Lateknight
Banned
With a pod no latter then 1900 have the USA join the central powers at some point during ww1.
AHC central powers US
- Thread starter Lateknight
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Post 1900? The only possible way would be for Britain and France to act incredibly recklessly and begin torpedoing US merchant ships, or sinking a US cruise liner or something of the sort. It's marginally possible with a pre-1900 POD, such as worse relations between the US and the British Empire in the 19th century, or a much higher percentage of Irish and German immigrants in the US, especially in positions of political power, but after 1900, I just don't see it realistically happening. The best you could hope for would be a neutral US that maintains relations and trade with both sides throughout the war.
Isn't there a way to bring the US and Britain into a war over Venezuela in the 1890s? I don't know the details myself, but I seem to recall it being discussed before...
In this case would it be possible for the US and Germany to forge closer ties and eventually ally? It's not strictly after 1900, but it's pretty darn close.
In this case would it be possible for the US and Germany to forge closer ties and eventually ally? It's not strictly after 1900, but it's pretty darn close.
Looking over this article, it doesn't seem like either the US or UK were interested in going to war over the Venezuela boundary dispute. It would take a complex set of PODs earlier in the 19th century for Britain especially to see the US as more of a threat than Germany, enough to want to go to war with the US over a matter like the Venezuela dispute, in which case the First World War as we know it would likely be butterflied away
Looking over this article, it doesn't seem like either the US or UK were interested in going to war over the Venezuela boundary dispute. It would take a complex set of PODs earlier in the 19th century for Britain especially to see the US as more of a threat than Germany, enough to want to go to war with the US over a matter like the Venezuela dispute, in which case the First World War as we know it would likely be butterflied away
I don't think WWI could be butterflied. I think, though, if Cleveland perhaps wasn't as reasonable, this crisis could have led to war. However, I don't know much about it. The Venezuelan president at the time had some considerable influence in Washington, according to wiki, so maybe he's able to manipulate things a little further and the crisis escalates into British occupation of the disputed territories.
A few years down the line something is bound to blow up in Europe.
I misspoke - meant to say that the World War I we're familiar with would be butterflied, but definitely some sort of major conflict in Europe was on the horizon.
I could maybe see Cleveland or some other 1892-1896 president being more rabid about enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, even at the risk of war; but 1890s Britain was just about at the height of its imperial power, so any such war would most certainly *not* be a walkover like the 1898 war with Spain was.
I'm kinda curious now myself to see how such a war would play out. Wonder if anyone will write a timeline about it.
Britain's best hope is to finish the war quickly as otherwise America's large internal market, vast coastlines, and relatively greater degree of autarky compared to the British. Britain, on paper, can beat the United States but that depends on mobilizing the empire's resources faster than the US can mobilize its own (not likely and the logistics are not favorable), not having something else pop up (like Ireland), and the US doing anything other than adopting a Fabian strategy (which would be the smart, likely thing as the US military at that point was based on a small professional core intended to serve as the nucleus for large numbers of volunteers/conscripts to fill out the ranks).
I know Britain ruled a large proportion of the Caribbean at this point - not just most of the Lesser Antilles, but the Lucayas and British Honduras as well - but how many military assets could they bring to bear in the Venezuela/Guyana theater in the 1890s? And likewise, how many could the US bring to bear, and how quickly, assuming this takes place before the Spanish-American war and thus there's no US presence yet in Cuba or Puerto Rico?