How do you manage to come up with butterflies? Also I've been thinking up a sort of similar TL where Bush is elected to the senate in 1964 and becomes Nixon's veep and handles the fallout of Watergate, so do you have any good sources on the 1970's? Outside of basic history and the occasional story from a relative I honestly don't know a lot about the timefrane.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I do wonder how the war will impact Italy. OTL both Berlinguer and Craxi were very simpathetic to the arab world, especially during the civil war in Lebanon
ITTL the survival of Aldo Moro* probably further strenghtened both parties, giving them more influence on the Italian government
Add Italy's strategic position in the Mediterrean and you get a new massive headheace for Tel Aviv and Washington
* Also ITTL Moro is probably the President of the Republic. OTL he was a favorite candidate before the whole "kidnapping and murder" thing
ITTL the survival of Aldo Moro* probably further strenghtened both parties, giving them more influence on the Italian government
Add Italy's strategic position in the Mediterrean and you get a new massive headheace for Tel Aviv and Washington
* Also ITTL Moro is probably the President of the Republic. OTL he was a favorite candidate before the whole "kidnapping and murder" thing
Honestly way too much of what I come up with is just taking some random event on Wikipedia and tweaking it, though that’s more typical closer to the POD.
Soviet-Swedish War or, way back when, having Bob Marley be successfully assassinated are prime examples
Moro is dead ITTL on schedule, fwiw.
But, yes, Spadolini needing Craxi’s support (Berlinguer’s influence is probably a little lower what with Moscow deciding that bombing Sweden was a good idea) probably does make his government a hair more sympathetic to Lebanon/PLO than otherwise
Oh I apologise, I could have sworn Moro had avoided the kidnapping ITTL.
I just hope that Palestinians can have a better fate than real life but not keeping my hopes up
The moment pearl harbor happened isolationism was put out like a sick dog
what’s funny is that a lot of the neo-cons that Reagan surrounded himself with surround Carey currently
Average US citizen after fighting multiple wars in Vietnam, South America and Middle East in little more than 10 years
Link please?A 1980 Redux campaign trail mod dropped like eight hours ago. Unfunny joke goes here
OTL the 1982 war was (IIRC) the beginning of the end of Israel’s total untouchability in the American Jewish mind. There’s a picture of a young Norman Finkelstein protesting with a sign that compared Sharon’s brutal siege of Beirut to a Nazi massacre. TTL that may not be the case as Syria and Iraq are bringing a credible military challenge to the Israeli hold on the Golan and Lebanon. It’ll be much easier for Peres to paint this as a valiant David vs. Goliath self-defense as opposed to the blatant stomping over mostly innocent Lebanese that it was OTL.
Heh
To put it mildly!
Possibly actually more successful, since Southern Ds stay powerful for longer
Indeed - though it's important to note that Peres and Yitzhak Rabin were by no mean doves, in any way shape or form (Rabin's reputation today is in large part due to the Kennedy effect of his 1995 death). It's more that here their goals are much more straightforward in terms of ejecting the PLO from southern Lebanon to the north, and the breaking of the Ba'ath Bloc preemptively. So Peres is smart enough to not go into Beirut.
(He also probably doesn't trust Gemayel quite the way a conservative like Sharon might have - there's a reason the Reagan admin was skeptical of the Phalange, after all, even though they never met a right-wing government elsewhere in the world they didn't like!)
Yeah I don't see why most Americans will see this any differently than 1973 or even 1967 for that matter.
I wonder if Soviets sent military advisers for Syria and Iraq.
If anything, post-1973 they might be even less sympathetic to Arab countries than they would have been otherwise
Inserted? Probably, though likely very subtly
After the debacle with Sweden, I can only assume Yuri Andropov would want to send any and all military advisors to not have a repeat.
The presidency is largely a ceremonial position in Italy. Im curious how Moro would have handled P2.
Blackbird Down
Blackbird Down
As important as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and war with the Ba'ath Bloc in May 1982 wound up being for long-term Middle Eastern geopolitics, for most Americans in the spring of 1982, the real show was not "yet another" conflict in the Middle East, as the general sentiment was for the public, but rather the incident of May 13 near the Sea of Japan.
