The top ten worst decisions in history

One of the worst decisions in hindsight was Georgian Monarch Erekle II's decision to disband his army of 20,000 Georgians, which lead to his defeat against Agha Mohammad Khan in 1795, leaving 4,000 of his soldiers dead, and 15,000 women and children sent to Iran as slaves and paving the way for Russian annexation.
 
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You need to restate this. In hindsight, this was a bad decision, but at the time it was not a bad decision at all.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk knew it was a bad idea from the start. If only he had been in command of Turkey at the time, things could have gone differently.

I understand that ostensibly it did present an opportunity to regain Egypt from the British, but with Allied naval superiority it should have been obvious that the war would go against the empire and the central powers.
 
This is an incredibly blasé, overconfident, full of hubris, and lacking historical awareness and insight into human nature, comment.

@Hegemon is entirely right to warn that we are not so superior as to imagine ourselves immune to the same danger of collapse that countless civilisations before us have been through. If history teaches us anything, it is that it would be naive to imagine that things will continue forever as they are now. That's simply not in the nature of things. There is nothing inevitable about human progress, and @Hegemon was also right to point to over-exploitation of resources and the evolution of disease as major danger points that could easily throw us back into the dark ages.



I'm not sure it's even worth debating this. I refuse to believe you are unaware of the overwhelming evidence of the unsustainability of man's exploitation of the planet. Either you have been living in a cave for the last 40 years with no contact with the outside world, or you are deliberately ignoring the evidence for political-ideological reasons.

Some analysts argue that we have already passed peak oil. The history of civilisation has been powered by increases in the efficiency with which we extract energy. That ratio is now in decline, and there is no viable alternative to cheap oil that comes anywhere close to meeting present and future energy needs. I still have hope that alternatives will be developed, but we may not have time in any case.

80% of the increase in food production since the industrial revolution was powered by oil. It follows that the demise of oil will reduce global food supply by 80%, if no action is taken to find an alternative. Even in the best case scenario, with global population set to reach 9 or even 12 billion, it doesn't take a genius to see that we could be headed for mass starvation.

Add to that the fact that global warming is destroying the viability of agriculture across some of the most densely inhabited areas of the globe, notably India and China due to melting of the Himalayas which means both countries' rivers are drying up, an increasingly unstable and uninhabitable Middle East where temperatures are soaring (and there is evidence the war in Syria was caused by climate change), plus regions like the Nile becoming a hotbed of future conflict over water, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

I'm not saying we are necessarily doomed, at least in the short run, but I certainly am saying you can afford to be a lot less blasé about the challenges facing global civilisation in the years ahead.

You are the one behind the times. With shale oil we have at LEAST a century or two of oil and gas while we also have several centuries of coal. With generation IV breeder reactors we can make right now (They merely need to work ways out to scale them up more ) we have millions , if not billions, of nuclear power. Nuclear energy is around a million times more efficient than chemical energy.

As far as agriculture is concerned we can either reserve oil for agricultural use by using nuclear plants or we can make gasoline out of CO2 and water using the waste heat from the same to make them. This can be done now, it is just inefficient. Scaling up genIV nuke plants would make it much more efficient. Other power sources that it could make is hydrogen gas.

We have millions of years of metals even without recycling while we have more wood now than we did 100 years ago. In fact I would thin many of the forests out west as they are too thick which is the biggest reason you have big forest fires. You are using outdated, discredit Malthusian economics. That went out the window decades ago.
 
Has anyone said "the Battle of New Orleans" yet? Because wow, there were a lot of ways the British screwed that one up. There have been plenty of threads about how the peace following would have been different (people tend to overstate the war of 1812's impact), but as for the battle itself practically any tactic, including straightforward assault, would have been better than Pakenham's dilly-dallying. At the first sign of difficulty he abandoned all of his flanking and bombardment plans, but went through with the frontal assault anyway (???), leading obviously to a massacre and the practical end of British encroachment onto US policy, as well as the rise of the man who made America - well, America. His genius almost compares to those of the Austrians.
 
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Alexander Severus not crushing the Sassanid rebellion. Especially in hindsight, it allowed a far more powerful dynasty to come into power in the east, stripping crucial resources from the west.
 
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk knew it was a bad idea from the start. If only he had been in command of Turkey at the time, things could have gone differently.

I understand that ostensibly it did present an opportunity to regain Egypt from the British, but with Allied naval superiority it should have been obvious that the war would go against the empire and the central powers.

Could he have seen the war as a bad idea? Yes, but I severely doubt he would have thought it would end up in the restriction of the Ottomans to Anatolia. And the problem is, the entire Ottoman population, and almost everyone in the government thought being on the central powers side was a good idea. I don't know if you know, but a government and heavily public funding for two dreadnoughts from Britain were withdrawn almost complete from the government without any payback, right before the war, and the order Greece had for dreadnoughts was not canceled. Also, Britain was supportive of Russia, the Ottoman's natural enemy, so Germany and Austria were the only real allies the Ottomans had left, and it's not like the British saw the Ottomans as allies.

The British initially supported the Young Turks, but then they realized the Young Turks were actually more of a threat to Britain than Abdulhamid II had been. Abdulhamid had used Pan-Islamism to protect the Ottomans, but the Young Turks planned to use Pan-Islamism to liberate Muslim occupied places and gain territory for the Caliphate and made plans for Islamic revolution as seen from their missions to India. And the idea of a Global Jihad was actually not that far off, because every day more and more Muslims showed devotion towards the Ottoman Empire, as they were one of the last independent Islamic empires, and one of the last Islamic nations that were still independent for the most part, unlike Persia or Afghanistan.

