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Commie USA

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Continuing my series of AHTG inspired maps.

where an extended intervention in a differently timed (and even messier) Mexican civil war kept the US out of WWI, and a nearly decade-long descent into the Mexican quagmire left the US with a shaky economy, bitterly politically divided and with a LOT of hardened and unemployed soldiers drifting about.

When an alt-Great Depression struck in the 30’s and the government response was less than inspiring (Roosevelt’s political career was butterflied away), a lot more people than OTL were willing to listen to the Communists (and the Reds in Russia, fighting heroically under Zionev to stop Germany from re-imposing White Rule, looked better too). The Reds won the eventual civil war, with a rump democratic US surviving under British Navy protection in Alaska and Hawaii.

Germany finally finished off Soviet Russia, with Japanese help, in the 1940’s. The US declared war on Germany, but weren’t able to do much, lacking naval force sufficient to make a landing in Europe, and the US war effort consisted mostly of naval raiding, submarine warfare, and lots of propaganda. The US ended up fighting the Japanese and then the British in the Pacific, and although beaten back from Hawaii, the invasion of Canada – and then Alaska – succeeded.

Germany developed the atom bomb in 1948, but thanks to an advanced espionage program and massive industrial capacities, the US duplicated it by 1951, before Germany could build up enough of a force to launch a crippling attack on the USA (United Soviets of America). After a period of political turmoil, a canny political operative by the name of R. Nixon came into power in 1958 and kept it until his death in 1994.

Today the USA extends from the Arctic to the Yucatan, and the states of Central America are Red puppets, while Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama have been incorporated directly. Its 335 million inhabitants have only about 40% the per capita GNP of Greater Germany, and the current leadership is struggling to institute sweeping economic reforms while keeping the political lid down. Results so far have been ambiguous at best. It has never been as unpleasant a place as Stalin’s USSR, and agriculture still operates well enough to feed the population and even export a bit – farmers are allowed to make and keep profits – but it is still a clunky heavy-industry economy with a rustbelt several times as large as ours OTL.

It is less threatened than the USSR OTL – the Germans and their Turkish and Chinese allies are less capable of maintaining a crushingly expensive arms race than our US, and the right-wing German allies dominating much of South America are nothing like NATO or Maoist China – but the people of the US had far bigger dreams than the Russians of the 20’s, and they became disillusioned a lot quicker. Cynicism prevails, and the intellectual underground scene, in spite of raids and persecution, is loud and raucous.

On the positive side, the USA is a racially integrated society, and thanks to government allocation of resources, the Hispanic and Black populations are almost as rich (or hardly more poor) per capita as the whites. There is also a “department of cultural preservation” that works to support ethnic and minority culture and traditions – you can still hear some pretty good Blues in New York (the new capital).

Abroad, the US has a number of friends in the Islamic world, former colonies (many of them dumped by the Germans after many years of US-supported anti-colonial struggle), and India, which split with the British over their support for South Africa. However, there has been no great victory for Communism comparable to the conversion of China OTL, which is bad (makes it look as if Communism isn’t a winner) but also good for the USA (in that they remain the unchallenged leaders of Red Revolution worldwide).

Another power block is the British Empire and their ally, the Japanese Empire (Korea, a bit of eastern Siberia, Taiwan, various islands... ), both fairly civilized places nowadays, although Korea remains a touchy subject with the Japanese. They do not get along with Greater Germany and its puppets and its Turkish, Chinese, South African (yes, they’ve switched camps), etc. allies.

The Russian rump state is nowadays quite ungrateful that Germany liberated it (at a cost of only 10 million or so Russian lives) from the Reds back in the 40’s, and there is a great deal of loud noise-making in Berlin re the inadvisability of Russia’s current pursuit of its own nuclear weapons.

It’s a poorer and less globalized world than ours, and the technology is about 2 decades behind ours. The US is more polluted and has a lot less unspoiled wilderness than OTL. On the positive side, there has been no Holocaust or Great Leap forward: on the downside, Greater Germany only returned to democratic practices in the 1960s after three decades of “emergency rule”, and still bans Communist or avowedly Socialist political parties, and maintains draconian security and censorship laws.
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Jax1776's avatar
It could be interesting to see a map from the 'Back to the USSA'.