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Very much so. It's not just that ITTL Germany does respect the neutrality of Belgium. It's also that with a 'Russia First' strategy Germany has little interest to rush seemingly unprovoked declarations of war to Russia and France, so it doesn't. In all likelihood, the event sequence is as...

Nice to notice that the overwhelming pressure of reality is apparently worming its way in the super-thick skulls of the Japanese military. The Romanian situation could evolve in many different ways, depending on Anglo-French and German reactions.

Yep. :D Following this line of thought, I would point out that if France joins the war, and although TTL Germany isn't going to annex large swaths of French territory for various reasons, it is still quite likely that a few relatively minor border adjustments would take place to annex certain...

As a matter of fact, you are quite right.

They might easily change their mind if the revolution is seemingly victorious on their borders, however, esp. if events somehow provide a restoration of Polish autonomy in Posen and/or Galicia.

AJ was certainly not a popular or influential figure, but the simultaneous assassination of the POTUS and VPOTUS (and near-assassination of the Secretary of State) by Southern sympathizers makes for a more serious and threatening treasonous attempt to break continuity of government, than what...

Not really. They didn't like being forcibly annexed by Prussia too much, but they weren't any less sensible to German national sentiment than any other part of Germany. They would be happy to join (North) Germany just like the other German states, provided they can keep their own autonomy. You...

Exactly. The double assassination by a group of Southern sympathizers is going to put a lot of wind in the sails of the Radical Republicans.

Of course, the French would then have much bigger concerns of their own, dealing with Anglo-German-Italian blockade and coastal raiding. :rolleyes:

Uhm, technically you are right. The Austro-Italian border included several places where it was Alpine warfare (the 'sides' of the Bozen-Trento salient, the Veneto border) and several ones where it was classical trench warfare (the 'bottom' of the Bozen-Trento salient, the Friuli border, the...

Yes, you are totally right about French overstretch, but please take into account that the Franco-Italian Alpine front is rather shorter than the Austrian-Italian Alpine one. So Italy is going to have more spare troops than OTL. As a matter of fact, the German-Italian accords to deploy extra...

I'm an ardent fan of successful 1848 revolutions, but we cannot ignore the hard reality that an awfully big number of uprisings, rebellions, and guerrilla wars *failed* during the 19th century, many more than they succeeded. There was absolutely nothing high-probability or irresistible about...

Well, yes. That, and building a better strategic buttress against French expansionism, which was the whole reason the Congress of Vienna created the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in the first place.

Looking at the Italian side of things, Italy doesn't really stand a chance of accomplishing much on the Alpine front, at least not until France starts to break. Moreover, they would have a serious forces surplus sitting on their hands, you can deploy only so many people on the Western Alps...

Given that otherwise the inlaw risks to lose all of Belgium due to the French intervention, the territory gained by Prussia would be a fair price paid for service (help) rendered. ITTL the Dutch would keep the vast majority of Flanders. Anyway, to give a quarter of Belgium to Prussia was a...

Well, I suppose there may be room for diplomatic/political/military butterflies to let it stay Dutch. It's not such a compelling issue. Prussia would make sizable gains nonetheless. :)

What DeathDemon said. Plus, I really wish people on this board would stop treating 'guerrilla warfare' as an invincible solution to the military inferiority problems 19th-century nationalists of various stripes would face. If one looks at the overall military record of the whole century, it was...

Well, we may adopt the PoD Pompeius proposed: the Dutch crush the Belgian revolt (honestly, with a bit more decisive Dutch reaction, it would have been easy), the French intervene to uspport the Belgian revolutionaries, the Prussian intervene as well to support the Dutch, a three-way partition...

Yes, but also note that what is now Dutch Limburg between 1839 and 1867 became the Duchy of Limburg, a part of the German Confederation, in a personal union with the Kingdom of Netherlands (same as the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg). Given this precedent, and the fact that Prussia had previously...

Their main concerns were to avoid France getting the Flemish ports or becoming too much aggrandized. At the same time, they were unwilling to burden themselves with a continental protectorate. In 1830-31, they weren't especially enamored of the OTL independent buffer state solution, in...