She could also come back to the seat if Coats leaves to run for something else like the Senate in ‘86.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
The first is very unlikely during this time period, Unionist Protestants are still a comfortable majority so any referendum would fail and the Republic would be completely incapable of dealing with the UDA/UVF and other Unionist paramilitaries. No Thatcher also weakens the SNP or rather it keeps them as "Tartan Tories" with a lukewarm attitude to independence.
Thank you! This time period of UK history has a lot of unique personalities who it’s interesting trying to work out, that’s for sure
Extremely unlikely, for the reasons @Thoresby charts out
Hadn’t thought of that, and it hasn’t, so he could be a survivor, certainly. Gastric hemorrhage is such a random and specific freak death anyways
Just realized if she was elected as widow she’d be the youngest woman elected to the House at that time
I could see the SNP getting close to their 1974 results if perceived as having been betrayed by Labour on devolution but that’s probably it
Would he run for Senate? 82’ Taft is still there so I guess it depends on his status, if he wants the nomination again I doubt Ashbrook would challenge him, if not, it's Ashbrook's to choke. Come '86, we know there is a red wave coming and Glenn could be a causality of that, maybe Ashbrook is the one to take him out. Either way, he could be contending for the presidency up until maybe 1996, depending on how Swede handles everything.
I think the Cold War is endlessly fascinating and that the events of 1977-80 are really integral to present day, so screwing around with them is fun
Yeah, maybe! Could see Taft hanging up the spurs after two terms (see: Voinovich and Portman for recent Ohio GOP examples) and calling it a career. He wasn't a spring chicken by any means as it was and had been in Congress for two decades.
I could see Ashbrook winning, hell maybe he even runs for President in 1988 or 1992. Personally I'm really excited to see how the Republicans reinvent themselves during their 12 years in the wilderness like how the Democrats had to.
Didn't Ashbrook die in like 1982 though? IIRC he had a heart attack and was succeeded by his widow.
EDIT: Sorry didn't see your earlier post about Ashbrook surviving.
Last edited:
Nixonian Republicans are back (minus Nixon of course!) I hope Alan K. Simpson gets more love in this timeline.
I wanted to write something I while back, but the mention of Taft reminded me of what exactly I wanted to throw out into the world. The Democratic Party ITTL is dominated by people who are ardent interventionists on the maximum level(Scoop says TV's and Nukes) and due to the popularity of the president, the Democrats at large agree with this viewpoint. As much as I like Scoop, being a hawk fails in 2 instances. If you get the world closer to nuclear annihilation, or in this instance, wars seemingly do not end. The US will eventually see themselves in a quagmire, it's bound to happen somewhere. The New Left, those hippy loving pacifists of the 60s, have been purged as much as possible from the party of FDR by the current administration. With the increase in polarization and the abject weakness of the Republican party due to their clubbering, an old idea may start to surface again in the minds of these increasingly conservative group of people.
The party of Lincoln was almost the party of Taft. If Dewey didn't convince the convention in 52' to throw out the southern delegations votes for new Ike delegates, Taft may have been the nominee. He probably would of won the election too for that matter. All on the back of an idea that is persistent throughout American history. Something that is bipartisan on appeal, with people like Huey Long and John Bricker supporting the concept. Something that will unite the rural with the former hippies. We see it today, with the rhetoric of the Republican party gravitating towards it. One more horrible war, after the travesties in South America and Panama, and the situation is ripe for the idea, and with a party so so weak....
Maybe the warnings of Washington will be remembered? Maybe America will embrace the old promise of Isolationism, under the guidance of the GOP, as a way to apologize for a great wrong done to one of the parties greatest men.
The party of Lincoln was almost the party of Taft. If Dewey didn't convince the convention in 52' to throw out the southern delegations votes for new Ike delegates, Taft may have been the nominee. He probably would of won the election too for that matter. All on the back of an idea that is persistent throughout American history. Something that is bipartisan on appeal, with people like Huey Long and John Bricker supporting the concept. Something that will unite the rural with the former hippies. We see it today, with the rhetoric of the Republican party gravitating towards it. One more horrible war, after the travesties in South America and Panama, and the situation is ripe for the idea, and with a party so so weak....
Maybe the warnings of Washington will be remembered? Maybe America will embrace the old promise of Isolationism, under the guidance of the GOP, as a way to apologize for a great wrong done to one of the parties greatest men.
