Anglo-French Cold War Challenge

Starting with Napoleon's final defeat, could the animosity between France and Great Britain have continued long enough for a late 20th Century Cold War and nuclear arms race between them?
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Starting with Napoleon's final defeat, could the animosity between France and Great Britain have continued long enough for a late 20th Century Cold War and nuclear arms race between them?
Having France somehow decisively win the Franco-Prussian War as well as to avoid its 19th century demographic decline might significantly help with this; indeed, that would ensure that France will remain the dominant power in Europe and thus also ensure that Britain will remain hostile towards France.
 
The problem is, while I don't disagree with the POD suggested, foreign policy is as much pragmatic as ideological. More so the former in many cases. The death of Bismarck, for example, does little to prevent growing tensions between Britain and Russia in Asia. Britain's animosity is going to be focused on, in part, where it perceives the imminent threat.

Moreover, I think people forget just how close Britain and France are geographically. They are natural trading partners. Even at the height of Anglo-French tensions in the nineteenth-century British businesses were investing heavily in France whilst French exports often focused on Britain as a solid market. It is hard to maintain such animosity in the face of such obvious trading connections.

It would also be hard to fulfill, I think, the OC's 200 year scope. I can't think of any nations that have maintained an intense dislike of each other for that period of time in the modern world. Other events always intervene. Take @CaliGuy 's example of a French victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Yes, it would increase Anglo-French tensions. But has that already failed the criteria given that, in the time between 1815 and 1871 Britain and France have fought a war together as allies against a shared external threat?
 

Deleted member 97083

The Rhine Crisis turns to war, and France wins it with godlike fury.
 
Starting with Napoleon's final defeat, could the animosity between France and Great Britain have continued long enough for a late 20th Century Cold War and nuclear arms race between them?

It seems difficult because you would need no extra-european great power to dominate the european continent.

Which is unprobable. The point is that without WW1 as we knew It OTL and the bolshevik revolution, Russia was going to become the superpower of the eurasian continent because of its massive demography and of its turbo economic development. Which would incent Britain and France to ally together.
 
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