DBWI: If Yugoslavia was neutral in the cold war

I read somewhere that Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito nearly managed to split Yugoslavia from the USSR successfully and create a neutral yugoslav state. How would that have gone if he wasn't assassinated in 1948?
 
Well you wouldn't have an openly Communist country in NATO, which would probably butterfly away America's realist-inspired strategy of trying to drive wedges between Communist countries instead of treating it as a monolithic bloc. That means no friendly relations with Ho Chi Minh and would probably derail the US recognition and courting of Communist China.
 
I read somewhere that Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito nearly managed to split Yugoslavia from the USSR successfully and create a neutral yugoslav state. How would that have gone if he wasn't assassinated in 1948?

How would he have maintained its neutrality, as a state on the border between the Communist and the capitalist powers? Tito's assassination is an evidence against neutrality in such a circumstance.
 
This has got to be a joke. Tito wasn't assassinated in 1948, but instead lived for over 30 years until dying in 1980 as ruler of a neutral Yugoslavia.
 
I've got my doubts that Tito would have been successful in breaking away from the Soviets as early as 1948. Yes, Kardelj managed it in the 1960s (although with American help, and Kardelj is often regarded as one of the greatest European statesmen in history for his diplomatic manoeuvring and keeping Yugoslavia together), but in 1948 the whole 'we've just liberated you from Nazi aggression' factor was still running high, even though Tito's Partisans pretty much did the job for Stalin in the Balkans. At best, there'd have been huge political upheaval in Yugoslavia - conflict between Serbs and Croats, probably with some Serbian Stalinists trying to discredit Tito as a capitalist (and worse, a Croat); at worst, there'd have been civil war and possibly escalation into an international crisis.
 
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