Multiple Great Power or Superpower Cold War?

Basically a Cold War around the same time between more then two global powers. Each side has nuclear weapons.

Possible Scenarios:
1. USA/USSR/Japanese Empire(United States only fights Germany in WW2)
2. USA/USSR/Anglo-Franco Alliance(reemergence of imperial powers)
3. USA/USSR/Fascist Italy(neutral in WW2 and much more successful)
4. USA/USSR/Nazi Germany(Nazis don't attack USSR and United States only goes to war against Japan)
5. USA/Japanese Empire/Nazi Germany(Nazis win WW2 completely but the United States stayed neutral)
6. USA/USSR/Kaiserriech Germany(Germany wins WW1 and United States stays neutral)
7. USA/Japanese Empire/Kaiserriech Germany(same as 5)
8. USA/UK/Kaiserriech Germany(Germany wins WW1 fast. Britain and the United States stayed neutral)
9. No Great Wars: Superpowers; Germany, United States, Britiah Empire, Japanese Empire, and Russia. Great Powers; France and Italy
 
The USA stays out of WW1

Germany wins, Britain makes out okay, and France is nerfed. The USSR lacks Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, or Caucasus and thus is a middling power.

Japan is more content to go after France's colonies than muck around in China.

Great Powers of the 20th Century

1) United States
2) German Empire
3) British Empire
4) Soviet Union
5) Japanese Empire


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Alternatively...

The Fall of France takes 6 months instead of 6 weeks. Roosevelt doesn't run for a third term and Dewey defeats Cordell Hull in 1940, resulting in an isolationist US.

The French government in this scenario relocates to Algiers, evacuates its military to North Africa, and doesn't have its navy blown up by the British. France is divided between the Paris government which controls mainland France, minus Alsace-Lorraine and the northernmost bits that include French Flanders and Calais) and the Algiers government which controls the Empire and Corsica.

The Germans, after being pretty drained in France, don't have the stomach to go after the USSR. Stalin meanwhile is too cautious to actually provoke a war and he spent those extra six months partitioning Turkey at the 30th meridian east with Italy (with the Bosphorous and East Thrace also being Soviet of course).

The Japanese in this scenario still manage to clutch the idiot ball and piss off the Americans, but without Italian entry into the war (and thus no Otranto to inspire pearl harbor) they start by attacking Guam and the Philippines. The US, with only one country to focus on and its fleet not having been destroyed, overwhelms Japan to a massive degree together with the UK and France. Following the conquest of Japan, it is discovered that Germany was advising Japan and thus the US is peeved with the Germans.

The world proceeds to be divided between the Anglo-American-FreeFrench bloc, the Germans, and the Soviets.
 
Basically a Cold War around the same time between more then two global powers. Each side has nuclear weapons.

How do you stop the multiple poles collapsing into a two-sided cold war?

Plenty of human conflicts have started as 3-sided or even more sided, I can't think of a single one that didn't end as a two sided conflict.

fasquardon
 
How do you stop the multiple poles collapsing into a two-sided cold war?

Plenty of human conflicts have started as 3-sided or even more sided, I can't think of a single one that didn't end as a two sided conflict.

fasquardon


You'd need some kind of geopolitical or ideological basis for it.

British vs Nazi vs Soviet, for example is difficult to break into two sides.

If the Nazis control the continent, then they're a perpetual threat to Britain. The Soviets meanwhile are a threat to India and British middle-eastern interests. The Soviets and Germans, meanwhile, do not like each other very much despite being open to a certain amount of trade. Even as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were trading in the late 30s, they were fighting one another inadvertantly in Spain.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
The last scenario is just a continuation of Edwardian geopolitics, not a Cold War. Fascist Italy isn’t powerful enough the form its own bloc. At best it could lead a Fascist equivalent of the Non-Aligned Movement. In scenario 6, there’s no real reason for the USA to oppose the USSR.
 
You'd need some kind of geopolitical or ideological basis for it.

British vs Nazi vs Soviet, for example is difficult to break into two sides.

If the Nazis control the continent, then they're a perpetual threat to Britain. The Soviets meanwhile are a threat to India and British middle-eastern interests. The Soviets and Germans, meanwhile, do not like each other very much despite being open to a certain amount of trade. Even as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were trading in the late 30s, they were fighting one another inadvertantly in Spain.

There was a big ideological division in WW2 - Nazis & Fascists versus Communist versus Democracies. But in the end the Communists and the Democracies ended up on the same side. If working with the enemy of your enemy means that you can win, why wouldn't you? Especially if your enemy might work with said enemy first...

I could maybe imagine a cold war between the US, USSR and Japan in an ATL where Japan did not enter WW2. Japan hates the Communists too much to work with them and the US hates Japan too much to work with them and in any case, Japan isn't really important to the USA/USSR cold war over Europe... Only in OTL the US and USSR both were willing to work with people they hated in order to gain advantage during the cold war, so I am not even sure if Japan would last as an independent pole in this world. My gut says that the USSR or the USA (likely the USA) would find some way to work with the Japanese in order to win the big prize.

fasquardon
 
I think the most possible Tri-Polar Cold War scenario is a US-USSR-China after the Sino-Soviet Split. It is very easy to get such a scenario by changing just a few things.
 
There was a big ideological division in WW2 - Nazis & Fascists versus Communist versus Democracies. But in the end the Communists and the Democracies ended up on the same side. If working with the enemy of your enemy means that you can win, why wouldn't you? Especially if your enemy might work with said enemy first...

I could maybe imagine a cold war between the US, USSR and Japan in an ATL where Japan did not enter WW2. Japan hates the Communists too much to work with them and the US hates Japan too much to work with them and in any case, Japan isn't really important to the USA/USSR cold war over Europe... Only in OTL the US and USSR both were willing to work with people they hated in order to gain advantage during the cold war, so I am not even sure if Japan would last as an independent pole in this world. My gut says that the USSR or the USA (likely the USA) would find some way to work with the Japanese in order to win the big prize.

fasquardon



The thing was the Germans attacked the Soviets. If they hadn't attacked the Soviets, then there wouldn't have been a basis for a joint anti-Hitler front.

To give you an idea of the sheer amount of distrust between the WAllies and Soviets during the war, Stalin sent generals to the Italian theater because he wanted to verify that the dastardly capitalists in the west were actually fighting the Germans and Italians.
 
The thing was the Germans attacked the Soviets. If they hadn't attacked the Soviets, then there wouldn't have been a basis for a joint anti-Hitler front.

To give you an idea of the sheer amount of distrust between the WAllies and Soviets during the war, Stalin sent generals to the Italian theater because he wanted to verify that the dastardly capitalists in the west were actually fighting the Germans and Italians.

Sure. But even so, Stalin knew war with Germany was pretty likely and Britain was very keen to get the Soviets into the war.

So Barbarossa isn't the only chance for the two sides to unite.

fasquardon
 
The last scenario is just a continuation of Edwardian geopolitics, not a Cold War. Fascist Italy isn’t powerful enough the form its own bloc. At best it could lead a Fascist equivalent of the Non-Aligned Movement. In scenario 6, there’s no real reason for the USA to oppose the USSR.
Could that system of geopolitics exist into the nuclear age or the modern era?
 
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