Cold War, without WW2

[Kongzilla]

Can there be a Communist vs Capitalist style cold war happening without a Second World War.

for a POD Maybe Hitler dies and Weimar trundles on, and the USSR captures Poland and sways some other states thanks to that in 1920.

What would the world be like with a cold war starting two decades earlier.

What would the world look like if the USA didn't become a Superpower or would it get involved to fight against communism. Who would be the main opponents of the USSR, what would the flash points be like. How would the British empire go about and colonialism as a whole.

So yes anyway, basically. What would the world be like if the cold war started two decades early and World War Two didn't happen.

 

[Anaxagoras]

I could see a Franco-British-German alliance against the USSR in such a scenario.

 

[AMF]

Can there be a Communist vs Capitalist style cold war happening without a Second World War.

I would say definitely yes. The PODs you mention do in no way make the USSR less dictatorial and totalitarian, and in all probability more aggressive against other countries. On the other hand, the PODs in no way remove the people who brought about the European process of unification, and the fact that Hitler dies may very well lead to these people coming into power earlier. So you may get an earlier unified Western Europe co-operating with the USA and possibly Japan, China and Turkey against the USSR.

for a POD Maybe Hitler dies and Weimar trundles on, and the USSR captures Poland and sways some other states thanks to that in 1920.

If the USSR conquers most of Poland, and Germany takes the opportunity to reconquer the territories lost to Poland at Versailles, then there is no alternate Cold War, but some kind of balance of power system, with Britain and France (and potentially, the USA) on the same side, but opposed to Germany just as much as to the USSR. If the USSR conquers all of Poland and even more countries, then it becomes quite likely that Britain and France unite with Germany against an overwhelming threat.

What would the world be like with a cold war starting two decades earlier.

What would the world look like if the USA didn't become a Superpower or would it get involved to fight against communism. Who would be the main opponents of the USSR, what would the flash points be like. How would the British empire go about and colonialism as a whole.

The USA would be an economic superpower in any case. The PODs you mention would not remove the military intervention of the USA in post WWI Soviet Russia, and it seems next to impossible to me that the USA turns in any way pro-Soviet. US forces in Europe do not seem very likely to me, neither in the case of a three-sided balance of power system (Franco-British alliance / Germany / USSR) nor in the case of an alternate Cold War with Britain, France and Germany allied against the USSR. The balance of power system would be too similar to what happened historically to remove US isolationism, and in the alternate Cold War, Germany and Japan would be much stronger opponents of the USSR than they were in the OTL Cold War, which largely removes any need for US forces in Europe or Japan.

If we have an alternate Cold War, what could bring about a more active involvement of the US in power politics, is an alliance between the USSR and Japan, or a USSR / Japan / China alliance.

One big difference between the alternate Cold War and the OTL Cold War is the fact that the Red Army is not where it is because it has defeated Hitler, so the Soviet Union would be seen as a foreign aggressor even earlier and to a greater degree than it was in OTL. The same is also true for the legitimacy that Stalin's regime had gained in the eyes of the Soviet population, because he had been the leader in the war against Hitler. This kind of legitimacy would not be there in the eyes of the peoples of the Soviet Union in an alternate Cold War.

I think that colonialism would end at roughly the same time, and for the same reasons that it ended in OTL.

 

[elkarlo]

A more diffused affect, a whole generation without PTSD, means less of a hippy generation. As the WWII gen seemed so distant and removes from their kids which I feel added to the appeal of the hippy movement

 

[CalBear]

Without WW II there wouldn't have been a Cold War. Specifically, without the lessons imparted by the virtual destruction of Europe by high explosives, the quite literal obliteration of an entire generation of Soviet males, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki any level of tension even close to the worst moments of the Cold War would have resulted in a Hot War.

While the horrific results of WW I were not quite sufficient to keep WW II from dragging its scythe through the next generation, the 50 million dead of sequel were enough to get the attention of politicians of every stripe focused. It didn't prevent major conflict were many died, but it did prevent the almost insane expansion of regional conflict into general war. When that was combined with the all too real threat of extinction offered by the introduction of WMDs that exceeded the nightmares of all previous eras, that was enough, barely, to permit the Cold War.

What worries me is that the impacts of WW II and the destruction it wrought are fading in second, even third, hand memory. Humans have so amply demonstrated that they are incapable of long term lesson retention.

 

[von kressenstein]

Without WW II there wouldn't have been a Cold War. Specifically, without the lessons imparted by the virtual destruction of Europe by high explosives, the quite literal obliteration of an entire generation of Soviet males, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki any level of tension even close to the worst moments of the Cold War would have resulted in a Hot War.

While the horrific results of WW I were not quite sufficient to keep WW II from dragging its scythe through the next generation, the 50 million dead of sequel were enough to get the attention of politicians of every stripe focused. It didn't prevent major conflict were many died, but it did prevent the almost insane expansion of regional conflict into general war. When that was combined with the all too real threat of extinction offered by the introduction of WMDs that exceeded the nightmares of all previous eras, that was enough, barely, to permit the Cold War.

What worries me is that the impacts of WW II and the destruction it wrought are fading in second, even third, hand memory. Humans have so amply demonstrated that they are incapable of long term lesson retention.

