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The problem is the "perceived" wake-up call. The Opium War was just seen as another manifestation of barbarian raids pillaging China and leaving great, but localized devastation in its wake. There was not a lot of consideration given to the precedent put in place for expanded foreign domination...

While, for my part, I believe the "Great Man" theory of history is an incredibly narrowminded way in which to view the world, I believe the idea that occasionally, pivotal figures do reshape the world is an idea that has merit. History is reshaped by charismatic, dynamic figures. It was, after...

Israel is a distinct possibility as well if the Shah becomes convinced Khomeini is a threat.

I am doubtful of the assertion that there would have been no revolution whatsoever, but I think the distinctly Islamist character of Khomeini and his supporters would pretty much have caused the stillbirth of political Islamism in Iran. The Revolution prior to a certain point was actually...

That part is actually not entirely untrue. The Chinese government whether you agree with them or disagree with them has done quite a lot to preserve the culture and heritage of the Tibetan people. They've significantly increased the number of Tibetan-language primary schools in the Tibetan...

Every member of the US military swears to uphold the Constitution upon joining. Officers in particular are entrenched into the mentality of the need to uphold both the US government and its laws from day one. Strangely, quite a lot of them actually take their vows quite seriously, and in a...

As ON brought up in the post that ninja'ed my own on the matter, the Kaiser was no longer in power. The slightly more palatable Weimar Republic was in charge. Honestly though, the postwar British public is probably more concerned about rebuilding than anything else. The all-consuming desire...

Making some concessions in favor of Germany is far more preferable to the Western Allies than the prospect of Bolshevik domination, or worse still, an alliance between Germany and the USSR (technically wasn't the USSR during the Polish-Soviet War but I digress). Really, if there was any way to...

Honestly I think Bolshevik-German cooperation is a lot more likely than Franco-Bolshevik cooperation. France did, after all, send troops to fight in the short-lived Western intervention in the Russian Civil War. It wasn't a huge amount of men, but the fact that France was willing to do this in...

The logistics of the Soviet-Polish War were pretty dodgy for both sides (the Soviets more so than the Poles), even going by the extremely charitable assumption that these problems wouldn't completely hamstring Soviet efforts to conquer Poland (and they did IOTL), it's a stretch to assume that...

Aye, nothing you have said I disagreed with, that is the main restraining factor behind such decisions IMHO. Edit: Also, it is really hard to simply conduct a *limited* intervention. It is hugely embarrassing if a given military action fails to significantly alter the outcome, especially if a...

It isn't really unlimited considering Congress ultimately controls the funding for any overseas military operation. Other than that though, none of this is anything exceptionally new, the President has been defined by the most important legal document in US government as being the commander of...

The President is Constitutionally-defined as the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, he (or she, some day, hopefully) does not need Congressional approval to initiate military action. The only thing that gives some nuance to this is the War Powers Act, which Congress has never attempted to...

The Hundred Days' Reform, tardy and reluctant as it was, was nonetheless quite a potent force, and had it gone differently could very possibly have preserved the Qing Dynasty (which admittedly likely would have had to become quite a ways more integrated into Chinese culture to truly weather the...

The problem is I don't really know what can meaningfully done in such an event to actually stop the fighting short of an intervention. Sure people will call for mediation/ceasefire the whole way through but by the time it goes to all-out Sino-Soviet war, it's probably way too late for that...

It wasn't a case of surprise. Castro openly said he was going to nationalize some foreign-owned industries to put Cuban resources in the hands of the Cuban people. This was met with extreme disfavor in Washington and absolutely no effort to accommodate Castro's policies. It was only really...

China only conducted its first nuclear test in 1964, by which time the Soviet Union had thousands of warheads in its stockpile, a number which had increased significantly five years later in 1969. There was never anything close to a reasonable parity between China and the Soviets in this era. An...

This is pretty much the crux of the issue. China was the one conceivable enemy that the Soviet Union could not defeat with its overwhelming manpower (India being the other, though India was pretty consistently pro-Soviet). The likelihood that the USSR would use nuclear weapons in a theoretical...

I see the prequels as kind of a gradually increasing scale of quality from Episode I (the worst) to Episode III (the best).

Oh I wholeheartedly agree, I like that theme as well, that said, I think that very same theme of the Republic being impotent and utterly incompetent would be much better reinforced if the people taking advantage of the Republic's weakness are a genuinely terrible and unsympathetic crowd, to the...