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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...

Even with a monarch behaving with Nicholas II level incompetence? I think the real problem is that by 1900 the monarch doesn't really have enough power to screw up enough to provoke a revolution.

Ferdinand's mother was an Orléans and his father was a minor prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gothe. This made him first cousins with Victoria on his father's side and Leopold II of Belgium on his mother's. Ferdinand's relation to Victoria makes Wilhelm, Victoria's grandson, his first cousin twice (?)...

No interest?

Just from a cultural standpoint it seems that the British are quite fond of their Monarchy. Is there any chance for a republican revolution (think February Revolution in Russia) to take place in Britain during the 20th century. If no solid POD springs to mind, and I'd be surprised if one did to...

You don't really even have to get rid of the hardliners. Georgy Malenkov was widely considered to be smarter than Khrushchev, desired friendlier relations with the West, and was planning on Liberal economic reforms. So you could get a China-esque USSR as early as 1960 if that track continues.

Depending on how 'early' you want it we're going to see very little of the USSR remaining. In the mid-50s SAC estimated that they could hit over 600 Soviet airfields capable of handling nuclear bombers, as well as about 120 out of 180 major metropolitan areas. Coupled with fallout that's not...

The United States helped develop the United Kingdom's nuclear weapons capability after WW2, and while France developed their program independently the US and UK did nothing to interfere (to my knowledge) and began providing technical assistance in the 1970s. Is there any scenario in which the...

I'd count Britain more towards the neutral side than anything at this point, Germany was already widely perceived as a threat within the British government. That being said I read somewhere that Russia was considering either pressing the Persian issue or the Serbian issue. They landed on the...

You really don't even have to do that much arranging, and Molotov doesn't really need to be a part of it either. Georgy Malenkov could either stay premier, or oust Khruschev somehow. This becomes a Stalinist Russia that is even scarier than Stalin's Stalinism (what a sentence that was!)...