AHC: German-Russian-British Alliance in WW1

I saw this in the "Alternative WWI Alliances" thread and this particular idea interested me enough to make a thread about it. After doing a bit of searching on this, I think I found only one thread about this, but it's been quite a while since it was created so I wanted to revive this idea here.

I think I can imagine a few ways with which this could happen:
-If Russia and Germany are already allied from the start and opposing Britain initially, then maybe Britain would be forced to support them in the interests of balance?
-Franco-Austrian War doesn't happen and Austria becomes slightly stronger. France and Austria become allies. Following this, Germany allies with Russia against Austria and a failure of the Anglo-French detente could lead to an Anglo-German alliance, ultimately creating a Triple Entente with Russia, Germany and Britain.
-Bismarck stays in charge of foreign policies.
-Maybe Francis Joseph dies early while Rudolph does not commit suicide, then Austria-Hungary under him might align itself with France? Colonial affairs with France and Britain become more hostile and forces Britain to tend to the German-Russian side over the Franco-Austrian side. War happens earlier, maybe in the 1890s or 1900s, because the colonial conflicts during that time were still fresh, and this would be before the populations in Germany and Austria can do something about the diplomatic hostilities between their countries by pressuring their governments.

Obviously this would butterfly away the OTL war, but what would a war with this alliance look like? What would be another way with which this could happen? What would be of America, Italy or other OTL Allied Powers?

(also, would this be more appropriate in 'After 1900' or 'Before 1900'?)
 
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And who would oppose such a crushingly mighty alliance ?

If there was such an alliance with OTL respective powers, then there will be no general war in Europe because the opposing party would be no match.

You need a very different balance of powers to have it happen : France needs to be the top dog on the continent and Germany being relatively weaker, Rhineland being French and the south german States remaining independent but the French and Austrian sphere.
 
And who would oppose such a crushingly mighty alliance ?

If there was such an alliance with OTL respective powers, then there will be no general war in Europe because the opposing party would be no match.

You need a very different balance of powers to have it happen : France needs to be the top dog on the continent and Germany being relatively weaker, Rhineland being French and the south german States remaining independent but the French and Austrian sphere.

This is certainly one option, though I think to get the Brits actively lined up in an alliance, rather than simply favoring the Russo-Germans if push comes to shove, you're better served by Russia being regulated to the "Sick Man of Europe" role so there isn't so much colonial friction and the looming threat of Russia turning against the British interests at a later date. Reverse the trends affecting them and the Ottomans: St.Petersburg slipping into deep debt, reforms getting retarded, Finland, Ukraine .the Caucauses, the Donbass ect. peeling off, getting economically colonized: maybe all this starts with harsh terms after totally bungling Crimea and efforts to emancipate the serfs either go belly up, or the Czar is obliged to buy them out at full price and so saddles the crown with a debt it can't get out from and has to keep giving political concessions and corrupt deals to the landowners and the forgeiners who bought up the serf-receits to stave off bankrupacy?

Meanwhile, a booming and expanding Ottoman Caliphate could be seen as a real threat to British colonial interests if they start streching their Pan-Islamic credentials and pushing their commercial sphere into the Indian Ocean. The threat of a Mohammadian revolt costing them the Raj could lead them to wanting to prop up the Russians as a baton to wave, especially if France had revived the old Franco-Ottoman Alliance
 
This one is difficult to imagine, given that Britain typically lined up with the lesser coalition on the continent to maintain a balance of power (although it's equally true that Britain flirted with an alliance with Germany, which alliance would have been sufficiently powerful that Wilhelm II would have nailed it when he said that (paraphrasing) "not a mouse in Europe would stir without our consent".) The part I really have trouble with is the alliance between Great Britain and Russia apart from the Entente, given that Russia and Britain were long-standing rivals at the very least. I think Russia would have had to make significant concessions, among which would have been a hands-off pledge as far as India was concerned.
 
if push comes to shove, you're better served by Russia being regulated to the "Sick Man of Europe" role so there isn't so much colonial friction and the looming threat of Russia turning against the British interests at a later date.
I should point out that one of the major factors in Britain's OTL choice of allies was that France and Russia could cause major problems for British interests globally if war came, while Germany could do little outside Europe.
Allying against Germany was the safest option.
 
You need a very different balance of powers to have it happen : France needs to be the top dog on the continent and Germany being relatively weaker, Rhineland being French and the south german States remaining independent but the French and Austrian sphere.
Possibly POD could be a French win in 1871?
 
