After a long series of distractions, I'm back in the GURPS game. Continuing with the Dixie series is Dixie-4. According to Infinite Worlds, "the Civil War occurred in 1844, the West is still Mexican, and the United States and CSA are allied against the Mexican and German Empires. Britain is neutral." I don't know what could provoke an American Civil War in 1844 off the top of my head; perhaps an earlier abolition movement? At any rate, I depict the Confederates being much stronger here, as the South was comparatively stronger than the North than they would be twenty years later, and I even have all of the slave states joining the CSA. Of course, this begs the question: why is the CSA rebelling, when the South had control of the federal government at the time? Good question, next question.
Mexico itself would have to be strong, and perhaps fought a few wars against the Americans and Confederates. That's about what it will take to bring both the USA and CSA on the same side. Here, Mexico never suffers the humiliation of the Mexican-American War, and while it has a few problems with civil unrest, generally does a better job at border control. The American Civil War generated a lot of refugees trying to flee to Mexico, provoking a tougher Mexican response. The violence of the ACW created lots of outlaw types, so when the Americans were going to Mexico, they weren't sending their best.[1] With the USA and CSA at each others' throats, the American government
s couldn't do much about it. The Americans did try to fight wars of Manifest Destiny against Mexico, but separately, and they were each defeated in turn. British assistance helped. Later on in the century, the Mexicans turned to the Germans, who (as Prussia) defeated France and Austria during the War of German Unification. These defeats against Mexico turned Mexico into the great threat that the Americans, Confederates and (later) the Canadians could unite against.
British neutrality implies lots of negative things about the situation in Europe: have the British already been cowed by the German war machine? Has there been a more recent war between them and the natural German rivals of France and Russia? Does Germany already dominate Europe, rendering British opposition moot? Perhaps so, a world under a dominant Kaiserreich. This is what I chose: a world where the German Empire reigns supreme. Germany is the richest country in the world, although its colonial empire is growing unwieldy. The Germans have no real opposition to their global rule; only the Americans have formed a bloc to oppose Germany, and the only reason they can do so is because their words are backed with nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation is limited to Germany, Russia, Italy, the USA and the CSA; Britain and France had nuclear programs during the Great War, but they were shut down and are now legally barred from producing more. China has a clandestine program, as does India and South Africa.
The French and British went to war against the Germans and the Russians in the 1930s, with the French and British losing and being forced to sign off much of their colonial empires. The Germans defeated the French by successfully breaking through the Western Front and capturing Paris, while the British fought on until a German atomic bomb destroyed the Royal Navy in the Channel, and a second one destroyed Birmingham. The British initially kept the dominions, but the growth of an independent national identity in the dominions, along with distrust of the British, eventually led them to go their own way. The French have been humiliated and are about as eager for war as OTL Germany, however, they are neutral. The French are permanently disarmed and prevented from getting into an alliance with any other great power. Russia is on Germany's side. The Russo-German alliance was secured by Bismarck ITTL and it stuck, with Germany taking the Russian side during the Great Game, and it's only recently starting to crack.
In the East, the Qing have been deposed and replaced with the more reformist Tao Dynasty. The Ottoman Empire remained neutral after the Balkan Wars, where the Germans and Russians basically disassembled their European holdings; the Ottomans almost joined the French and British in the Great War, and are glad they didn't. India became independent after the Great War, with Russian-backed nationalists taking control, and now the Indian National Party is trying to keep the country and itself from splitting along all sorts of identitarian lines.
[1] Some of them, I'm sure, were nice people.
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