Having Germany win WW1 at the last minute with the Spring Offensive truly makes for an interesting situation.
OTL, the Entente and associates barely held together after their nearly Pyrrhic Victory, with several regimes falling. It’s not quite on the scale of what happened to the Romanovs, but the Liberals in the UK never recovered from their “victory”, Wilson had a stroke and saw the Democrats collapse in popularity and were only resuscitated by the Great Depression. Italy’s democracy went Fascist early on, etc.
In this story, all of the above still seems to be happening but worse, and the “victorious” Central Powers regimes are only modestly better off than OTL. The militarists and junkers are already being shown the door in Germany despite their ultimately successful conquests of East and West, the Ottoman dynasty looks to be on its way out since they basically lost the war and the nationalist Turks are fully taking over the metropole. Lord knows what the Habsburg dynasty is facing in the 1920s. Bulgaria and its regime seem the biggest winners, having won its full territorial ambitions, though now all of its neighbors hate it.
It’s not totally inaccurate to describe the end of this war as having No Winners, Just Survivors. Germany clearly just conquered a vast empire of vassal states, but the sunk cost has been so high it’s unclear it will ever “make a profit” or be worth it.
OTL, the Entente and associates barely held together after their nearly Pyrrhic Victory, with several regimes falling. It’s not quite on the scale of what happened to the Romanovs, but the Liberals in the UK never recovered from their “victory”, Wilson had a stroke and saw the Democrats collapse in popularity and were only resuscitated by the Great Depression. Italy’s democracy went Fascist early on, etc.
In this story, all of the above still seems to be happening but worse, and the “victorious” Central Powers regimes are only modestly better off than OTL. The militarists and junkers are already being shown the door in Germany despite their ultimately successful conquests of East and West, the Ottoman dynasty looks to be on its way out since they basically lost the war and the nationalist Turks are fully taking over the metropole. Lord knows what the Habsburg dynasty is facing in the 1920s. Bulgaria and its regime seem the biggest winners, having won its full territorial ambitions, though now all of its neighbors hate it.
It’s not totally inaccurate to describe the end of this war as having No Winners, Just Survivors. Germany clearly just conquered a vast empire of vassal states, but the sunk cost has been so high it’s unclear it will ever “make a profit” or be worth it.
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