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A great post with a lot going on but there's something important buried in here that I wanted to highlight: the capitulations. While not as extreme as say, China, by the late 19th century the Ottomans had via losing wars and various financing missteps/ bankruptcy crises wound up with a whole...

Yeah I don't like "communism bad grey building bread lines lol" timelines and I don't think that's what you were doing at all. If you look at the history of US food quality and especially US beer your description of ATL whiskey production isn't that far off from the postwar hegemonic reign of US...

This is absolutely incredible on several levels. I'm super interested in the history of industrial food culture and in daily life in hypothetical alternate socialist Americas so this is hitting on all cylinders. I love it.

I think you've hit on something here in re: ISKCON's popularity in the west; in short, the hippies ruined it. What made ISKCON grow in the west was it's position as basically a fad, a part of the overall countercultural movement's turn towards spirituality and lifestyle and away from politics...

This would do it. Really just a Syrian plan to initiate a grinding attritional fight in the Golan, based on seizing local high ground with smaller "bites", bringing up infantry with antitank weapons to dig in, extending the SAM umbrella to cover them, repeat might have worked. The OTL Egyptian...

Well then, Indonesia is probably the biggest one, if the mass killings of Communists in 1965 aren't given the tacit go-ahead by DC. Italy of course is where a Communist party could have been elected into office most readily in W.Europe although that would have triggered an instant coup or at...

Ah! Okay. I guess I was confused. I think restoring the monarchy once it is abolished is a long shot, BUT, the Ottoman monarchy could easily have survived the end of the first world war if they had just embraced the anti-Sevres nationalist resistance. It's not highlighted much today, but the...

I also don't agree with the characterization of the Ottoman Empire as Islamic extremists. They were Sunni chauvinists for most of the time of the empire, merciless towards Shi'a or Alevis or anybody who could be considered a heretical Muslim, but it was a force of conservatism and...

Post first world war this is actually more likely than an Ottoman revival. Although quite a lot of reactionaries around the end of the first world war and the 1920's were loyal to the institutions of the Ottoman Empire (the Caliphate, and the idea/principle of the Sultanate) the actual house of...

I'd actually argue that stabilizing daily life after the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward was made significantly more difficult by those events. Alexniko is spot-on with this, and I think my post only glossed over this dynamic- public health would be the one area where the CCP would...

I think questions like this are going to hinge on exactly how the KMT wins. Saying things like "the CCP is defeated" or "warlordism is brought to heel" glosses over what would be central problems for the KMT and would determine the contours of how they govern and the mistakes they make and...

Turkey carried out a huge mobilization on the Iraqi border in 1991 and apparently tied down quite a large number of Iraqi troops, but the mobilization was difficult, slow, and administratively chaotic, and reserve units deeply under-performed. As said above, Ozal was very close to Bush Sr. and...

I absolutely agree. A 1980's pandemic would encounter, in most of the world, pretty well organized and robust public health systems, especially in the US. The cold war national security states provided a lot of continuity of government and emergency public health functions that were hollowed...

Well there's your problem. Recent history is full of military forces in the Arab world performing well on the ground in the face of total enemy air dominance- just not state armies. Everything from tactical-operational defensive (Hezbollah 2006) to operational-strategic offensive (Islamic State...

Tansu Çiller in Turkey presided over the state-PKK conflict's bloodiest years in which extrajudicial killings and dirty war tactics were not uncommon. She was also (allegedly) deeply mobbed up with the Deep State and various Turkish ultranationalist mafia figures under the auspices of the...

Also this whole thread could just be a thread about the Houthis. There isn't a rigged or re purposed weapon they haven't loved. Using S-75 SAMs as surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, using AA-8 air to air IR missiles as surface-to-air missiles, ripping the antiship missile launchers off...

There actually is! Motorcycle-mounted heavy machineguns have started to pop up in Syria. As the US/coalition got aggressive about blowing up ISIL technicals, they moved away from using pickup trucks to a dushka mounted on the rear of a motorcycle with an attached brace on the side- the driver...

Wasn't this rumored to have happened OTL? I have read in several places that the Soviets were said to have used a low-powered ground based dazzler laser to harass one of the DoD Shuttle missions.

I realize that Raketoplan is based off of OTL designs but when I first read the description I was like :confused::confused: - I'm a confirmed spaceplane skeptic, and think the lasting contribution of Dynasoar might have been a "what not to do" lessons learned, but at least I see what draws...

Fantastic timeline! I'm really enjoying this slow-burn take on the space race. What exactly, however, is the difference between Safir and Zarya? As I understand it, the Soviets have three different crewed spacecraft in this TL- Orel, Safir, and Zarya. IIRC Zarya is something like truncated...