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Otto Vin Habsburg doesn't have an army of three million men already equipped and trained.

I'm pretty sure that the Allies would sell Austria down the river in a heartbeat to get the Italians on side, particularly if there was any chance at all of the Russians getting involved. Making Austria a client state was one of Mussolini's goals.

The other side of this deal is that the longer he props up the Germans the more the West will hate them and see them as an existential threat to be contained or destroyed. This will be particularly acute when the Holocaust is discovered, as the Soviets will be tarred with that brush. It's not...

The Italians are likely to do pretty well if they attack Austria, because they can go through the Slovenian parts of Yugoslavia, and quite possibly through Hungary, bypassing the natural defences on the Austro-Italian border.

It will, but if the North Koreans are throwing weaponised biologicals around the neighbours are going to want to thoroughly destroy the place to prevent further large scale attacks that could cause enormous casualties. This isn't just a counter-value attack for them, but a counter-force one. I...

I suspect that the Russians and Chinese would consent to a British missile overflight if they knew exactly the trajectory that it would follow, given they'd also been attacked. I suspect they'd know that otherwise there'd be a fair chance it would be launched without permission. It would be a...

That's illegal in the US at this point, and absent the Fall of France Roosevelt doesn't have the political capital to repeal the legislation. US entities aren't allowed to lend money to countries that are at war at this point. That's why the US maintained the legal fiction that China and Japan...

This would mostly be of symbolic value, to try to guilt the British into defending the place for them. If relations with Japan do look strained, I can see Portugal joining the Allies pre-emptively, whatever the Iberian Pact says. With basically no chance of Spain joining the Axis, I can see...

One thing I've mentioned before, but given there should be significantly higher British aircraft production than iOTL (a higher proporition of single engined aircraft and less disruption from bombing and the Battle of Atlantic), and with the French aircraft industry still operating, where are...

If you dig into the details of the Phony War period, until the Fall of France relations between Britain and the Uk weren't amazing. For example, at this stage the British actively didn't want the US in the war, as they didn't want them to have a seat at the peace conference. On an economic...

That's not the approach they took iOTL, IIRC. They made significantly more orders than they had the dollars to pay for, on the assumption that the US Government would relent and change the law. Not just completely out of cash, but completely out of cash and so desperate that they're willing to...

Something worth remembering is that the US and US entities can't offer any loans, secured or not, to the UK and France at present. That's why the sudden stop is likely to happen. There's very little buffer.

The relationship isn't good, and is likely to get worse, but the path to Congress to give the administration the power to impose the embargo they want is very narrow, and unless something radical happens I don't see it happening. Roosevelt is likely to be stuck calling for a moral embargo...

As I understand it, there is no US embargo of Japan at this point, and there's unlikely to be one at this point.

I'd imagine that there are very large numbers of Spanish and Italian workers in the French fields this year.

That's quite obviously ludicrous. There is no way that there is a sufficient rate of capital accumulation or untapped capacity in the Soviet Union to permit that, nor the infrastructure or management to utilise it even if there was.

That shouldn't be the case here. Italy's awards after WW I radically changed the situation. Controlling the South Tyrol and partially controlling the Brenner Pass means that the Italians would start in a much more advantageous position. Part of the reason that the borders were set as they did...

I'd say that removing the First and then the Second World War would be enough, which doesn't take that much. Just delay things long enough for the social democrats to become influential enough in Germany that the focus moves to internal reform rather than external relations, and then let things...

Frederick Joliot-Curie only joined the Communist Party in 1942, when they were one of the more effective resistance movements to Nazi rule. He was left wing, but he seems to have been patriotic in his own way, despite suggestions that he was also responsible for leaking nuclear secrets to the...

The network of supporters had been smashed to pieces. The remnants of the KKE wasn't just broken and the on the run, it was also discredited and will still be mired in infighting between pro and anti M-R pact factions at this point. There simply isn't a functional communist movement in Greece to...