In my humble opinion the Russo - German alliance would be the most sane option for both parties, unfortunately for them, their leaders chose option that benefited only the West
 
This is certainly one option, though I think to get the Brits actively lined up in an alliance, rather than simply favoring the Russo-Germans if push comes to shove, you're better served by Russia being regulated to the "Sick Man of Europe" role so there isn't so much colonial friction and the looming threat of Russia turning against the British interests at a later date.

The obvious question is who would manage to accomplish such a "regulation" without fighting a major war prior to WWI?

The colonial frictions with the GB had been pretty much gone after the final settlement of the Russian-Afghan border. By that time even people from the British Foreign Office learned how to read the maps and figured out that Afghanistan was enough of a buffer against any realistic Russian threat). The later British support of Japan against Russia was pretty much paranoia for paranoia's sake (and cost the Brits dearly few decades later): there were no British colonies on the Far East which could be realistically threatened from the Russian Pacific coast.

Reverse the trends affecting them and the Ottomans: St.Petersburg slipping into deep debt, reforms getting retarded, Finland,

"Debt" to whom? In OTL Russia made a lot of loans in France andin this AH it would be making these loans in Germany. It does not look like these loans had a negative effect upon the Russian economy (quite opposite) and, anyway, state debt is a common thing: Britain (AFAIK) got out of the Napoleonic Wars with a huge state debt and so what?

"reforms getting retarded," which reforms? Russia stops building the railroads and develop its industry? Why would this happen?

Ukraine .the Caucauses, the Donbass ect. peeling off,

I understand that the analogies with the late XX - early XXI centuries are tempting but by the early XX they are rather unrealistic. :)

Let's start with the basic facts: in 1914, unlike 1989 - 91, there was no mechanisms allowing realistic "peeling off" from the Russian Empire. In the SU there were republics with their own governments, clearly defined borders and a formal right of secession while in 1914 there was nothing of the kind. "Ukraine" was not a clearly defined ethnic or administrative entity but, if we are talking about its modern borders, a set of the governorships with the different eithnic breakdowns and, in many cases, no history of being associated with a notion of "Ukraine". Borders of the modern Ukraine had been to a great degree defined by the German occupation of 1918 and later Soviet administrative "creativity".

Donbass - sorry, but this is a complete anachronism and, anyway, it was splitting off from Ukraine in a hope to get to Russia.

The same goes for Caucasus: it is an extremely ethnically diverse region where most neighbors hate each other and hardly capable of uniting (look at the existing mess: Armenia - Azerbaijan, Georgia - Abkhazia, Georgia - North Osetia).

getting economically colonized: maybe all this starts with harsh terms after totally bungling Crimea

If you mean the Crimean War, it was bungled as much as was realistically possible and any serious further "progress" in that direction could be reached only by a much greater effort of the allies, which was not possible.

and efforts to emancipate the serfs either go belly up, or the Czar is obliged to buy them out at full price

The obvious question is what "full price" means? Who and how would be defining it? There was no serfs market with the fixed price per capita and the issue was not as much the serfs as land ownership. The OTL reform was pretty much the worst case scenario (for both sides and Russian economy in general) so, again, you hardly can do much worse (as long as you stick to a real world) than it did happen. :teary:
 
I should point out that one of the major factors in Britain's OTL choice of allies was that France and Russia could cause major problems for British interests globally if war came, while Germany could do little outside Europe.
Allying against Germany was the safest option.

Indeed... in our timeline. However, given this thread is about the plausability of an Anglo-German-RUSSIAN alliance, you have to consider Britain joining into a German-Russian pact (Since that's likely to be the initial seed of any of this), or maybe Russian joining an Anglo-German alliance. In that context, the context is always going to be pretty iffy for the third leg of the stool, since France (even with a cohalition under her) isen't strong enough to risk disrupting the European Status-Quo Post-FPW (And Britain wants the balance maintained on the Continent) or the colonial position. Paris is stuck being "The Jack of All Trades, Master of None"; having too many fronts for ambitions/security to ever acheive supremacy on any of them so long as the other European power centers are who they are, AH hasen't been in a financial-military to project power since 1848, and Italy is part of the "Great Powers" club largely as a matter of curtosy and the need to fill the slots vacated by the collapse of the Ottomans and Spainards and America's continued geopolitical provincialism/"You stay out of my backyard I'll stay out of yours" relative to the other Empires.
 

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In my humble opinion the Russo - German alliance would be the most sane option for both parties, unfortunately for them, their leaders chose option that benefited only the West

Maybe but the real “smart” alliance would have been Austria-Russia. They had many overlapping interests and easily could’ve helped each other with their troublesome minorities.

The part I really have trouble with is the alliance between Great Britain and Russia apart from the Entente, given that Russia and Britain were long-standing rivals at the very least.

Yeah, cos Britain and France weren’t long-standing rivals OTL, were they?
 
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