I think in a lot of ways the Monroe Doctrine expressed not the actual intent of US foreign policy (since, as is pointed out above, the US couldn't do much at the time or for a while afterwards) but rather declared a new reality in the New World, that of independent states led by local elites. In...
The Proceedings article is indeed bizarre, but I don't think it's as insane as it first appears. To my mind the easiest way to get some kind of letter of marque would be to make some kind of deal with merchant ships during the world wars wherein they were compensated for sinking submarines...
I think the 1890s is a plausible divergence as it gives about a generation for different attitudes to set in. I do think more than trade is required (see British attitudes towards the Confederacy). There's a difference between industries buying components or raw materials from the most efficient...
I think an underrated driver of this decision, debateably more so than cultural ties, would be financial ties. IOTL American finance skewed heavily towards the Entente and continued access to American lines of credit was one of the big reasons the British and French put so high a priority on...
I think the only way to really do this is to get a peace President. You're going to need some genuinely catastrophic defeats for northern armies, and probably get rid of the March to the Sea somehow, because IIRC part of the point of Sherman doing that was to secure electoral victory in '64...
Were NATO and the Warsaw Pact going to go to war what do we think the role of the United Nations would be?
The UN Charter specifically says that before turning issues over to the Security Council the nations must try to resolve them themselves, and pre-Cuban Missile Crisis when there wasn't...
In The Guns of August an incident is described wherein the Kaiser (or some other very high ranking staffer) asked Moltke to reverse the trains, but Moltke panicked and yelled at whoever asked him about how the die was cast. The man in charge of the railroads for the military wrote a book post...
I wouldn't, but countries have been using justifications like this forever, it's just a matter of making it an internationally accepted definition and doctrine.
The UN is often ridiculed as a "toothless" organization, and there is some truth to this. The UN Charter precludes action on issues which are "essentially domestic in nature." Thus, many events (genocides, mass repression, war crimes during a civil war etc.) that people think the UN should act...
I'm not sure about the Geneva Conventions but I'm fairly familiar with the Hague. It's pretty easy to have it never happen, NO one wanted to attend in the first place.
Czar Nicholas proposed the Hague Convention out of misguided realpolitk, thinking that limiting both the enemy's and his own...
SMS Goeben's epic escape from the British Mediterranean fleet to Constantinople is pretty widely accepted to have been the decisive action in bringing the Ottoman's into the 1st World War. If the Goeben were sunk before it could reach Turkey what effect would this have on the war?
Without a navy I doubt that Farragut's going to help the Confederates that much. That said it would be interesting who would replace him, and whether or not they would be as aggressive with the Union Navy.
That's an interesting comment about the ratio of capital ships. IOTL Fisher wanted many more battlecruisers than he got, and generally thought them a superior class of fighting ship. The Germans who, even in their own battlecruiser designs, tended to prefer more armor, would probably keep right...
Is it at all possible, pre-WW1, to construct an incident wherein the German Empire and Great Britain fight a limited naval war against one another without any allies?
I think the most interesting part of the Istanbul question is Russia's response. Russia had coveted Constantinople for as long as it had territory territory on the Black sea. Russia had also been a major supporter of Bulgarian independence, and it's debatable, knowing this, whether or not the...