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A question I've been mulling over a little lately, considering how marginal the initial premise seems to be. Let's presume a historical end to The Great War, at least on its fundamental pillars (IE: Entente victory in 1919, German Empire having fallen to Revolution, Russia having gone through the February and October Revolutions and subject to B-L, US enters the war in 1917 on the Entente side, ect.) with one minor butterfly: The Ottoman Empire, after the Italo-Turkish and Balkan Wars, wary on matters of its security, facing disagreements among the Three Pashas, and seeing the opportunity to use the breathing space provided by the rest of Europe being distracted by war decides not to align with Germany and instead; like Iberia, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands remains strictly neutral. Maybe relations break down when the Germans don't offer up sufficient loans of gold and equipment, maybe the Goben and Breslau are denied entry into the Straits in a moment of gun-shyness by the Sublime Porte leading to a diplomatic fall-out, or maybe Enver just eats a bad plate of clams and gets food poisoning creating a diplomatic paralysis; pick your POD and go with it. Given this situation, a few questions emerge.

  1. How do the Ottomans spend their four years of (relative) security from outside pressures? Given historically they unilaterially denounced the Capitulations, its possible they could do so ITTL... but without a treaty where Germany guaranteed them for 5 years after the war's end and such action ran the risk of international reprisal would the CUP be so bold as to try this in our timeline? What kinds of internal activity would they try to get away with otherwise?
  2. To what extent would a neutral OE be able to digest the lessons it learned from its previous wars and observing the current one to reform its military even without German assistance? Equipment availability is obviously going to be a limiting factor, given that global production is... spoken for. Would this encourage the local arms industry (Which could also produce for export), or limit those changes to mostly those of doctrine and reorganization?
  3. What would a neutral OE's reaction to the outbreak of the Russian Civil War be? Obviously, they have regional interests in the Caucuses and North Persia as well as concerns of instability spilling into their own borders, and would have one of the few fresh armies and still not war exhausted populations left with which to potentially pull off some notable interventions. What might their relations be with the various seperatist groups, White factions, and Reds? Would they co-operate with the Entente in their limited post-war interventions?
  4. Since the Empire survives rather than gets partitioned post-war, what might its alignment look like during the Interwar period?
Feel free to post any other questions you'd like discussed as well.
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