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A Different Cold War

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OK, this is a commission for Venusian Si over on alternatehistory.com, based on a map by Thande somewhat expanded on and modified by some ideas from Venusian Si.

Original map here: www.alternatehistory.com/discu…

In this world, WWII went differently due to a Fascist takeover in Sweden and a later entry of the US into the war. Churchill got his wish for a Balkan invasion, which as warned didn’t turn out too well. The USSR overran Scandinavia and met the Allies on the Rhine. Postwar the division of Europe was more north-south than OTL’s east-west. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania end up members of an alternate Warsaw pact while Finland is directly annexed into Russia. Allied Germany is for a while divided into a south German republic and a Rhinelands state, although eventually after much US coaxing the French allow the two democratic Germanies to unify (although they draw the line with Austria). 

As a result of the much larger size of Red Germany relative to capitalist (pardon me, free : ) )Germany, there was no south-north union after the war as OTL, and indeed there was considerable delay in bringing North Germany into the European Union, due to weak democracy, the tendency of nationalist Northern politicians to talk of inevitable reunification in embarrassingly old-style blood and soil terms (“we can’t be fascists! They all fled to American, British and French territory”) and continued Southern fears that all 40-odd million northerners would move south and go on relief. Fortunately, things worked out in the end, and there is again talk of reunification, although most think another couple decades of economic convergence will be needed. (There is enough emigration from North to South that some joke that by that time the population of the North will consist entirely of over-70 Communist hardliners, and indeed the population of the south is now somewhat larger than the north).

The invasion of the Balkans left the Allies with the job of rebuilding Yugoslavia, and they did so fairly well in spite of some odd decisions, such as adding Bulgaria to the mix. (Some said to punish Reich-friendly Bulgaria, other that it was to balance out the popular Red Partisan vote with less radicalized Bulgarian peasants). In the end, in spite of various hiccups, the complicatedly (and getting more complex with time) federated Yugoslav state has survived to the present day (2017). Some see it as a positive model for a more closely unified future EU: other see it as a warning as to why such a unified EU shold be avoided. 

In East Asia, a slower start to the Manhattan project means the war in the east goes on a bit longer, the Soviets take all of Korea as fighting drags on, but Chiang manages to do better in the subsequent civil war with a lot more US equipment handy. Mao’s Reds end up a Soviet-protected rump state in Manchuria and some bits of north China proper, which leads to a serious falling out between ROC China and the USSR, which therefore feels no regrets about annexing east Turkestan/Xinjiang and establishing influence in Tibet.

Butterflies lead to the Indian Nationalist Congress taking a less communalist and more secular-leftist turn in the 1930s, which allows for compromises with Jinnah’s Muslim followers. India will stay united, if a bit more decentralized than OTL, and the snappily dressed Muslim politician will be India’s first prime minister (already dying of cancer, he won’t last long). A more left-leaning India will be wooed by the Soviet Union, and will be considered a Soviet ally for much of the cold war, although no actually military alliance will take place (not that this prevents US military planners from constructing scenarios on how to turn India into radioactive paste). Burma, ethnically and culturally alien to the subcontinent, is initially part of the union, but will later revolt against New Delhi rule.

With Chinese indifference on their side, the French manage to eventually crush the Communist rebellion, but are unable to reestablish a stable colonial regime in the long run, and eventually “declare victory and flee”, leaving behind a Federation of Indochina whose at least weakly pro-French government will not last five years. On the plus side, Indochina misses out on Pol Pot and two more decades of war: on the down side, leaving Indochina as a political unit means the Vietnamese inevitably dominate, and suppression of Cambodian separatists has left the country with a civil rights reputation as bad or worse than OTL’s Burma/Myanmar. (A merely moderately unpleasant one-party state in this TL). 

The US has a somewhat less strenuous Cold War with no Korean or Vietnam war, although the European border it must guard is much longer than OTL. (Given geographical similarities, Roman Empire analogies tend to show up a lot in this world’s Cold War literature). Prosperity, the threat of nuclear annihilation, small wars in Africa and Latin America and the rise of minority civil rights and women’s lib give rise to a counterculture of sorts in spite of the lack of ‘nam, although it has less of a radical edge and more of a folksy, embrace-the-earth air to it (noting all those young people tramping about the countryside, the finger-wagging crowd mutters darkly about peregrinating young Germans in the 1920s). Drugs are used, of course.

The US remained closely invested in East Asian affairs, and post-war gave various special economic and trade rights to its various allies and protectorates in the east, which when combined with an early move to NAFTA –type free trade in North America developed into the North America-Pacific Free Trade Union. (Expansion southwards has been hampered by Brazilian/Argentine hostility: Latin American “third way”-ism remains a strong force, combined with “Bolivarist” anti-American populism familiar to any observed of Venezuela OTL. (The third world/unaligned movement was somewhat more extensive than OTL, with more of the Third World remaining neutral during the Cold War.)

ROC China grows its economy, although somewhat starved for industrial resources thanks to territorial losses and hampered initially by Guomindang corruption and paranoia about “comprador capitalism,” while the Manchurian Reds create a highly industrialized crapsack economy. By the 2010s, it will be running at least a decade ahead of OTL China in terms of development, more urbanized, more populous, and even more polluted (the neighbors tend to complain). Japan, which misses the economic influx from the Korean and Vietnamese wars, is somewhat poorer than OTL, but didn’t crash as hard economically either, and has somewhat more diverse politics. 