To my knowledge Taft Jr. was not much of an isolationist and to be honest America was probably never going to retreat into itself. Even when we were “isolationist” like in the 1920’s and 1930’s we were still knee deep in Latin America and Asia. I like the premise though, but isolationism is unlikely, maybe having a return to a more pragmatic, realist approach is possible but isolationism doesn’t feel right. Good post tho!
The republican party is in no way going to be isolationist, that would be political suicide especially after Panama. With Carey having the same type of foreign policy as Reagan (with the exception of South Africa) the republican party can’t let the Dems outflank them on hawker. As has been discussed the party will stay with Nixonianism which ideologically see’s isolationism as borderline treason
Haboob - Part II
(Author's Note: Do NOT bring current politics/world events into this discussion)
The Israel Defense Forces had, since 1948, formed for themselves a reputation drawn straight from the Torah - they were the David of the Middle East, standing tall against the Goliath of Arab armies that outnumbered them, and every time a war had occurred they had thrown the enemy back. There were, of course, much more nuanced factors to this - the Second Arab-Israeli War in 1956 had been fought partly with the assistance of Britain and France in the shadow of the Suez Crisis, and Israel's performance in the Yom Kippur War had left quite a bit to be desired. The Israel that went to war in Lebanon and Syria in 1982 was thus one that had faced down Arab threats on four occasions and won every time - the IDF was, to put it mildly, more than a little bit cocky.
It was the case, too, that the events of spring 1982 served the purposes of the IDF quite well. After the suspension of Israeli operations in Lebanon in 1978 after Operation Litani, the IDF under Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan had drawn up precise and complex plans for how exactly to conduct another ground invasion of Lebanon in the event of a conflict once again breaking out, this time with the explicit and express aim to drive the PLO entirely from its bases in and around Beirut and expel tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian refugees from Lebanese soil, ideally into northern Syria. The objective was as much military as it was political - ending the use of Lebanon as a base of operations against Israel by both the PLO and Syrian agents, ending the Lebanese Civil War in favor of a Maronite state headed by Bachir Gemayel and his right-wing Ketaeb faction in alignment with moderate Shia and Druze factions, expelling Syria from Lebanon entirely, and exacting a humiliating defeat on the PLO that would lead to, perhaps, a long-term peace treaty that would secure Israel's northern and eastern borders much in the same way that the 1978 Rose Garden Agreement had done the same for their frontier in Suez. Indeed, it was that pact with Egypt that led directly to Israel's provocation of the Ba'athist alliance in 1982 - without the south to defend against, Israel could focus all its armor and substantial air power against Syria and Iraq, an advantage it had never before enjoyed in its previous clashes with her neighbors.
On the morning of May 2, within minutes of the announcement that Syria and Iraq were mobilizing following the Osirak attack, air strikes began across southern and central Lebanon towards Syrian Army and PLO positions, and on May 3, the IDF crossed the border into Lebanon and re-fortified the Golan Heights in anticipation of a Syrian attack. The initial contours of Israel's invasion of Lebanon largely aligned with the operation that the IDF had been advocating for over two years and finally had the green light to execute, but it had been cabined considerably by the Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Unlike previous plans to drive on Beirut, Rabin's revisions instead revealed a change in priorities, namely putting the bulk of Israeli attention on advancing roughly sixty kilometers into Lebanese territory to secure a new, larger buffer zone further from the border but, crucially, capturing the Beirut-Damascus road and thus cutting off the most immediate axis of attack from Syria towards the Lebanese heartland. Control of this road, and the crucial crossroads at Chtoura, would force Syria forces to concentrate in the north of Lebanon, where the Maronite factions were, ostensibly, stronger. This strategy was complemented by, starting on May 3 with the announcement of Syria's mobilization, a massive preemptive air raid against Syrian airfields, suspected ammunition depots, and the road network south of Damascus, particularly highways leading towards Jordan, Lebanon and the Golan Heights. Syria had, however, learned their lessons from 1967 and 1973, and their strategic assets were considerably more secure from air raids - the Israeli bombings were successful in that no pilots were lost such as at Osirak, but much of what they had aimed to destroy survived, even if the damage to Syrian road infrastructure would badly delay Damascus' response time.