So very well put

 

[Mark E.]

A cold war does not have to be communist vs. capitalist.

Consider world alignments in the thirties. Germany built a military-industrial complex so powerful that it would take the combined forces of the Soviet Union and the United States to bring it to a timely end.

Suppose Hitler drops dead in 1933 and German history is very different. They still build up, but instead of invading Poland, France, etc. and starting a second world war, they use their influence to instigate a Soviet civil war that cleaves the Ukraine from the USSR.

With the independent Ukraine as an ally on the Black Sea, Germany builds a completely different set of alliances. World War II as we know it, including the Holocaust, does not happen.

Suppose the world's first exposure to the Bomb is constructive, as the Germans nuke out a canal through Honduras. It is easy to imagine tensions between the US and Germany as an ideological fight between dictatorship and democracy. What about the Soviets? Hard to say.

The result is a Cold War, with very different players.

 

[katchen]

I agree about a new Cold War. I suspect that such a Cold War would take a much different form and have greater domestic affects in the US much more quickly.
How many of us have read "Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origin of Our Time" by Ira Katznelson 2013 yet?
That book is basically a must read for alt history folks. Basically, Katznelson shows how our current divide between liberals and conservatives has it's roots in the New Deal in which all of Roosevelt's economic and social democratic initiatives had to pass muster with and were tempered by Southern Democrats who made sure that they would not affect the racial and economic hierarchy in the South. And when they threatened to do so, they withdrew their support and threw their weight to the Republicans--in the 30s and 40s. Thus New Deal programs were locally administered, so that local administrators could discriminate against African Americans. Thus after WWII, Taft-Hartley passed, giving Southern States the right to pass Right to Work laws that basically made union organizing nearly impossible in industrial plants. The GI Bill, administered locally, did not apply to Southern African Americans. Neither did the FHA. And it was redressing THOSE grievances that was the basis for the Civil RIghts Movement. And it was the legitimacy African Americans gained by fighting WWII that gave them the right in the eyes of most Americans to demand redress of those grievances in the late 50s and early 60s--something forgotten by the 1970s.
No World War II, no legitimate grievances for African Americans. A much harder Civil Rights struggle.
Something else that Katznelson brings out is that it was the Southern whites, the Scots-Irish (whom former Virginia Senator James Webb has characterized as "Born Fighting" in his book of the same name--another must read) who provided the initial grassroots support for the US builduip to World War II. I'm sure a lot of the reason for that is cultural. Scots Irish--the "Jacksonian" Americans have always and still do make up a disproportionate percentage of the US Armed Services. and the UK's armed services too.
Be that as it may, no Nazi Germany means that the US will not be worried about a war in Europe. But Roosevelt will still have that bee in his bonnet about Japan attacking China. The US is still mired in the Great Depression in 1940 even though the economy has somewhat improved (much as it has now, proportionately (unemployment then down from 25% to 15%) and overseas expansion is seen as a panacea for US business. Japan is in the way of US business expansion into China.
So Roosevelt will prevail upon the British and Dutch to enbargo Japan and probably get that embargo, goading the Japanese into Pearl Harbor. I suspect though, that Roosevelt will get his pretext if he has to out and out stage a Japanese attack on a US ship the way the Nazis staged an attack by Polish troops on German troops in September 1939. After all, Johnson fabricated the attack on the Maddox by North Vietnam that led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. American presidents are good at this sort of thing. And the American public usually buys it.
So Roosevelt gets his war and the US defeats Japan, probably after an invasion in 1946. The US won't developp the atom bomb in this TL since there's no overriding reason for Einstein and Fermi and Leo Szilard to come together to help the US to do so.
The US has no reason to be magnanimous to Japan and executes the Japanese royal family. It's occupation of Japan is not peaceful. Stalin becomes alarmed at America's behavior in Japan and decides to support insurgencies against the US in Japan and Korea. Harry Turtledove's "The Man With The Iron Heart' is probably one of the best books on how the US of 1946-1947 might react to an insurgency.
Look to see American forces tied down by Japanese Communists, by Kim Il Sung and maybe even by Mao in China. And for the issue of African-American civil rights to break out in a particularly ugly manner back home.
Abroad, Israel may become independent unilaterally as a result of insurgency rather than UN or League of Nations resolutions, standing on it's rights under the Treaty of San Remo and it's right to abrogate the British Mandate because of Great Britain's refusal to uphold it[s end of the Treaty and permit unrestricted Jewish immigration. Which may mean that American Jews may move to Israel in large numbers because of an upsurge in Anti-Semitism in the US.
Those are some of the possibilities I see.

 

[Mark E.]

What we need to think about is the definition of Cold War. The term came up because the US and USSR faced ideological and political differences to the extent that they stacked nuclear threats against one another. At risk were civilian populations.

Without nukes, one of few elements that might qualify for a Cold War might be threats to the global economy. As I suggested earlier, you might have a German bloc. Suppose it controls some of the Middle East. Big Oil. The American Bloc has the Americas, and maybe major oil supplier USSR. The threat might not be nuclear, but a breakdown could cause immense complications.

Issues like American racial segregation or Jewish sovereignty would not qualify.