome there<br \/>\nwas Franco taking power sooner, probably as a generalissimo under a<br \/>\nweak Spanish king in Germany&#8217;s orbit, glaring across the Pyrenees<br \/>\nat France.<\/p>\n<p>Where this is leading is that in Great War II, the France that<br \/>\njoins the allies is Fascist&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>FURTHER UPDATE: With Bolshevism dead in Russia, the beau ideal of<br \/>\nthe world&#8217;s anti-monarchist left becomes not &#8220;scientific socialism&#8221;<br \/>\nbut anarcho-syndicalism on the Spanish model.  At the extreme end this<br \/>\nmovement fuses with what&#8217;s left of 19th-century romantic nihilism.  As<br \/>\na result, terrorism becomes an important tool of the fringe left<br \/>\ndecades before the analogous development in our 1960s.<\/p>\n<p>The British Labor Party turns increasingly syndicalist; in reaction,<br \/>\nBritish Tories increasingly link arms with French and other fascist<br \/>\nmovements, which in this timeline are often genuinely reactionary<br \/>\nrather than being Marxism with a nationalist\/racialist paint job.<\/p>\n<p>In the U.S., trade unions also increasingly turn syndicalist and<br \/>\nanti-German. American conservatives tend to line up with the Bund and<br \/>\nthe Kaiser; when Great War II breaks out in 1923. American industrialists<br \/>\nsell weapons to the German Empire.  After a bitterly-fought election<br \/>\nin 1924 U.S. policy begins to tilt pro-British, but the change is<br \/>\nslow because many Americans are revolted by Fascist France.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=106754076272890860\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Donald Sensing has suggested that it may have been a bad thing that the Allies won the First World War, and sketched an alternate history. Stephen Green has replied. Donald, I buy your scenario in the West (Germans go home, keeping Alsace-Lorraine) but I think Steve is right that your take on German war aims&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Great War II<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}