Mussolini stayed Communist and his government supported the Catalan workers, who were the anti-Soviet, anti-Fascist "third force" in Spain during the 1936-1939 war. Mexico's Cardenas brought his own socialist government into Mussolini's "anti-Moscow Socialist Axis" in 1938 and Mussolini's Axis stayed neutral during the "inter-fascist struggle" of World War II. The U.S.-U.K. alliance took an increasingly technocratic stance after the war, and launched a series of huge government "Manhattan Initiatives", intending projects like the Moon shots, fuel cell cars (Iran's socialist government joined the Axis in 1953), and the Concord stratojet to maintain the West's lead, even after the Soviet collapse of the 1960s. Now in 2004, the world is decades behind OTL in some areas like agriculture and personal electronics and decades ahead in others like moon bases, fuel cells and supersonic aircraft.
Plausible?