AHC: Alternate Global Showdown

In 1838, Part One of Tocqueville's Democracy in America was published in New York; towards the end was an astonishing prediction:

There are at the present time two great nations in the world—allude to the Russians and the Americans... All other nations seem to have nearly reached their national limits, and have only to maintain their power; these alone are proceeding—along a path to which no limit can be perceived... Their starting points are different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

The US and Russia went on to become the two global competing superpowers just over a century later -- and as it happened, Russia first underwent a communist revolution, and used its superpower status to head the communist powers.

The challenge is to fulfill Tocqueville's prophecy in the same time or less -- minus that last detail (;)). No PoD's before the above mentioned publication, though I'd actually prefer if the first one was much later.
 
no communist revolution in Russia.

(1) Have Great Britain stay neutral in WWI, Germany "wins" a quick "victory" in 1914, and Russia demobilizes. The Czar remains in power.

(2) Have Germany sign a peace treaty in 1917 that the Russian centrists can live with. The February 1917 revolution still occurs, but now without the peace plank for the Reds the November 1917 revolution doesn't.

(3) Have America and/or Britain and/or France intervene massively on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War. In our time line America had no interest (according to my grandfather) and Britain and France couldn't.
 
Here we go:

Have Bismarck favor Russia over Austria as an ally of Germany. This leads to German assistence building the Trans-Siberian railroad, and Russia wins an alt-Russo-Japanese war with German naval assistance. An alt-WWI then occurs, with the sides as Germany-Russia-Italy vs. Britain-France-AH-Ottomans. The GRI alliance wins, dismembering AH and the Ottomans (German Iraq? :D). France loses a couple chunks to the Germans, and has to pay huge reparations and limit its army. Britain more or less gets a white peace, since the RN is still too big to take on. The US stays out.

After the war, Russia undergoes a set of reforms to head off a full-scale revolution. The Duma is given some real powers, there is limited freedom of the press, etc. Tensions develop between Germany and Russia after squabbles in the Balkans over spheres of influence in the wreckage of the Ottoman and AH Empires. In the wider world, an alt-Great Depression occurs, leading to *fascists taking over France (We hate Germans! And Jews!), Italy (We didn't get enough out of AH!), and Britain (The government is criminally incompetent!). The British takeover was particularly nasty, with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand sliding into the US orbit and rebellions across India. *WWII begins with the *Axis (Britain, France, Italy) attacking Germany after the Germans refused give back the bits they took in WWI (The Kaiser put his foot down after the Chancellor said "but...peace in our time!" once too many times). The Russians refuse to support Germany, since Germany has been supporting too many inconvenient minorities in the Balkans.

The Germans fight hard, but lose the Low Countries and are barely hold on to the Rhine. A large chunk of the HSF is lost to British dive-bombers in the initial hours of the war. A second series of Axis offensives manage to capture the Rhineland, but are stopped when they try to penetrate deeper into Germany. The war slides into a stalemate. The Axis victories manage to scare the living shit out of the US Congress, which passes a series of increases in the military budget, drastically increasing the size of the Army and Navy (think the OTL Two-Ocean Navy Act). Russia is also alarmed, but not enough to intervene.

Eventually, the Axis manages to beat Germany and ruin it. The Axis then backs Britain in it attempt to restore Canada to its Dominion status and recognize the King of Britain (one of the effects of the fascist takeover in Britain was that Edward VII is restored to the Kingship, and the Dominions don't like that), leading to an Axis-US war. The US wins, since the Axis is still recovering from the *WWII. Russia picks up the pieces in Europe, and the US and Russia are effectively the last two intact Great Powers, and settle into a rivalry. The development of nukes early on makes what was gearing up to be another conventional Great Power war into something approaching the OTL Cold War, if significantly less ideological.

How plausible is this? This biggest hole I can see is *WWII, but other than that, I think it's fairly plausible.
 
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