Dystopian UN

The name "United Nations" generally conjures images of international solidarity, troops in blue uniforms, and other ineffectual BS.

But what if... the UN was actually badass? What if it had the aim of actually uniting the world, in the literal, warlike sense? How would such a monster arise? Would it even be possible? I submit that it would be possible, and if not, it's still one hell of an awesome idea.

So here's the plan:
In WW2, the USA for some reason doesn't join the war, and Japan discovers Daqing in Manchuria. The USSR fights hard, but is unable to push the Germans out completely, so they have a stalemate of many millions dead. Sometime around 1946-48, Germany builds nukes and uses them on Russia and the UK, at which point the USA enters the war and makes its own nukes. The war ends in the early fifties with many cities in ruins, and at least a hundred million dead.

During the course of the war, the UK and USSR are so destabilized and weakened through nuclear exchanges that the USA has to prop them up. A Soviet civil war between Stalinists and revisionists breaks out, and the revisionists side with The USA and win, with the radicals being banished to a Siberian rump state. In Asia, Japan attacks Russia when Germany does, but is still defeated upon US intervention and is split into occupation zones. The KMT doesn't lose control of China, but the CCP runs to Manchuria and becomes neighbors to the Russian hardliners.

The result is that we have an alliance of the USA, UK, USSR, and China occupying devastated Europe and Japan. All of the allies except for the USA will have gone through massive destruction; hence, the USA ends up more or less supporting them all.

Then the UN gets formed, with the goal of actually uniting the world. This is now possible because the USA is by far the greatest power and the other three aren't going to join against it (esp. since USSR and China are fighting civil wars during the UN's formation). And since everyone wants US aid, they join the conglomeration. The biggest hurdle is getting a US president with enough guts to actually draw up these kinds of plans, and elements in the other powers that will agree to them.

So the UN gets formed, and immediately goes about getting other nations to join. But not all is well as the UN policymakers use heavy-handed techniques in suppressing revolts (Stalinists in the USSR and China, colonies) in the name of unification, and soon the new world authority is dealing with a bunch of insurgencies. The next few decades see the UN, with heavy American control, fighting many asymmetrical (and proxy) wars to expand its influence (and of course, to get closer to a world gov.) in the poor regions of the world. Many of these wars would be fought in third-world nations by third-world member sates, with UN4 (the 4 superpowers) support.

The only major enemy (besides insurgencies) to the UN would be the Russian/Chinese East Asian regime, which I see as having nukes early on and being in a Cold War against the UN. They would also promote Marxist radicalism around the world to undermine the UN.

And by the 1980s or 90s, the geopolitical situation stays largely the same; China and Russia have enormous corruption problems, America is the most affluent (and everyone accuse it of controlling the UN), and perhaps the UN forces are off fighting in the Middle East and propping up an unstable Indian government against Stalinist elements.

Map1980UNrevolts.png


The red things on the map show major revolts or conflicts. The four "UN superpowers" are shown in sky blue and other members have the purple-blue. Most countries joined because then they would get foreign aid.

The culture and attitude of a UN-dominated world would be rather interesting. I can imagine that pro-globalization propaganda would be everywhere, religious fundamentalism and Communism would be lumped together as "the enemy", and that the "UN4" populace would be very pro-war and pro military-industrial complex. With communism and radical religion being seen as enemies, I can't imagine the same kind of USA that we have OTL which has a large (devoutly) Christian belief, but rather, a powerful secularized state like Turkey.

In the end, I think it is interesting that this TL would look a lot like OTL, with the same problems of globalization, rich-poor gap, and insurgent warfare. The USSR and China of this map are unstable, just like Russia and the PRC are OTL.

Thoughts? Is this too widely ASB to be plausible in the least? I personally think it's an awesome idea.
 
It would be damn funny as the people most worried about teh ev0l UN, are now actually running it, how would Barry Goldwater react?
 
