Recent content by david_herdson

  1. Russia keeps Alaska and the Czar flees there after the Civil War

    The trends would remain the same but a Russian Alaska might still tip a decision that was finely balanced one way to one finely balanced the other, butterflying to a wholly different world. Of course, it might not but still, suppose ... Britain is already worried about Russia in the Great...
  2. WI: Lloyd George and Keynes were Killed in 1916?

    This topic has been tackled in an alternate history book...
  3. Awesome PODs that you wish got more attention

    Clemenceau was mayor of Montmartre (or the 18th arrondissement, strictly) prior to the Commune seizing power in 1871 and sought to reconcile communards and republicans, without success. He was out of Paris when the Commune was suppressed. It wouldn't be too great a stretch of the imagination...
  4. British Civil War 1987

    Britain wouldn't have had nukes by that point. Even the OTL 1983 Labour Party was in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Like others, I'm not convinced by the detail but I do think the concept's worth running with. You'd need Foot to be removed and perhaps replaced by Benn. You'd also...
  5. WI: Britain buys Alaska in the early 1860s?

    Russia, having lost the Crimean War, recognised the indefensibility of Alaska and sought to sell it. At one point, it tried to engineer a bidding war between Britain and the US but Britain wasn't interested and the US was distracted by the prospect of losing the South rather than gaining a...
  6. What if the War began in 1944? Royal Navy in particular and RAF overall

    But wasn't the whole rationale behind Hitler's strategy to secure his western front before launching in the east, so avoiding the two-front problem Germany had in WWI? I don't really see a viable POD that enables Britain and France to stay neutral while Hitler attacks the Soviet Union, which...
  7. AHC: British 'Southern Strategy'

    My mind did go straight to the magisterial If Banks Had Played alternative history, which has a Powell-led Conservatives producing something of a southern strategy on precisely that basis, though I don't think that Powell himself had the willingness to play the low politics that might have been...
  8. AHC: British 'Southern Strategy'

    One of the reasons that Nixon's Southern strategy was possible was because the Democrats had thrown away their supremacy over Civil Rights. Unless there's some equivalent issue that's toxified Labour, I don't see it really working. Nor, for that matter, does it need to. As 2015 proved, the...
  9. Would a surviving British Empire as an Imperial Federation be less racist than the UK today?

    Like much of the British empire's history, if it were to have happened, it would probably have happened by accident. My guess would be that rather than reform of the Commons in London, it's more likely that colonial politicians would have been co-opted via the Lords. This not only gets around...
  10. How hot can the Cold War get without turning into full on nuclear war.

    If fighting breaks out in Europe or the Middle East then a full nuclear exchange is almost inevitable. It's possible that you might get direct exchanges taking place in proxy wars or in conflicts seen as strategically peripheral but the politics would become very difficult for either side to...
  11. How long can Third Reich survive without war?

    War was intrinsic to the essence of Nazism - certainly as Hitler conceived it - so to waive away war is to fundamentally change what Nazism was. You'd probably have to remove Hitler from the scene, which would have tremendous butterflies from the event itself (assassination? coup? accident?)...
  12. WI - BEF goes to Poland, not France

    Surely the pressure would be on Hitler to still do a deal with Stalin. As you say, Germany is potentially in a bit of a bind without secure supplies and a prolonged war will cause its economy and war-making capacity serious trouble. But on the other hand, a relatively quick win in Poland...
  13. Cuba - What if the US recognizes Castro as new leader of Cuba

    Indeed - there would have to be some PoD to generate the outcome of warmer US-Cuba relations, so let's invent one. How about that someone in State recognises the strategic risk that the revolution poses and persuades Eisenhower (who carries great personal prestige and has no need of...
  14. WI - BEF goes to Poland, not France

    Yes. The Nazis wanted war. They wanted it because they believed in it ideologically as a purifying process by which the strong emerged triumphant and the weak were rightly discarded from history, whether as individuals, nations or races; and also because they believed in the lebensraum...
  15. Cuba - What if the US recognizes Castro as new leader of Cuba

    If the Americans had known with foresight what they knew with hindsight - that an estranged Cuba would jump into the Soviet sphere, with all the risks that ran - the business interests might have been overriden by national security concerns. I don't see why it's not possible in principle that...
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