Well its not really related to OTL since its an entirely different fictional universe, but hey man you take your time no problemo.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Hey King! I was just wondering, but how is the Space Shuttle holding up? Curious how Carey will deal with the upstart program and if he will re-organize the NASC considering the immense commercial demand the Shuttle had during the 80s
Not Newt Gingrich
Banned
I hate to bombard @KingSweden24 with another inconsequential niche question, but is there any developments in Albania related to the Enver Hoxha - Mehmet Shehu feud that diverge from OTL?
Ousting Hoxha would be difficolut. BY 1976, Enver had total control of the army and Shehu's position had been weakened by his son's mariage with an american woman.
At worst, I could see the conflict ending like OTL. However ITTL Hoxha's regime could survive his death if the Soviets decide to support some of his potential successors, quite a few crazy as much as him.
On the other hand, the conflict between him and Shehu could be avverted thanks to the different situation of the PRC ITTL. Without Deng in charge,it is likely China didn't stop sending aid to Albania ITTL so Tirana isn't completely isolated like OTL during the same time period.
This means that Shehu won't start making a fuss about the need to reopen diplomatic channels with the West, thus preventing the split between him and Hoxha.
Indeed Hoha may be slightly less paranoid than OTL, as he doesn't think China betrayed him ITTL and he thinks he has still an ally against the Soviets, the West and Yugoslavia.
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Not Newt Gingrich
Banned
Interesting, I’m currently reading a biography of Hoxha but haven’t gotten much farther than beyond 1945 so far. Great points though.
I’ve always been fascinated by some of the dictators of the 70s and 80s. Some of the more colorful characters like Nicolae and Elena or Idi Amin have been killed off, while others like Mugabe have fortunately been butterflied away.
I’m definitely excited to see what will happen in the 80s with Arabia. I get the vibe that some kind of eccentric Islamist leader might arise from the storm there if the House of Saud goes down.
I'd say its still probably on pace similar to OTL
I'll admit I know very little about Albania in this period (or any, even the Ottoman one where Albanian pashas and beys were often very influential disproportionate to their population within the OE), so @Gar48 has some good feedback that I'd consider pretty similar to what we'd likely see - especially his point about a Hua-led China being strongly pro-Albania still, perhaps even considering it their foothold in Europe
Sorry for the really random aside, but do wonder if the Carey admin will bother with the Super Collider (perhaps in a potential second term, if at all?)
Perhaps they won't deal with that whole debacle?
Perhaps they won't deal with that whole debacle?
Not Newt Gingrich
Banned
I was also thinking about this. I wonder if he ever meets his second wife at all in this timeline. For his sake, I hope he doesn't!
I’ve always been enamores with the idea of putting the Collider in Texas, personally. Would do a lot for Dallas’ economy!
Ah but see this is very much not how I approach writing TLs 😂
He is America's most prominent bachelor at this point after all
Could provide something salacious to the media (and maybe even something substantial to those attack dogs for Republicans come '84) if he does choose to remarry soon
A Tale of Two Chinas - Part II
A Tale of Two Chinas - Part II
The Republic of China - colloquailly known as "Taiwan" in the West - was a geopolitical oddity. It was the previous government of Mainland China, having fled under Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 with the Nationalist loss in the Chinese Civil War as Mao Zedong's forces had seized the country and imposed the People' Republic of China in part by force and in part because to a great many Chinese, there was no real downside in the devil they didn't know versus the corrupt, inept, and hideously unpopular devil they did. Other strongholds of Chiang's autocratic Kuomintang party, such as Hainan, fell one by one, and indeed in the early 1950s more than a few American and other Western observers suspected Taiwan would be next to the point that it was considered a fait accompli. But Taiwan held out, even under a strict and authoritarian state of emergency that included vast political repression known as the White Terror, and by the 1970s, Taiwan was not just a poor and heavily militarized island but a slowly industrializing, slowly modernizing "Asian Tiger" economy alongside South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore that represented part of the Western bulwark in East Asia while also serving as an alternative market and indeed partial competitor to Japan.
Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975 after over five decades in charge of the polity known as "the Republic of China", and his son Chiang Ching-kuo was elected President of the ROC in 1978, though Chiang the Younger had effectively been the head of the regime for nearly a decade for all intents and purposes. Considering the normal course of hereditary non-monarchy dictatorships - say, North Korea where the young Kim Jong-il was clearly positioning himself to take over for his father, or the Duvaliers in Haiti - there was little reason to expect Chiang Ching-kuo to be any less an autocrat than his father had been. He had, after all, been head of the secret police in the 1950s and carried out much of the White Terror himself, and had led a number of purges of officials, most famously Su Li-jen, who were seen as insufficiently loyal; indeed, having been educated in the USSR and having been sympathetic to socialist economics in his youth, Chiang did much to formalize the KMT as a "vanguard party" in the mold of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that looked to Moscow for inspiration, though not of the ideological kind.
Chiang surprised observers, though. In the 1970s his Great Construction Projects helped modernize Taiwan and he introduced a number of labor and economic reforms that saw conditions improve, the standard of living improve and incomes triple or quadruple for average Taiwanese, and he largely ended the White Terror. Still, Taiwan in the early 1980s was in a time of transition; most of its legislature, which elected the President through an electoral college, was still dominated by aging officials known as the "thousand year legislators" who had been elected to the Legislative Yuan in 1948 or 1949 and were guaranteed by law their seats for life. This was a staunch block of vehement reactionaries, who saw any wavering as potentially opening the door to a Communist plot in Taipei, and who respected Chiang's reforms only out of economic necessity or admiration for and loyalty to his late father.