It would be damn funny as the people most worried about teh ev0l UN, are now actually running it, how would Barry Goldwater react?
Well the UN isn't evil if it helps the USA spread freedom everywhere, right? ;)
This would probably be Goldwater's wet dream; there's lots of war involved and the only major enemy is a Stalinist power. The only problem he would have is with the USA cooperating with the post-Stalin Soviet government.

This kind of strikes me of being somewhat similar to the C&C-verse with your version of the UN being the GDI and the Soviet-China camp being Nod.
I didn't really think about it that way, but the GDI part of it sort of works. NOD not so much, because the Stalinists's power only extends around Asia and the Pacific. There are lots of other rebellions and wars elsewhere though, but they have little to do with the communists.
 
This is a great scenario you brought up. I've thought about a scenario like this before; basically I thought "What if the USA took over the world when they had the chance?". There was a period there, from 1945 through 1950, where the USA alone had nuclear weapons. That, in my opinion, is the closest any one nation came to conquering the Earth, since the USA could have done it in that period had they wanted too. Now I agree, that is a stretch, that the USA would jt take over the world. I do, however, love the image of all the worlds nations to stop the Americans from overrunning them. Patton would be compared to Napoleon. :rolleyes:

But in all seriousness, had WWIII broken out for any reason in that timeframe, it's not impossible that something along the lines of a "New World Order" could be instituted in the post-war World. The Korean War would be a good POD. Say the USSR gets involved, and it goes nuclear. Western Europe is already financially controlled by the USA at this point, and will be further damaged by WWIII. Comintern would lose the war, unconditionally, since they have too few nukes. They will also be too devastated to rival the USA. The American leadership could argue that there has been two World Wars in five years; it's time to take concrete action to prevent any future conflict. It would be the UN that won the war, and in light of that, perhaps it's time to reform the UN to 'prevent aggression'.The UN could be merely a global puppet government, with the USA having special status on all the councils, especially the Security Council. Nuclear Non-proliferation will be enforced militarily. Aggression would be met with overwhelming force.

Obviously, nations would be unhappy with this, but what could they do? The American public has faced incredible death tolls and they want to ensure that this never happens again. If that means preemptive nuclear strikes, so be it. No nation would want to challenge this for a while.

The culture effects of this would be the most interesting. The UN would be far more investigative regarding nuclear weapons(must enforce nonproliferation). No nation could refuse UN inspectors, not Ethiopia not France. "Police actions" could periodically occur if any nation refused. I doubt there would be widespread occupation, but there could still be the bombing of industrial or nuclear centers. Nuclear if necessary. Economic sanctions would be devastating, because all nations would end trade with you (or risk American wrath). The the globalization vs. anti-globalization split would be a huge political difference that defined the entire world. That said, over time, people would begin to realize that the new generation of Americans are less likely to do this. On the other hand, it will be the traditional political model by the 1970's and the 1980's, so there wouldn't be a huge movement to get rid of the UN puppet government system. I mean, many people will like the stability it provides. In the long term, I could see the UN getting rid of the US 'special position', but keeping the overall system as an international world government.

Well anyway, sorry I went off on my random other dystopic UN scenario, but it is very much like your scenario, and I think many, if not all of the points I said can apply to both.
 

Teleology

Banned
There is a short story about a world where the Soviet spies in the US nuclear program were sniffed out. The general gist of the timeline implied is that the United States cracks down on any attempts to develop nuclear, chemical, or biological (being forced at nuke-point to not develop atomic weapons of their own, the Soviets started bio-weapon labs in the Urals that were discovered) weapons. This is enforced against serious attempts at genetics research, space programs, nuclear power plants, and so on; which coincidentally gives the US a monopoly on GM crops and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The story deals with France, hiding an experimental nuclear reactor somewhere from US radiological police, it being targeted, and protesters deliberately going there in order to try to shame the US from from destroying it (standard practice, as was evidently used on Israeli attempts at nuclear weapons, is a "burrowing" nuke that takes out the site without too much large-scale ecological harm to the surrounding nation).