The operations timetable drawn up in Tel-Aviv aimed to have the Beirut-Damascus Road secure by May 6th, with armor pressing northwards immediately, and to then focus on repulsing Syrian Army attacks against the Golan or their position in Lebanon until the Lebanese Forces under Gemayel could link up with Saad Haddad's pro-Israel South Lebanese Army to secure the routes into Beirut and begin squeezing PLO camps in the city's south. For Rabin, this rapid timetable and hesitation to attack Beirut directly had two separate purposes. One, by 1982, a number of center-left and centrist parties in European countries on whom Israel depended for support had become if not Arabophile then considerably more sympathetic to the PLO specifically than in years past; it did not help this dynamic that the Osirak facility was built by French engineers and that Valery Giscard d'Estaing, France's mercurial liberal Prime Minister, was one of the few Western leaders who liked and admired Saddam. Thusly, it was important to Israeli public relations facing the world to suggest that the impetus for the war was to combat a pro-Soviet Ba'athist alliance that meant to ring Israel and crush it from the outside. Second, the destruction of Osirak meant that Saddam would respond soon, and while Saddam still lacked the ability to attack Israel by way of missile (though it was thought he hoped to achieve such a capability), and Rabin was unenthusiastic about the contours of a campaign against both Syria and Iraq's joint forces, even if across a very narrow front.
The advance into Lebanon bogged down rapidly due to the poor quality of the road networks, with Israeli tank and transport columns resembling traffic jams and subject easily to ambush; nonetheless, the advance ground forward under strong air cover, even as within hours of the ground invasion across three different prongs (smaller forces were deployed west of the main column near the Lebanese coast) it was already obvious that Rabin's timetable was likely to slip. Israel's luck, however, had not run out - because the response of her enemies was not a well-oiled machine, either.
Any scholar of the Lebanese Civil War can begin by ruefully admitting that the conflict is, easily, one of the most complex in terms of participants in the 20th century, made even more maddening to study by the relatively small corner of the Middle East it was fought over. Factions changed alliances frequently, and though by 1982 the most important militias had largely shaken out and consolidated, it was still a hornet's nest of confusion. For the purposes of Israel's war in Lebanon, however, there were essentially two tests - whether the faction was entirely pro-Syria, and if not, whether it could be persuaded to neutrality or being pro-Israel. The Shia-based Amal Movement, for instance, shifted its attitude towards Syria gradually, but due to Israeli proximity to their territory south of Beirut, they were thoroughly unwilling to be Israel's catspaws, and thus fought the Israeli advance perhaps more ferociously than the Syrians did. Meanwhile, though Western analysis often presumed that the Maronites - largely headed by Gemayel now - were pro-Israel, major Maronite factions such as that headed by the Ehben-based Frangieh family, were vehemently opposed to the Phalangists and held a serious grudge over the Gemayels slaughtering their families and crushing their militia in order to produce their 'united front.' Syria was helped by the Assad government, technically speaking, being a non-confessional secular Arab socialist government, which meant that they did not necessarily favor any religious faction in Lebanon but rather operated transactionally, and were able to position themselves as defending all Lebanese Arabs against Israeli aggression, notwithstanding how much of Syria's intervention in Lebanon was an imperialist project of its own.
As such, the resistance to the Israeli advance was uncoordinated and sclerotic, and the Syrian Army was slow to mobilize, especially with the damage to the approaches to the Golan making an offensive something that would have to be put off. The Assad brothers in a meeting on May 5th in Damascus concurred with the assessment of military planners that the earliest Syrian forces could realistically counterattack and drive Israel out of Chtoura was likely May 20th, which would give Israel weeks of air superiority over central Lebanon and southern Syria to stage attacks and entrench their position. Ambushes by the Amalists were helpful, but uncoordinated, and Assad was deeply concerned about the daunting logistical issues faced by Syria early in the campaign, not least due to the country's pariah status after the Hama Massacre three months earlier and his worry that his army would be annihilated in the field much as it had been in 1967 and 1973.
The intervention of Saddam and its size and timing thus became the key aspect of the war. Saddam had massively upgraded and expanded Iraq's army in the late 1970s to the point that Egypt was its only reasonable peer in the Arab world; the force was one of a quarter of a million men, over thousand tanks and APCs, and over three hundred Soviet-built aircraft. However, it was also a hugely untested force, and even Saddam, no stranger to grandiose ideas in his long-term plot to become the chief power of the Arab world of the late 20th century as Babylon had been of antiquity, was deeply uncertain of his army's force projection capabilities far from Iraqi soil. In many ways, his military had been designed to face off against Iran, by far the Middle East's most powerful military with its massive (and by 1982 fully upgraded) air force and professional army; the Algiers Agreement of 1975 remained Saddam's Versailles. The thought of sending his massive, prized army four hundred kilometers from the western outpost of Rutba to Syria where it would be detached from logistical support was a concerning one. Jordan and Syria were worried about such a task force as well, albeit for other reasons - there was ample concern in Amman in particular that once invited, Saddam would decline to leave if his army was on their territory.
