AHC Have the U.S. stay isolationist to modern day.

How can you have the U.S. remain isolationist to modern day? How would the world be different? Who would be the worlds superpower? Would the U.S. be better than it is in OTL or worse? Would the rest of the world be better off or not?
 
If the balance of power in Europe is maintained and there is no WW1 or at least a faster result that would not exhaust Europe, and therefore no collapse of the British Empire or the European powers. The US could be satisfied having the British Navy patrol the world's shipping lanes.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
You have to start with no WW1, or at least a WW1 where the American shipping interest are not harmed. So for the second one, you need both the UK and Germany allowing US merchant ships to trade with both sides. If you have this POD butterfly away communism, it helps a lot too. Then you will need to have the USA give the Philippines independence and no one challenge the Monroe doctrine. This should be enough.
 
European power is sorted out without their help - they focus on 'fathering' the Americas. As long as they can trade and communism/fascism isn't a serious global threat I dont think its that hard.
 
economic isolation isn't really possible, but you could have political isolationism for a lot longer. It could start with no SAW/expansion into the Pacific beyond Hawaii... without that, you'd have no US presence in the Phillipines, and no reason to clash with Japan. Preventing WW1 is fairly easy, have Germany make the decision to not attack US ships. Without a US entry in WW1, the incentive to do so in WW2 is practically nil, provided Hitler decides not to declare war on the USA first. However, if there is still a rise of the USSR, it gets harder for the USA to stay isolationist... plus, the USA is going to get dragged into the world whether it wants to be or not, with the increasing reliance on foreign oil and minerals...
 

BlondieBC

Banned
economic isolation isn't really possible, but you could have political isolationism for a lot longer. It could start with no SAW/expansion into the Pacific beyond Hawaii... without that, you'd have no US presence in the Phillipines, and no reason to clash with Japan. Preventing WW1 is fairly easy, have Germany make the decision to not attack US ships. Without a US entry in WW1, the incentive to do so in WW2 is practically nil, provided Hitler decides not to declare war on the USA first. However, if there is still a rise of the USSR, it gets harder for the USA to stay isolationist... plus, the USA is going to get dragged into the world whether it wants to be or not, with the increasing reliance on foreign oil and minerals...

Without USA in WW1, you likely get a draw, perhaps a minor Central Power victory. Hitler will be an unimportant painter, whose name is only know by Austrian art historians. The USSR will likely not exist as we know it. It will be at a minimum smaller, and we can't rule out the whites winning. France is likely a second rate power like Italy, although with a bigger colonial empire. The Royal Navy will still largely rule the waves, German will rule central Europe, and Russia will dominate the east after it finishes its civil war.

As long as the existing main power (Germany, Russia, UK) decide to allow USA dominance in Latin America, the USA will remain isolationists. Also, the USA was only isolationist in the Eastern Hemisphere. We never had trouble sending forces to fight in Latin America. If Imperial Germany agreed never to send forces to North or South America, the Kaiser would have been an isolationist by the American standard, which is only invading countries in one hemisphere.
 
Iraq wouldn't be just "Iraq like it was in 2002," America's influence in the Middle East ramped up significantly after WWII, and the country was very influenced by the Cold War.
 
Depends on if you include "Kurd" in your definition of "Iraqi", I guess.

That is a complicated issue, but I can see the point. The majority of Iraqis is not Kurdish, however.
I'm not sure most Kurds are that much sympathetic to America right now, but, yes, most of them likes not to have to deal with Saddam anymore. Still, Iraq is currantly not exactly a multi-national democracy.
 
Iraq wouldn't be just "Iraq like it was in 2002," America's influence in the Middle East ramped up significantly after WWII, and the country was very influenced by the Cold War.

That is true.
With an Isolationist America, it might be an Ottoman province to this day, though this does not strikes me as a very likely outcome.
 
That is true.
With an Isolationist America, it might be an Ottoman province to this day, though this does not strikes me as a very likely outcome.

An extremely unlikely outcome; that is unless the US had much more of an influence in events that led to the demise and carving up of the Ottoman Empire that I was aware of.
 
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