The SR-71 "Blackbird" was a high-altitude strategic reconnaissance aircraft developed by Lockheed and pioneered in the late 1960s as a complement and eventual replacement for the U2; it had served with distinction over North Vietnam and Laos, and had been re-dispositioned to spy on Soviet and Chinese forces around-the-clock on critical missions since. One of the most important Blackbird bases was out of Okinawa, where the plane was nicknamed "Habu" by the Japanese for its distinctive black, rounded appearance and thus its similarities to an indigenous pit viper, a nickname American crews accepted with pride. The Nixon Thaw and continuation of detente under the Ford administration had meant that spying was essentially the key aspect of the Cold War, with a genuine armed conflict between the superpowers seen as increasingly remote as the 1970s closed even with the rise of Yuri Andropov. The Soviet-Swedish War, however, was seen even at the time as potentially ending detente and bringing about a new era of increasing tensions, and subsequently in November of 1981 the National Security Council had issued a memorandum significantly stepping up the number of Blackbird flights over both Europe and East Asia, and this increased "awareness campaign," as it was called inside the Pentagon, was regarded as a key priority of Defense Secretary Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
On May 12th, 1982, an SR-71 piloted by Captain Robby Tucker with Lieutenant Bill Schwartzman as the reconnaissance officer took off from Okinawa for what was intended to be a routine mission that would be re-supplied by Stratotanker to survey the area in the proximity of Vladivostok and the North Korean coast. Tensions in the Korean Peninsula had never quite gone away, and the Air Force's guarantee to South Korea included keeping an eye on what the "Norks" were up to at all times. The first leg of the mission went by uneventfully, until after the refuel mission was complete early in the morning of May 13 and Tucker took the Blackbird back close to the North Korean coast. What exactly transpired next is largely unclear, even today; upon the reunification of Korea, attempts by CIA analysts to reconstruct records in former DPRK archives of 5/13/82 were unsuccessful, with a suspicion that Kim Il-sung purged officers involved with the incident and had documentation destroyed. Whatever the truth of the incident was on the North Korean side - "truth" being a difficult thing to ascertain with Pyongyang - the truth to the West was more clear: without warning, two North Korean interceptors suddenly appeared near Chongjin and shot down the SR-71, which quickly entered into a spiral and saw both pilots successfully, near-miraculously in fact, eject and parachute down, landing approximately six miles apart from one another in the northeastern North Hamgyong Province. The shootdown occurred at 0417; by 0800, both men would have been captured by North Korean soldiers alerted to look for them, and the wreckage of the top-secret SR-71 recovered successfully by Pyongyang to be inspected by not only their engineers but of course those of China and the USSR, too.
Even as the White House's attention had been on Israel's war of choice in Lebanon and southeastern Syria, the "Blackbird Down" incident in North Korea immediately gobbled up all of President Carey's attention, but there was an internal debate on what exactly to do. North Korea waited two entire days to announce to the world the shootdown had occurred; in those two days, the White House ran contingency plans including a potential rescue mission and first spent significant time confirming that both Tucker and Schwartzman were, indeed, still alive. Memories of the USS Pueblo incident were still fresh, especially amongst those such as Nick Katzenbach who had served in Lyndon Johnson's administration, and Carey and Jackson were both adamant that an eleven-month stretch of torture and imprisonment for the two pilots was unacceptable - especially with midterms looming.
Carey thus decided to beat the North Koreans to the punch. Ten minutes after the North Koreans announced that they had two "imperialist pigs" in custody, Carey called an impromptu press conference and declared, "Early in the morning of May 13, 1982, an American reconnaissance aircraft over the Sea of Japan was attacked, unprovoked, by the North Korean air force and shot down; both pilots, by the grace of God, were able to parachute safely out after steering their damaged aircraft over land. These pilots, these two brave Americans - Robert Tucker of Lorain, Ohio, and William K. Schwartzman of Utica, New York - are now prisoners of the North Korean regime, taken hostage against their will, their only crime serving their country. I want to make my administration's stance clear - this is an illegal shootdown of an American plane over international waters, and an illegal kidnapping of two brave American airmen, and we expect... no, we demand, actually, the return of our two airmen without preconditions by North Korea without significant delay." He would take no questions, and National Security Advisor Brezinski ominously informed the press that "any and all options remain on the table to return our airmen safely and promptly."