The vast size of the Middle East, and the deserts through which armies had to travel to get to their destinations, spoke to the reason why most Arab countries had heavily relied on Syria, Jordan and Egypt in prior Arab-Israeli conflicts and supplemented them with expeditionary forces. Jordan mobilized on May 5th and announced it would "militarize" the Jordan Valley, placing much of its army on the frontier with the West Bank or concentrated in Irbid; while King Hussein had no intentions of actually invading Israel after how previous bouts had gone and his contempt for Arafat and the PLO that had nearly overthrown him in 1970, he nonetheless wanted to create the appearance of participation alongside his fellow Arab powers. As Saddam began mobilizing, he proposed the use of Jordanian roads for Saddam to traverse all the way to Al-Mafraq, at which point they were to either be put under Jordanian command or routed north to Syria; Saddam, who disliked the Hashemite King, refused this entreaty, and instead simply agreed that Iraqi planes could use Jordanian airspace and instead elected to send his troops on the more remote route through Al-Tanf in Syria, which thus meant that the eventual attack on the Golan could not be two-pronged.
When he learned on May 7th that Saddam's "Iraqi Expeditionary Force" would initially only be 80,000 men and one division, Assad was furious - once again, it appeared that other Arab leaders intended to use Syrian boys as human shields and let Damascus take the brunt of fighting. Primakov, in Damascus at the time, was able to calm Assad's nerves - this was nonetheless a much stronger Iraqi force than had ever before been deployed, and he assured the Syrian dictator that "Saddam wants blood for Osirak." The Iraqi Expeditionary Force crossed into Syria two days later, and the gathering of Arab forces for their massive counterattack readied as wings of Iraqi planes landed at newly-built Syrian airfields near Homs and Tartus...
Haboob - Part II
The Israel Defense Forces had, since 1948, formed for themselves a reputation drawn straight from the Torah - they were the David of the Middle East, standing tall against the Goliath of Arab armies that outnumbered them, and every time a war had occurred they had thrown the enemy back. There were, of course, much more nuanced factors to this - the Second Arab-Israeli War in 1956 had been fought partly with the assistance of Britain and France in the shadow of the Suez Crisis, and Israel's performance in the Yom Kippur War had left quite a bit to be desired. The Israel that went to war in Lebanon and Syria in 1982 was thus one that had faced down Arab threats on four occasions and won every time - the IDF was, to put it mildly, more than a little bit cocky.
It was the case, too, that the events of spring 1982 served the purposes of the IDF quite well. After the suspension of Israeli operations in Lebanon in 1978 after Operation Litani, the IDF under Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan had drawn up precise and complex plans for how exactly to conduct another ground invasion of Lebanon in the event of a conflict once again breaking out, this time with the explicit and express aim to drive the PLO entirely from its bases in and around Beirut and expel tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian refugees from Lebanese soil, ideally into northern Syria. The objective was as much military as it was political - ending the use of Lebanon as a base of operations against Israel by both the PLO and Syrian agents, ending the Lebanese Civil War in favor of a Maronite state headed by Bachir Gemayel and his right-wing Ketaeb faction in alignment with moderate Shia and Druze factions, expelling Syria from Lebanon entirely, and exacting a humiliating defeat on the PLO that would lead to, perhaps, a long-term peace treaty that would secure Israel's northern and eastern borders much in the same way that the 1978 Rose Garden Agreement had done the same for their frontier in Suez. Indeed, it was that pact with Egypt that led directly to Israel's provocation of the Ba'athist alliance in 1982 - without the south to defend against, Israel could focus all its armor and substantial air power against Syria and Iraq, an advantage it had never before enjoyed in its previous clashes with her neighbors.
