DBWI: A Cold War?

After WWII, Trotsky Soviet Union and Truman United States enjoyed decades of cooperation and relatively harmonious relationship, WI instead straight after WWII the two contries had develop a rivality?
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
Hmm, if Germany had not gone Communist, if Trotskyi hadn't evacuated Czechoslovakia and Hungary after the war it could have happened.
 
I think removing vice president/president Wallace would do a lot to worsen US soviet relations. The role his administration played was essential towards establishing the resulting decades of peaceful economic and cultural relations between the two nations.
 
With a solid red block extending from the Rhine to Vladivostok, the Soviets felt secure from a second capitalist assualt in the west and could afford to compromise. If all or even most of Germany had falled into Western hands at the end of the war, Trotsky would have faced far stronger pressures to form a protective "buffer" of small states. As it was, American dislike of the Nazis and the extreme thoroughness of the purges of Nazi officialdom in Red Germany gave an impression of the Soviets as Rightful Avengers rather than opportunistic land-grabbers. Remember that Trotsky never compromised in his anti-Nazi stance.

Other things that could have led to confrontation:

1.) A Communist takeover of China. I know, most Soviet as well as most Western historians think Mao had no real chance, but if things had gone a bit differently in 1946-1947, or Trotsky had changed his mind about the absurdity of a country that was still essentially feudal establishing a Communist regime...

2.) An earlier development of the nuclear bomb. If the bomb had been availaible in '45 rather than '47, it would have been a war-winning weapon rather than a super-expensive, pointless monstrosity. It was therefore possible to negociate effective atomic-weapons limitations treaties after the Soviets developed their own in '50 (plus, also, the invasion of Japan was such a bloody mess that it effectively killed off any American apetite for further conflict, and the Free Poland and Free Germany lobbies never could work up a real conflict).

Bruce
 
Well, it stands to reason that the Soviet Union, and with it Communism, could have collapsed earlier than in OTL. I know it's jsut been a few months now, but still. One cannot help but wonder.
 
Well, it stands to reason that the Soviet Union, and with it Communism, could have collapsed earlier than in OTL. I know it's jsut been a few months now, but still. One cannot help but wonder.

Maybe. I mean, President Nixon, despite his friendly appearance towards them, was staunchly anti-Communist in OTL. Had he been elected in a timeline with a rivalry between the nations, there could have been problems for stability. In other words, I see a Soviet collapse in the mid-Sixties.
 
Maybe. I mean, President Nixon, despite his friendly appearance towards them, was staunchly anti-Communist in OTL. Had he been elected in a timeline with a rivalry between the nations, there could have been problems for stability. In other words, I see a Soviet collapse in the mid-Sixties.

Too early I think. Remeber, back then Crustchew (sp? ) had just been killed by that bloke Breshnew, and the Soviet economy was still going strong. I think that mid 1990s would have been more realistic, especially after the Soviets tried to match the Chinese Army.
 
Would Suez War still happen? I've read somewhere that U.S and Soviet "Joint neutrality" at the start of the conflict what helped the Alliance to invade Egypt
 
Too early I think. Remeber, back then Crustchew (sp? ) had just been killed by that bloke Breshnew, and the Soviet economy was still going strong. I think that mid 1990s would have been more realistic, especially after the Soviets tried to match the Chinese Army.


OOC: in our tL, Kruschev wasn't killed, simply forced into "internal exile."

IC: I don't know what you're reading, but the Soviets collapse had little to do with the military buildup of the 90's. The economy was hitting the limits of a command economy in any event, and someone like Andreyev would have come along and made some sort of major reform effort regardless. Heck, if he hadn't died of cancer in 2002, he might have pulled it off.

Rather, it had to do with Premier Melnikov attempting a brute-force reversal of the policies of the Andreyev period, the resultant revolts in Germany and Poland, and the disastrous fuckup the attempted suppression turned out to be. The Soviet people had seen the democratic light at the end of the tunnel, and weren't going marching back to Trotsky's "continous revolution." Frankly, we're lucky it ended as peacefully as it did, with only a couple million deaths and a relatively sane military man running the "Rump Russia" of Belorus, Great Russia, eastern Ukraine,and Kazakhistan.

Bruce
 
Would Suez War still happen? I've read somewhere that U.S and Soviet "Joint neutrality" at the start of the conflict what helped the Alliance to invade Egypt

Depends: in a cold-war situation, the US might have backed its allies, dissuading any Soviet moves. It might even have been succesful: the British and the French were forced to pull out after the USSR and US embargoed them economically. The only winners were Sadat, who got to look heroic, and the Israelis, which grabbed most of the Sinai (and much good has that done them :rolleyes: )

Another thought: if there had been a cold war, might the competition between the USSR and US have led to faster space exploration? I know, some people say that without the US and USSR working together, the 1980's moon landings would have been unacceptably expensive, but nationalism has led to siller things. Perhaps we would have reached Mars by now, rather than the project getting put on the shelf when relations turned cold after 2002.

Bruce
 
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