India’s more decentralized nature makes up somewhat for leftier economics (more big steel and concrete things!), allowing some of the states to follow a more profit-oriented path, although overall results by the 1980s were not much of an improvement from OTL, which combined with a clearly malfunctioning soviet economy and Chinese success with a more capitalist approach, as OTL led to pro-markets reforms. 

While the Communist block was smaller than OTL, it was also more cohesive and remained firmly under Soviet leadership.The Soviets, mostly shut out of continental East Asia, concentrate efforts elsewhere, with varying levels of success. There was rather more Red on maps of The Matter of Africa, and a successful Communist coup in Indonesia, while things were pushed beyond the breaking point in South Africa (Nelson Mandela and de Klerk’s careers were derailed by butterflies); the fallout is ongoing in various parts of the world, and such efforts probably did not benefit anyone but weapons contractors. If the US and allies were geographically stretched in Europe, so were the Soviets: the Second German Uprising of ‘76 nearly wrecked the *Warsaw pact when the Poles decided to join in the fun. 

There was a Space Race as OTL, which again stalled out with Moon landings. As OTL, manned trips to Mars are endlessly debated while robots fly and crawl all over the solar system. The US, Russia and the EU have space stations, and China is building one. 

Arab Ba’athism did better than Egyptian lite socialism in this world, and unified successfully Iraq and Syria: thanks to an alliance with the USSR and more calculating leadership, the Arab Union has managed a series of successes on the military and political front, although their last clash with Israel was a tie at best. Since their development of an atomic weapon in the late 90s, the Union has found itself essentially encircled by hostile nations and in an atomic arms race with Israel (which has openly declared its nuclear capacities and has nuclear missile subs in the Red Sea right now). This breeds paranoia, and people worry about who will replace the current aging Supreme Leader (a bit less awful than OTLs Saddam, and with a rather more impressive mustache). It is also currently involved in a bit of a spitting match with India, whose Muslims apparently believe that since India is the largest Muslim nation on earth, other Islamic nations should defer to their political opinions. (They have not been pleased by Iraqi descriptions of them as “stooges of the Polytheists”). 

Africa is in some ways even more screwed up than OTL, although there are some bright spots, and as OTL the worst era of crazy dictators, communist paradises, and national subdivision by warlord seems to be over. Somalia as OTL ended cracking up, but at least they managed to salvage a working state in the north. The Zulu managed to make it as an independent nation in the breakup of South Africa, and have a functional economy by third-world standards (tourists should be warned they’re really big on Shaka, and it’s hard to get out of the country without buying a load of Shaka-related tourist crap). 

The Soviet Union tried to reform its economy as limits to growth loomed in the late 70s, but things ended turning into a sort of war of attrition between the cozily corrupt managerial class and the reformers, in which the old proverb “Russia must stay frozen to survive” was seemingly proven as the whole economic system essentially seized up. Things by the mid-80s reached the “police shooting people rioting over bread” stage, and in 1987 the Soviet regime essentially collapsed. There was no Yeltsin waiting in the wings to run off with Russia, and former Party heads hastily rebranding themselves as nationalist politicians had rather different notions as to where the bounds of the post-Soviet state were to be established. While Eastern Europe went its own way, with no Gorbachev-type previous democratization and no Yugoslav bad example to avoid, things got rather hairy till ‘92, and several small but bloody wars were fought, with the occasional spot of ethnic cleansing. A Ukrainian nationalist seizure of nuclear assets was narrowly avoided, and “Red-Brown” Russian leaders snagged territory from the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and attempted to reestablish authority in the trans-Causcus and the Baltic region, with varying levels of success. The experience was bloody enough, and the economic collapse (in this world blamed on the civil war(s) ) shattering enough to bring a later reaction: Russia in 2017 is moving to divest itself of some border territories, and under a more-or-less democratic government is trying to patch up its shaky relationship with Europe. 

There was no plausible cause like OTL’s “Star Wars” program for the economic disaster, which combined with the fact that a Democrat was in office 1981-1988 made it harder to spin the end of the Soviet Union as a triumph for the Republican party. Combined with a US right a bit less crazed by the 60s than OTL, and by 2017 one has a US perceptibly to the left of OTL, although still “right wing” in many ways by EU standards. The paranoid style, alas, still flourishes in American politics, although the targets are a bit different . A court case is currently going on in Texas as to whether shoulder-carried missile launchers are a legitimate form of home defense. 

With trade and other support from the USSR temporarily suspended, Manchurian Red China also economically collapsed, and was absorbed by ROC China, which almost choked on the costs of bringing the industrial hellscape of the North up to spec. The Red regime in Tibet, which had been a Soviet puppet from the start, fell apart, and the Dalai Lama returned from exile in 1997. (The Socialist Republic of Tibet had been no friendlier to Buddhist God-Kings than the OTL PRC). 

In 2017, the world is generally at peace. India is somewhat and China is significantly richer than OTL (and a lot freer), the US is less politically at odds with itself, and the global economy is currently ticking along nicely. Without the disasters of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria Islamic fundamentalism remains weak compared to Arab secular nationalism (although the Islamic parties ended up taking over Egypt), and Islamic terrorism is only a small dark cloud on the horizon for most countries. Indonesia, some part of Africa and southern Korea are worse off than OTL, but overall the situation is comparable or better. The one really troublesome bit is the Israeli-Arab confrontation, which remains, rather more than OTL, an existential conflict, and the US, Russia, the EU, and China are all putting increasing pressure on both sides to end their arms race…
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bruiser128's avatar

How did Tito do as part of the capitalist bloc in comparison to OTL.