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The trends would remain the same but a Russian Alaska might still tip a decision that was finely balanced one way to one finely balanced the other, butterflying to a wholly different world. Of course, it might not but still, suppose ... Britain is already worried about Russia in the Great...

This topic has been tackled in an alternate history book...

Clemenceau was mayor of Montmartre (or the 18th arrondissement, strictly) prior to the Commune seizing power in 1871 and sought to reconcile communards and republicans, without success. He was out of Paris when the Commune was suppressed. It wouldn't be too great a stretch of the imagination...

Britain wouldn't have had nukes by that point. Even the OTL 1983 Labour Party was in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Like others, I'm not convinced by the detail but I do think the concept's worth running with. You'd need Foot to be removed and perhaps replaced by Benn. You'd also...

Russia, having lost the Crimean War, recognised the indefensibility of Alaska and sought to sell it. At one point, it tried to engineer a bidding war between Britain and the US but Britain wasn't interested and the US was distracted by the prospect of losing the South rather than gaining a...

But wasn't the whole rationale behind Hitler's strategy to secure his western front before launching in the east, so avoiding the two-front problem Germany had in WWI? I don't really see a viable POD that enables Britain and France to stay neutral while Hitler attacks the Soviet Union, which...

My mind did go straight to the magisterial If Banks Had Played alternative history, which has a Powell-led Conservatives producing something of a southern strategy on precisely that basis, though I don't think that Powell himself had the willingness to play the low politics that might have been...

One of the reasons that Nixon's Southern strategy was possible was because the Democrats had thrown away their supremacy over Civil Rights. Unless there's some equivalent issue that's toxified Labour, I don't see it really working. Nor, for that matter, does it need to. As 2015 proved, the...

Like much of the British empire's history, if it were to have happened, it would probably have happened by accident. My guess would be that rather than reform of the Commons in London, it's more likely that colonial politicians would have been co-opted via the Lords. This not only gets around...

If fighting breaks out in Europe or the Middle East then a full nuclear exchange is almost inevitable. It's possible that you might get direct exchanges taking place in proxy wars or in conflicts seen as strategically peripheral but the politics would become very difficult for either side to...

War was intrinsic to the essence of Nazism - certainly as Hitler conceived it - so to waive away war is to fundamentally change what Nazism was. You'd probably have to remove Hitler from the scene, which would have tremendous butterflies from the event itself (assassination? coup? accident?)...

Surely the pressure would be on Hitler to still do a deal with Stalin. As you say, Germany is potentially in a bit of a bind without secure supplies and a prolonged war will cause its economy and war-making capacity serious trouble. But on the other hand, a relatively quick win in Poland...

Indeed - there would have to be some PoD to generate the outcome of warmer US-Cuba relations, so let's invent one. How about that someone in State recognises the strategic risk that the revolution poses and persuades Eisenhower (who carries great personal prestige and has no need of...

Yes. The Nazis wanted war. They wanted it because they believed in it ideologically as a purifying process by which the strong emerged triumphant and the weak were rightly discarded from history, whether as individuals, nations or races; and also because they believed in the lebensraum...

If the Americans had known with foresight what they knew with hindsight - that an estranged Cuba would jump into the Soviet sphere, with all the risks that ran - the business interests might have been overriden by national security concerns. I don't see why it's not possible in principle that...

It's not always the state that's doing the forced relocation though. Civilian mobs can be just as effective in pushing out former neighbours of the wrong ethnicity / religion / colour / whatever when an attempt is made to create a country for the chosen group.

I remember reading or hearing (though I can't remember where) that Stalin gave orders to resist any attempt by the West to force a land route through to Berlin unless it looked like a general mobilisation, in which case the matter should be referred to Moscow. That implies that he would have...

Doesn't any attempt of that nature invariably lead to violence when people find themselves (or their neighbours) on the wrong side of the line, as in Poland-Russia, Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, for example?

Yes, I think this sort of thing is the most likely route. Russians do tend to appreciate a successful strong leader and after a discredited communist government, then a discredited Yeltsin regime, then a discredited Zyuganov regime, there'd certainly have been scope for something else to take...

I agree. The Nazis' antisemitism was inevitable in any far-right group but the intensity of it may well have been a vote loser. It's one thing to have them in and amongst the scapegoats, together with liberals, sexual perverts (as they see it), communists, foreigners, gypsies and so on - but...