On the morning of May 2, within minutes of the announcement that Syria and Iraq were mobilizing following the Osirak attack, air strikes began across southern and central Lebanon towards Syrian Army and PLO positions, and on May 3, the IDF crossed the border into Lebanon and re-fortified the Golan Heights in anticipation of a Syrian attack. The initial contours of Israel's invasion of Lebanon largely aligned with the operation that the IDF had been advocating for over two years and finally had the green light to execute, but it had been cabined considerably by the Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Unlike previous plans to drive on Beirut, Rabin's revisions instead revealed a change in priorities, namely putting the bulk of Israeli attention on advancing roughly sixty kilometers into Lebanese territory to secure a new, larger buffer zone further from the border but, crucially, capturing the Beirut-Damascus road and thus cutting off the most immediate axis of attack from Syria towards the Lebanese heartland. Control of this road, and the crucial crossroads at Chtoura, would force Syria forces to concentrate in the north of Lebanon, where the Maronite factions were, ostensibly, stronger. This strategy was complemented by, starting on May 3 with the announcement of Syria's mobilization, a massive preemptive air raid against Syrian airfields, suspected ammunition depots, and the road network south of Damascus, particularly highways leading towards Jordan, Lebanon and the Golan Heights. Syria had, however, learned their lessons from 1967 and 1973, and their strategic assets were considerably more secure from air raids - the Israeli bombings were successful in that no pilots were lost such as at Osirak, but much of what they had aimed to destroy survived, even if the damage to Syrian road infrastructure would badly delay Damascus' response time.
The operations timetable drawn up in Tel-Aviv aimed to have the Beirut-Damascus Road secure by May 6th, with armor pressing northwards immediately, and to then focus on repulsing Syrian Army attacks against the Golan or their position in Lebanon until the Lebanese Forces under Gemayel could link up with Saad Haddad's pro-Israel South Lebanese Army to secure the routes into Beirut and begin squeezing PLO camps in the city's south. For Rabin, this rapid timetable and hesitation to attack Beirut directly had two separate purposes. One, by 1982, a number of center-left and centrist parties in European countries on whom Israel depended for support had become if not Arabophile then considerably more sympathetic to the PLO specifically than in years past; it did not help this dynamic that the Osirak facility was built by French engineers and that Valery Giscard d'Estaing, France's mercurial liberal Prime Minister, was one of the few Western leaders who liked and admired Saddam. Thusly, it was important to Israeli public relations facing the world to suggest that the impetus for the war was to combat a pro-Soviet Ba'athist alliance that meant to ring Israel and crush it from the outside. Second, the destruction of Osirak meant that Saddam would respond soon, and while Saddam still lacked the ability to attack Israel by way of missile (though it was thought he hoped to achieve such a capability), and Rabin was unenthusiastic about the contours of a campaign against both Syria and Iraq's joint forces, even if across a very narrow front.
The advance into Lebanon bogged down rapidly due to the poor quality of the road networks, with Israeli tank and transport columns resembling traffic jams and subject easily to ambush; nonetheless, the advance ground forward under strong air cover, even as within hours of the ground invasion across three different prongs (smaller forces were deployed west of the main column near the Lebanese coast) it was already obvious that Rabin's timetable was likely to slip. Israel's luck, however, had not run out - because the response of her enemies was not a well-oiled machine, either.
Any scholar of the Lebanese Civil War can begin by ruefully admitting that the conflict is, easily, one of the most complex in terms of participants in the 20th century, made even more maddening to study by the relatively small corner of the Middle East it was fought over. Factions changed alliances frequently, and though by 1982 the most important militias had largely shaken out and consolidated, it was still a hornet's nest of confusion. For the purposes of Israel's war in Lebanon, however, there were essentially two tests - whether the faction was entirely pro-Syria, and if not, whether it could be persuaded to neutrality or being pro-Israel. The Shia-based Amal Movement, for instance, shifted its attitude towards Syria gradually, but due to Israeli proximity to their territory south of Beirut, they were thoroughly unwilling to be Israel's catspaws, and thus fought the Israeli advance perhaps more ferociously than the Syrians did. Meanwhile, though Western analysis often presumed that the Maronites - largely headed by Gemayel now - were pro-Israel, major Maronite factions such as that headed by the Ehben-based Frangieh family, were vehemently opposed to the Phalangists and held a serious grudge over the Gemayels slaughtering their families and crushing their militia in order to produce their 'united front.' Syria was helped by the Assad government, technically speaking, being a non-confessional secular Arab socialist government, which meant that they did not necessarily favor any religious faction in Lebanon but rather operated transactionally, and were able to position themselves as defending all Lebanese Arabs against Israeli aggression, notwithstanding how much of Syria's intervention in Lebanon was an imperialist project of its own.