Carey's quick response had drawn a line. Conservative governments in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan were bolstered by what was quickly portrayed in friendly media as a unilateral attack by the DPRK against a plane that was heavily implied to be totally unarmed, and underlined the threat of the DPRK and its Communist benefactors in Beijing and Moscow to their restive publics. It would serve to improve, dramatically, the relationship between President Choi Kyu-hah in South Korea with the post-Park, post-Hanahoe Army, perhaps to the detriment of his gradual democratic transition; it would also be a major factor in the rise of Yasuhiro Nakasone as Prime Minister of Japan, and his right-wing Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, later in 1982.
A surprising protagonist emerged into the thick of the mess about a week in, after several days of saber-rattling and Jackson announcing that an additional carrier group would be deployed to the Sea of Japan - Yuri Andropov. The Soviet leader quietly called Carey on the Washington-Moscow hotline and offered to try to intercede with Kim, who had not responded to a single missive from the United States. Andropov's diplomatic overture caught some American analysts off guard, especially once it became clear that Soviet and East German military advisors were embedded with Syrian and Iraqi forces battling with Israel, and in part because after the three days over Sweden in October, nobody really trusted Andropov's "new start" in the USSR anymore. But Andropov was, after all, a former KGB spymaster and much cannier than he often got credit for. The DPRK was a Soviet client but directly adjacent to China, and it had indeed been Mao's China that had rescued her from obliteration in October 1950 as UN forces drove to the Yalu River in the space of less than a month. Following the Sino-Soviet Split, the DPRK had remained in Moscow's orbit, but had always by geographic necessity maintained good if uneasy relations with Beijing.
The months after Sweden had been very, very bad for Soviet soft power - that was, in part, a reason for its more overt backing of the Ba'ath Bloc despite Andropov's personal contempt for Saddam. Poland had bitten the bullet and pursued a number of reforms that while falling well short of Finlandization had nonetheless brought trade unions and democratic socialists "into the fold" rather than pursuing martial law, with Soviet support regarded as unreliable; Afghanistan's communist government looked increasingly shaky, too. As such, Andropov was highly worried about Hua parachuting into Pyongyang as a negotiator with the Americans to help the DPRK save face, and so he wanted to cut off any chance that Soviet influence in communist or socialist spheres was further curtailed.
Andropov's pitch was a prisoner exchange - ten North Koreans held in South Korean prisons, in return for the two pilots. His gamble, one that proved correct, was that the United States could care less about North Korean spies or operatives held capture south of the 38th, but that they cared very much about Tucker and Schwartzman. Further, he knew that unlike the Pueblo incident, where there was some plausibility that the United States may indeed have sailed into North Korean waters, the shooting down of a spy plane was a much more hostile motion and that, unlike 1968, the United States was not distracted by Vietnam, but nonetheless that Carey preferred a de-escalation if at all possible despite hawks like Jackson looming over his shoulder. The prisoner exchange was thus a face-saving exercise for all parties involved, particularly Kim, and prevented a genuine geopolitical incident, all while helping Moscow boost its prestige again at a time she desperately needed it.
Carey and Andropov thus came out of the incident quite well. Carey had looked tough and strong in the face of the provocation, and Andropov had helped repair his tattered image as a craft operator. The American public cared very much that "our boys came home" in less than a month, and Carey feted both in the Rose Garden on June 2, 1982; the American public could have cared less about twenty North Koreans returned to Pyongyang at the same time. Indeed, the only people who the Blackbird Down incident seemed to tarnish longer term were Kim and Hua - the former, because he had not extorted a higher price from the West according to hardliners that included his son, and the latter for having failed to insert China into North Korean affairs more bluntly and begin to nudge out Soviet influence in the Far East more aggressively....
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