The war was not to regain Egypt, as while Egypt was highly pro-Ottoman, the initial aims for war was the restoration of lands in the Caucasus pre-1877, dismember the Ottoman Capitulations, and more importantly than any territory was to get rid of as many unequal treaties as possible, and reassert the Ottomans as an independent sovereign state. One of the Young Turks dreams was a Muslim bourgeoisie that could invest in Muslim owned businesses in the empire, and across the world. They also wanted a pro-Ottoman Albania under Austrian protection, and gain influence in Transcaucasia.

Allied naval superiority was obviously considered during war plans, yet the Ottomans had a navy of their own, with two German dreadnoughts, commanded by Germans, and also, the Ottomans knew the British wouldn't waste their ships on areas not of worth, the main city they'd attack would be Constantinople, as the world's most powerful navy should attack a capital with water on both sides, and when that happened, it failed.
 
Alexander Severus not crushing the Sassanid rebellion. Especially in hindsight, it allowed a far more powerful dynasty to come into power in the east, stripping crucial resources from the west.

Not like he could really do anything about it, like the Sassanids never manages to crush the empire in all its civil wars.
 
Right, and man made global warming has nothing to do with it...

There has been little or no change in temperature in over a decade. What this pause means is subject to debate. IMO it probably means that at least the top end of the scenarios fail. We are talking maybe a couple C or so not 4 or 5.

Even if I am wrong since there has been no observed global warming in a decade it couldn't have such an effect. Forests overstocked with fuel does. US forest policy for decades has been to plant two trees for every one chopped down. The downside to that is over thick forests. The US forest service assumed we would be chopping down the trees not having Greens throw a hissy fit every time a few conifers are felled.
 
Not like he could really do anything about it, like the Sassanids never manages to crush the empire in all its civil wars.

Well at that time, the sassanids were in their infancy, beginning in Pars and expanding to conquer the rest of the Parthian empire and expand its borders even further than Parthia ever had. The rebellion came after the Roman occupation of Mesopotamia in the 210s. Had the Romans been able to crush the sassanid rebellion, it’s possible that a much weaker Parthia could be propped up as a quasi-vassal. Perhaps Roman Mesopotamia could even be maintained.

Mind that I’m not saying that the Romans needed to conquer Parthia, or even Mesopotamia, or even formally vassalize Parthia, but they just needed to keep their eastern border as an ineffectual buffer state. The Sassanids were the exact opposite of “weak” and “buffer”.

Also, this is much easier to see in hindsight, when we can look back at all the grief the Sassanids caused for the Roman Empire
 
Well at that time, the sassanids were in their infancy, beginning in Pars and expanding to conquer the rest of the Parthian empire and expand its borders even further than Parthia ever had. The rebellion came after the Roman occupation of Mesopotamia in the 210s. Had the Romans been able to crush the sassanid rebellion, it’s possible that a much weaker Parthia could be propped up as a quasi-vassal. Perhaps Roman Mesopotamia could even be maintained.

Mind that I’m not saying that the Romans needed to conquer Parthia, or even Mesopotamia, or even formally vassalize Parthia, but they just needed to keep their eastern border as an ineffectual buffer state. The Sassanids were the exact opposite of “weak” and “buffer”.

Also, this is much easier to see in hindsight, when we can look back at all the grief the Sassanids caused for the Roman Empire

Yeah but Romans probably weren’t even certain what the whole thing was about. It was Parthia’s business to deal with, and Romans would have had to strike a deal with Parthia to help her crush the rebellion, which thing I doubt they had any interest in doing, Parthia still was a nuisance after all. It indeed was a mistake, not crushing the Sassanids, but one that could be hardly avoided by the Romans, thus not technically a “mistake”.
 
Yeah but Romans probably weren’t even certain what the whole thing was about. It was Parthia’s business to deal with, and Romans would have had to strike a deal with Parthia to help her crush the rebellion, which thing I doubt they had any interest in doing, Parthia still was a nuisance after all. It indeed was a mistake, not crushing the Sassanids, but one that could be hardly avoided by the Romans, thus not technically a “mistake”.

Yeah, which is why I say this is mostly in hindsight.
 
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk knew it was a bad idea from the start. If only he had been in command of Turkey at the time, things could have gone differently.

I understand that ostensibly it did present an opportunity to regain Egypt from the British, but with Allied naval superiority it should have been obvious that the war would go against the empire and the central powers.

Mustafa Kemal had the experience that helped him since 1919 onwards. You could say MKA would be much different than he was OTL had he been in power from 1913. In which he would be 32 years old.

Besides, everybody knew what kind of bad idea it was to fight the British and Russians at the sams time. But considering Russian Threat existed and this time by using the Armenians, it was "either victory or destruction" in the minds of the three Pasha's... probably.
 
Mustafa Kemal had the experience that helped him since 1919 onwards. You could say MKA would be much different than he was OTL had he been in power from 1913. In which he would be 32 years old.

Besides, everybody knew what kind of bad idea it was to fight the British and Russians at the sams time. But considering Russian Threat existed and this time by using the Armenians, it was "either victory or destruction" in the minds of the three Pasha's... probably.

The expansion of Russia to the south combined with the decline of the Ottoman Empire is one of the great disasters of history.

Before entering in the war, the question is: How would the Ottomans achieve naval superiority?

Do you think the Ottomans could have gained something from the war, if the leaders made some different decisions?

What is the best case scenario for Ottomans at this period?
 
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