The general idea is that the US and the average American have grown to only feel secure if no one else has access to knowledge that could potentially be used for WMD's, including advanced science of many kinds. The implication is that gradually this knowledge will become more and more off-limits within the United States itself until the world policeman becomes a police state. A big point is made about how the idea of MAD and security in mutual deterrence seems ridiculous to TTL's Americans.
 
We don't even need WW3 to make it happen. A very destructive WW2, so long that the USA ends up way more powerful than everyone else, is a sufficient driver. And in order to achieve this, that's why I added the Soviet civil war (which is plausible given the nature of Stalin's government) to make the new USSR warm up to the US.
And my idea isn't such overt American hegemony per se, but there is obviously going to be a lot of US influence in the way the UN carries out its task. This coupled with more...brutal Soviet and Chinese ways will make the organization one to be feared.

I'm liking this idea more and more.

ALSO: On nuclear weapons TTL, the nations to have them would be (in order) Nazi Germany, the USA, USSR (spies in US and German projects), Stalinist Siberia (NKVD, which knows everything, is with them in the civil war), PRC (passed on from Stalinist Siberia), ROC (possibly as part of a weapons sharing program with USA or USSR), and Pakistan, which gets them secretly through the Stalinists and starts building their own.
 
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MacCaulay

Banned
The name "United Nations" generally conjures images of international solidarity, troops in blue uniforms, and other ineffectual BS.

But what if... the UN was actually badass? What if it had the aim of actually uniting the world, in the literal, warlike sense? How would such a monster arise? Would it even be possible? I submit that it would be possible, and if not, it's still one hell of an awesome idea.

A while ago, I pitched an idea for a more pro-active UN but no one seemed to like it as there wasn't enough exploding stuff...

Okay...just bear with me, because this all follows kind of a thin strand but could have an immense effect later on.

The United Nations Emergency Force was the peacekeeping force put in place after the Suez Crisis in 1956 erupted into war along the Egyptian-Israeli front. The militaries from Canada, India, Brazil, Finland, Sweden, and Yugoslavia all contributed significant amounts of men and material, finally reaching a force number of 6000 spread along the Egyptian side of the border with Israel from Gaza south along the Sinai to the sea.

It was the first of it's kind and demonstrated what we would later know as "peacekeeping." UNEF was spearheaded by Les Pearson, the Secretary of External Affairs of Canada, and Dag Hammarskjold, the UN Secretary General. This constant support from the Canadian government was evident when UNEF's first commander was selected to be Major-General E.L.M Burns, who had previously commanded I Canadian Corps in northwest Europe during WWII.

Dag Hammarskjold would pass away in a plane crash in the Congo in the early '60s, leaving the UN for the first time to rush to find a replacement Secretary General. They ended up nominating and then unanimously voting for: U Thant, a former Burmese prime minister.

When relations between Israel and Egypt began to become more strained, and some would say inverted from in 1956 due to Nasser's threatened blockade of the Straits of Tiran, U Thant took a very different tac than his predecessor. He sidelined UNEF, having decided that if Egypt and Israel were no longer interested in peace, then UNEF as a peacekeeping force wasn't viable.
As they were on Egyptian territory, then they would be forced to leave when Egypt asked them to, U Thant remarked, "regardless of Israel's territorial whims."

In May '67, U Thant tried to convince either Egypt to keep UNEF, or Israel to let UNEF redeploy on it's side of the border. Neither government would budge. U Thant felt he was without maneuver room, and the US was already preparing it's own plan, Operation Regatta, to open the Straits.

By the end of May, Egypt had formally asked UNEF to leave. When Egyptian troops began their push towards Israel, their first operation was to occupy and take into custody what UNEF posts hadn't yet been evacuated.
Over two dozen peacekeeping troops were killed in firefights.