As such, the resistance to the Israeli advance was uncoordinated and sclerotic, and the Syrian Army was slow to mobilize, especially with the damage to the approaches to the Golan making an offensive something that would have to be put off. The Assad brothers in a meeting on May 5th in Damascus concurred with the assessment of military planners that the earliest Syrian forces could realistically counterattack and drive Israel out of Chtoura was likely May 20th, which would give Israel weeks of air superiority over central Lebanon and southern Syria to stage attacks and entrench their position. Ambushes by the Amalists were helpful, but uncoordinated, and Assad was deeply concerned about the daunting logistical issues faced by Syria early in the campaign, not least due to the country's pariah status after the Hama Massacre three months earlier and his worry that his army would be annihilated in the field much as it had been in 1967 and 1973.
The intervention of Saddam and its size and timing thus became the key aspect of the war. Saddam had massively upgraded and expanded Iraq's army in the late 1970s to the point that Egypt was its only reasonable peer in the Arab world; the force was one of a quarter of a million men, over thousand tanks and APCs, and over three hundred Soviet-built aircraft. However, it was also a hugely untested force, and even Saddam, no stranger to grandiose ideas in his long-term plot to become the chief power of the Arab world of the late 20th century as Babylon had been of antiquity, was deeply uncertain of his army's force projection capabilities far from Iraqi soil. In many ways, his military had been designed to face off against Iran, by far the Middle East's most powerful military with its massive (and by 1982 fully upgraded) air force and professional army; the Algiers Agreement of 1975 remained Saddam's Versailles. The thought of sending his massive, prized army four hundred kilometers from the western outpost of Rutba to Syria where it would be detached from logistical support was a concerning one. Jordan and Syria were worried about such a task force as well, albeit for other reasons - there was ample concern in Amman in particular that once invited, Saddam would decline to leave if his army was on their territory.
The vast size of the Middle East, and the deserts through which armies had to travel to get to their destinations, spoke to the reason why most Arab countries had heavily relied on Syria, Jordan and Egypt in prior Arab-Israeli conflicts and supplemented them with expeditionary forces. Jordan mobilized on May 5th and announced it would "militarize" the Jordan Valley, placing much of its army on the frontier with the West Bank or concentrated in Irbid; while King Hussein had no intentions of actually invading Israel after how previous bouts had gone and his contempt for Arafat and the PLO that had nearly overthrown him in 1970, he nonetheless wanted to create the appearance of participation alongside his fellow Arab powers. As Saddam began mobilizing, he proposed the use of Jordanian roads for Saddam to traverse all the way to Al-Mafraq, at which point they were to either be put under Jordanian command or routed north to Syria; Saddam, who disliked the Hashemite King, refused this entreaty, and instead simply agreed that Iraqi planes could use Jordanian airspace and instead elected to send his troops on the more remote route through Al-Tanf in Syria, which thus meant that the eventual attack on the Golan could not be two-pronged.
When he learned on May 7th that Saddam's "Iraqi Expeditionary Force" would initially only be 80,000 men and one division, Assad was furious - once again, it appeared that other Arab leaders intended to use Syrian boys as human shields and let Damascus take the brunt of fighting. Primakov, in Damascus at the time, was able to calm Assad's nerves - this was nonetheless a much stronger Iraqi force than had ever before been deployed, and he assured the Syrian dictator that "Saddam wants blood for Osirak." The Iraqi Expeditionary Force crossed into Syria two days later, and the gathering of Arab forces for their massive counterattack readied as wings of Iraqi planes landed at newly-built Syrian airfields near Homs and Tartus...
An Ashbrook run would be likely if he’s a Senator, imo
Simpson will definitely get some love
I agree - I think isolationism in the 1980s is very difficult for people who’s brand is anti-communism.
That said, there’d probably be a streak of realist foreign policy, where the Kissinger school of thinking persists rather than the neo-cons Reagan surrounded himself with
Glad to see that’s an option!A 1980 Redux campaign trail mod dropped like eight hours ago. Unfunny joke goes here
The next time we check in on the massive sandstorm in the desert we’ll dive into foreign reactions but, no, the Carey admin is not amused by Peres’ decision to hit Osirak and go into Lebanon here (this war is essentially a reworked, expanded version of the 1982 OTL invasion)
There’ll probably be a brief speculative spike in May/June 1982, definitely, though that should subside once it’s obvious this isn’t going to be a regional conflagration. The West is also much more prepared for such a thing than 1973 when they were caught with their pants down, and new sources of oil like the mentioned North Sea, Prudhoe Bay, Iran staying online (and explicitly being a Western ally) and Mexico’s oilfield expansions of 1977-80 keep the lid on, a bit.
Will still slow the recovery quite a bit and exacerbate problems for Latin and African economies in particular