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Point of information: the Lisbon Treaty actually imposes a cap on the number of MEPs an individual country can elect, so Russia couldn't really exercise any more power within the EU apparatus than Germany or France. On paper, anyway.

1968's Reagan strikes me as far more of a committed ideologue than the President we eventually got. Would he ever opt to share a ticket with Nelson Rockefeller, of all people? I can see his Goldwaterite supporters taking such a thing as heresy.

1988 is before The Apprentice (and other assorted japes) turned him into a complete joke. He'd run a very pedestrian Perot-type campaign, and wouldn't cause much of a stir. However much an act it really is, Trump's 2016 bid of OTL would not even survive the political standards of the late-'80s...

Whoops, misread. Yeah, JFK's going to carry this one. It definitely won't be the landslide of 1964 (that had as much to do the post-assassination rally to the Democrats as Goldwater's political eccentricities), but Barry's politics are far outside the early-'60s mainstream. I don't think a...

No way Goldwater's going to get the nomination after the '64 wipeout. That would be a totally unprecedented gamble (and one liable to fail, too).

Which is the problem with Bachmann's candidacy in general, let alone a Bachmann Presidency. Even with the Obama campaign in jeopardy, American conservatism has far more polished, marketable acts to put on the table.

Absolutely, but the writing was already on the wall by the time Lincoln came around. The problem is, he's only part of the equation. Both sides had already established that there could be no mutually satisfactory compromise on the question of slavery – even attempts to, say, levy a Federal tax...

Staunchly Catholic, for the most behalf, or at the very least crypto-Catholic – the initial stymieing of Elizabeth's religious settlement can be largely attributed to the presence of Catholics in the House of Lords. This is one of the few plausible scenarios that could have brought Mary Stuart...

Lincoln's election would not have made sense outside of a context where abolition, and therein Southern secession, was not already on the cards. That ball had been rolling for years, even decades – to butterfly it, one would necessarily have to butterfly the Lincoln presidency.

Can't see how you can get worse than the abomination of OTL. The post-Genocide 'reconstruction' of Rwanda was essentially a white terror, an extended period of looting and reprisal killings that, whilst hardly on the scale of the Interahamwe's madness, very much alienated the Hutus (I recall...

Every incarnation of the IRA has declared the Irish state to be illegitimate, so unification, absent a Sinn Féin takeover down South (highly unlikely at any point in the late-20th Century), is totally off the table. Putting aside the implausibility of the British being forced out in the first...

In what sense? The U.S. didn't enter the war with explicit designs upon abolition, but, as others have said, the South's secession was wholly predicated upon the assumption that Lincoln would emancipate the slaves. Self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.

It couldn't if he'd died gradually. The French Empire was doomed to collapse for all the same reasons Alexander's was - overextension, coupled with Napoleon's tendency towards nepotism in conquered territories. There was no decent local bureaucracy to assume the reins of power when the head...

Marxists need not apply. You've chosen a very iffy period for this; I don't think it can be done. Communism was never a major grassroots force in Spain, least of all in the 1910s - the strength of the PCE was vastly inflated with Soviet aid during the Civil War, and they're outside your...

Interracial coupling was not going to result in this under any circumstances - rather, you'd end up with slices of mixed-race, culturally British cosmopolitania lording over dark-skinned majorities they detest. Absent fundamental shifts in more general European attitudes to foreign societies...

Could this come to pass under any circumstances around the late-18th / 19th Centuries? I'm aware the Episcopal Church has never been an especially strong denomination, but it would make for a seriously interesting America.

Despite pretensions otherwise, virtually nobody in the NAM was genuinely nonaligned, nor did it ever really pretend to be an effective 'third way' in the Cold War. India is no exception.

India WAS Soviet-aligned. To my knowledge, the four Indo-Pak Wars represent one of the few major triumphs of a Soviet arsenal over American arms in the field.

Israel's odds in 1948 should not be overestimated, though the best (?) PoDs are prewar. This was not the Israel of 2015, it was a state essentially hashed together by paramilitaries in the face of impending doom, armed with some very shoddy Soviet equipment. Its primary strength lay in the...