This leads one to ask a few questions, not the least among them: what if U Thant had not been the Secretary-General in charge? Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash, and so the search for another UN head was fairly hurried.
Hammarskjold could've easily missed the flight and lived, in which case had he supported keeping UNEF in place to support a negotiated settlement or possibly even an armed wall between the Israelis and Egyptians, he would've had support from now Canadian Prime Minister Les Pearson, who would be under pressure to prove that the Canadian Forces Reorginization Act, which had amalgamated the Army, Navy, and Air Force, had actually done some good.

This leads us to a scary setup on the Egyptian/Israeli border in 1967: two armies who desperately want to settle the bad blood between them, and another force who wants to keep them apart and is prepared to fight.

This also leads the UN down another path, one that at first seems good (they may have stopped a war that brought us to the brink of nuclear conflict), but when we stare a bit deeper may in fact be setting a dangerous precedent.

Egypt will almost certainly still ask UNEF to leave no matter who the Secretary-General is, and even if Canada drops the Airborne Regiment in, and Yugoslavia sends in reinforcements, and they actually hold, the end is still the same: a force from the UN was invited on to Arab soil and when asked to leave, they stayed of their own volition. Not only did they stay, but they actively engaged in combat against their hosts.

This is a world with a different kind of peacekeeping. The kind that people seem to wish for: the kind that actively stops wars, and that keeps people safe from evil. It is less restrained, and more proactive.
But with more proactivity comes less activity in the world at large. Egypt wouldn't ever want a UN force on it's soil again, nor would any other Arab state. We can butterfly away the UN forces in Lebanon, and the Palestinian gunmen kept under house arrest by UN police in the West Bank. The Communist world may also feel estranged. This may even butterfly away the UN mission to the DMZ in Vietnam, and Panama.

Yugoslavia, too, may develop a dislike of the organization that it's troops fought and died in, making a UN deployment to that country in the 90s that much harder.

This is just something I was thinking about. UNEF defined peacekeeping, and there were alot of precedents set. And thought I believe U Thant got a lot of grief that he deserved for his handling of the situation, I believe it could've been handled more poorly.
 
Sounds a bit like the "Hope" novels of the late David Feintuch. The UN weas a real world government there, and not particularly nice.

Ditto in some of Larry Niven's "Known Space" yarns.
 
We don't even need WW3 to make it happen. A very destructive WW2, so long that the USA ends up way more powerful than everyone else, is a sufficient driver. And in order to achieve this, that's why I added the Soviet civil war (which is plausible given the nature of Stalin's government) to make the new USSR warm up to the US.
And my idea isn't such overt American hegemony per se, but there is obviously going to be a lot of US influence in the way the UN carries out its task. This coupled with more...brutal Soviet and Chinese ways will make the organization one to be feared.
.

OTL, there was a notion that the world would be kept peaceful by the big powers after WWII:

"President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed the peace could be kept by the major allied powers of the war, the "Big Five"—the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China. In Roosevelt's vision, they would become the world's "policemen." "

( http://www.crf-usa.org/america-responds-to-terrorism/united-nations-fifty-years.html )

Given a Soviet Union led by Someone Else Than Stalin, and which had had a harder time of it in WWII, something along these lines could have emerged, with a paternalistic "great power" UN coercing the poorer nations of the world and making sure no new challengers would arise - for their own good, of course! A radical-left Maoist China, falling out very badly with a "traitorous deviationist" USSR willing to work with the US to maintain order and promote third-world development, might well be an initial leader to the opposition, due to the distinctly discouraging prospects for a quick UN invasion and replacement of the government by one more cooperative...

Bruce
 
We don't even need WW3 to make it happen. A very destructive WW2, so long that the USA ends up way more powerful than everyone else, is a sufficient driver. And in order to achieve this, that's why I added the Soviet civil war (which is plausible given the nature of Stalin's government) to make the new USSR warm up to the US.
And my idea isn't such overt American hegemony per se, but there is obviously going to be a lot of US influence in the way the UN carries out its task. This coupled with more...brutal Soviet and Chinese ways will make the organization one to be feared.