While this internal transition was ongoing, Taiwan in early 1982 found itself in a difficult position geopolitically. The end of the chaotic Mao era in Red China, and Nixon's visit to Beijing a decade earlier to begin the thaw with the People's Republic, suggested that Taiwan's position as a strategic ally of Washington was perhaps not so absolute, especially as defense of Taiwan had traditionally been a position that conservative Republicans had maintained as inviolable. [1] The Nixon Thaw had been continued by cordial relations under Gerald Ford, particularly enhanced with the appointment of George Bush, a former ambassador to China, as Secretary of State, who while occupied by events in Latin America under his tenure nonetheless sought to continue the project of opening the Chinese market.
The "re-closing" of China under Hua Guofeng arrested, or at least dramatically slowed, such endeavors, and Taiwan was greatly relieved by the election of the Carey administration, for counterintuitive reasons. The saying in the United States had been that "only Nixon could go to China" - that a man who made his name in the 1940s and 50s as a partisan, avowedly anti-communist attack dog was the only person with the anti-communist credibility to begin establishing contacts with Mao's China without being labled as soft on communism, because such an attack would be absurd. This was very much not the calculation that Hugh Carey and his team brought to the table. It had been their party, after all, that had overseen the Vietnam War and been blamed for both its failure and the countercultural backlash to it; Carey's team was studded with men who had served under Lyndon B. Johnson or advised externally by old Kennedy hands like George Ball, and it was taken as gospel in the Carey White House that Kennedy's greatest success had been on hitting Nixon from the right on the missile gap in 1960 and that with the grim memories of twelve years in the wilderness fresh, Carey was loathe to present his opponents any reason to suggest that he was not fully committed to curtailing and containing Soviet ambitions - especially after Sweden in October 1981. [2]
Carey thus was much more favorable to continuing the late-Ford era status quo with Taiwan as it assessed not only the developments in Hua's China but also the Soviet Union, and both considered Moscow less trustworthy but also less fearsome after its draw with Sweden. As such, the longstanding idea of GOP foreign policy circles from Nixon's time that Bush inherited of using China as a convenient wedge post-Soviet-Sino Split suddenly seemed less crucial; and as such, Carey thus had more than one reason to stick with Taiwan.
This suited Chiang just fine, as it gave him considerable cover to forge ahead with his projects of not only appointing more Taiwanese-born men to his inner circle and the bureaucracy, but also forging ahead with his civilian nuclear program with confidence that the United States, especially after the shakiness in Korea in 1979-80 and their skepticism over Hua's long-term intentions, still valued Taiwan's position. His chief economic planner and Premier Sun Yun-suan proceeded with his vast economic program, while Wang Sheng - the head of the Political Warfare Division of the ROC military and widely viewed as Chiang's likeliest successor - began to push forward with his own top-secret program, that being the development of nuclear weapons.
Taiwan's interest in having a nuclear deterrent was, of course, for entirely obvious reasons, and the escalation of this program had come with Nixon's decision to remove American warheads from Taiwan in 1972 - which Taiwanese leadership including the even-keeled Chiang Ching-kuo had understood to be the potential beginning of a gradual strategic abandonment of them to the PRC as relations between Washington and Beijing warmed. The existence of a Taiwanese nuclear weapons program had been partially revealed in late 1976, but the victorious Ford administration had never taken the following step to fully pressure Taiwan to drop the program entirely, and starting in 1979 Taiwan began importing uranium from South Africa for their own purposes, attesting that it was to fuel the increasing number of civilian reactors planned on the island as the share of primary electricity from nuclear power grew. In tandem with the "Sky Horse" ballistic missile program, Taiwan in early 1982 suddenly had a very sophisticated program to develop not only a workable warhead - which posed a number of problems in terms of its ability to be secretly, safely and successfully tested on a small, densely-populated island - but an indigenous delivery system, as concerns about American long-term thinking persisted...
[1] Not to say that Democrats didn't support Taiwan, as Quemoy Island would attest, but Madame Chiang was very deep in with the GOP FoPo establishment and the China Lobby that supported them.
[2] This is a major difference between Carey and Carter IOTL. Carter, bless his heart (and RIP Rosalynn), was convinced of his own moral superiority and saw his identity as an outsider as to his benefit and, for better or worse, built a foreign policy team of people he himself trusted. Carey's is (as Scoop Jackson's inclusion, and Katzenbach's) would suggest much more "official Washington" with names from across the Democratic half of the Blob.
Hmm, a stronger Taiwan with more US backing combined with a PRC on a more rickety foundation. Curious to see where this leads.
I really like how this TL keeps me guessing, a little more mystery than CdM.
I really like how this TL keeps me guessing, a little more mystery than CdM.
Chinese reunification war coming soon? Hopefully not. I shudder to think what disasters could emerge from that
Doesn't the PRC have nukes? I can see Taiwan supporting protesters in the mainland, but not start a war with a more densely populated and nuclear armed country
The PRC does have nukes and while their ability to strike the continental US is extremely limited, the DF-5 was the first missile with the range to cross the Pacific and it only entered service in OTL in 1981, they have had the ability to totally annihilate Taiwan since the early 70's.
Considering it's implied that both sides have nukes (or are at least on their way to having nukes, in Taiwan's case) and that even during the OTL cooperation between the US and China pre-Tiananmen I'd be surprised if the US left Taiwan out to dry, I don't think that's where where heading, unless KingSweden decides to end the TL with nuclear armageddon.
Seems like Chiang Jr. is more concerned with surface-level reforms to curtail dissent than actual democratization. Also pretty concerning to see yet another nuclear armed state that could potentially go rogue. It’s a volatile situation all things considered; looking forward to seeing how this all goes!
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