I'm liking this idea more and more.

ALSO: On nuclear weapons TTL, the nations to have them would be (in order) Nazi Germany, the USA, USSR (spies in US and German projects), Stalinist Siberia (NKVD, which knows everything, is with them in the civil war), PRC (passed on from Stalinist Siberia), ROC (possibly as part of a weapons sharing program with USA or USSR), and Pakistan, which gets them secretly through the Stalinists and starts building their own.

If this really is a dystopian badass UN timeline, I don't see it letting the Stalinist Siberian state survive for too long. Eventually, they will fall behind technologically North Korea style, and the UN will decide that a First Strike is the only logical way to keep the world safe. Otherwise, with no Cold War, the US will probably be allies to all the other world powers, so them having nukes isn't that big a deal. Nuclear non-proliferation will still be a large part of the UN, though. Don't want too many people getting nukes.
 
Well it would be ASB to make the UN that hardcore with the US leading it, and since the Stalinists have a credible nuclear deterrent and sizable population, there is a MAD situation. Plus it creates a good enemy besides "rebel forces" for the population to turn their attention to.

The Siberian/Manchurian state would have a significant industrial base and perhaps have some technological prowess. Especially since its territory is harsh and the enemy even harsher, it would make a policy of more efficient industry, farming, etc, as opposed to the mess that is OTL DPRK. The nation would still be very bad on humanitarian violations and an utter lack of freedom, but at least it wouldn't constantly be on the verge of collapse. In fact, it would be the most dytopian feature of the TL.

A while ago, I pitched an idea for a more pro-active UN but no one seemed to like it as there wasn't enough exploding stuff...
The issue with your idea is that it's a little...too believable to be generally interesting (I think it is but it surely isn't that exciting).

Given a Soviet Union led by Someone Else Than Stalin, and which had had a harder time of it in WWII, something along these lines could have emerged, with a paternalistic "great power" UN coercing the poorer nations of the world and making sure no new challengers would arise - for their own good, of course!

Well part of the basis of my idea is that the new Soviet leadership sides with the Americans in order to defeat the hardliners after Stalin dies near the end of WW2. And for Mao, he does flee to Manchuria and set up camp with the Siberian hardliners, forming a "mini-superpower."
 
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There is a short story about a world where the Soviet spies in the US nuclear program were sniffed out. The general gist of the timeline implied is that the United States cracks down on any attempts to develop nuclear, chemical, or biological (being forced at nuke-point to not develop atomic weapons of their own, the Soviets started bio-weapon labs in the Urals that were discovered) weapons. This is enforced against serious attempts at genetics research, space programs, nuclear power plants, and so on; which coincidentally gives the US a monopoly on GM crops and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The story deals with France, hiding an experimental nuclear reactor somewhere from US radiological police, it being targeted, and protesters deliberately going there in order to try to shame the US from from destroying it (standard practice, as was evidently used on Israeli attempts at nuclear weapons, is a "burrowing" nuke that takes out the site without too much large-scale ecological harm to the surrounding nation).

The general idea is that the US and the average American have grown to only feel secure if no one else has access to knowledge that could potentially be used for WMD's, including advanced science of many kinds. The implication is that gradually this knowledge will become more and more off-limits within the United States itself until the world policeman becomes a police state. A big point is made about how the idea of MAD and security in mutual deterrence seems ridiculous to TTL's Americans.

Actually, now that you mention it, this sounds like a very likely outcome for BlairWitch's Sword Unsheathed TL. The massive devastation caused by chemical and biological warfare combined with an example of several world leaders willingly using them on a large scale could lead to the US government and populace believing that any other nation posessing WMD's is highly likely to use them, you could easily have the US be willing to bomb the shit out of any nation that tries to develope nukes solely out of a fanatical fear that those weapons will be reclessly used.
 
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