Western Hemisphere becomes a Capitalist/American Version of the Eastern Bloc

Let’s say for whatever reason the USSR marches all the way into France and Italy due to lack of American or British involvement in mainland European front or for whatever other reasons. Pearl Harbor still happens and American wins the Pacific War. With the exception of Spain and Portugal the USSR and it’s puppets control all of continental Europe and a lot of mainland Asia. With most of Europe lost, the United States reenforces the Monroe Doctrine but with communism being the center threat to it. The US starts to heavily focusing on controlling the Western Hemisphere through economic, diplomatic, and sometimes military means. Many Latin American countries become blatant US puppets but on the plus side much of the Marshall Plan funding goes towards them. Could this work? How would it work? How could this happen? Possible impacts?

Additionally notes and ideas: Britain, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal are the only non communist or neutral countries left in Europe. The non communist French government is in exile in its colonies. Maybe Italy too depending on how the allies decide to use Italian colonies with the lost of the Italian heartland. Maybe set up a exile and refugee country in Libya for Italians. Algeria playing a similar role for France. Maybe a much of Europeans flee to the colonies in Africa after USSR and communist takeover of most of Europe. To expand on this maybe the United States, Britian, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, apartheid South Africa and parts of the Caribbean create a Anglosphere similar to the EU in structure to counter the much larger communist threat.
 
"To expand on this maybe the United States, Britian, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, apartheid South Africa and parts of the Caribbean create a Anglosphere similar to the EU in structure to counter the much larger communist threat." Oceania

"With the exception of Spain and Portugal the USSR and it’s puppets control all of continental Europe and a lot of mainland Asia." Eurasia
 
The problem with this is that the Americans aren't going to institute a repressive dictatorship because the American constitution and the Magna Carta forbid that. The most you can have is a more isolationist America that goes for Canada and sets up a pro-American regime there, but that's near ASB.
 
The problem with this is that the Americans aren't going to institute a repressive dictatorship because the American constitution and the Magna Carta forbid that. The most you can have is a more isolationist America that goes for Canada and sets up a pro-American regime there, but that's near ASB.
America helped install or prop up various dictatorships in Latin America
 
The Soviet Union controlled the Warsaw Pact as tightly as they did because it was a buffer against another invasion. If Napoleon's march toward Moscow hadn't shown Russia the importance of controlling the Polish region of the Northern European plain, then Barbarossa certainly did.

Russia has also has a crowded geopolitical neighborhood that America doesn't have to deal with. The US doesn't really have Great Power neighbors like Japan, Germany, Turkey, China, and Poland that have invaded or threatened the country's heartland at some point. The US doesn't need to micromanage central America to assure it doesn't become the base for a Brazilian invasion of the mainland US or something. The US also doesn't have an ideological reason to replicate its system the way Moscow did.

Stalin couldn't just have neutral states, he needed them to be actively pro-Soviet in order to ensure that the Soviet Union would have a safe buffer. For ideological reasons, Stalin thought that the only way to make the states of central and Eastern Europe was to give them socialist leaders. Marxism views a state's politics as a superstructure over the economic/material base, so the countries in question would have to have socialist economies in order to have socialist leaders, in order to be assuredly pro-Soviet in foreign policy. Even the most pro-Soviet bourgeois politicians like Edvard Benes weren't enough.

The USSR always had a self-serving theoretical explanation for soviet interests. According to theory, the Warsaw Pact steps were People's Democracies, an intermediate category between the bourgeois democracies in western Europe and the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. This meant that any moves to multiparty elections or civil rights were the work of reactionaries trying to pull the countries backwards in time, and central Europe had to follow the Soviet example in political and economic matters.
 
The Soviet Union controlled the Warsaw Pact as tightly as they did because it was a buffer against another invasion.

Which is why Gomułka was able to surround Soviet troops with Polish tanks in 1956 to ensure a "soft" new course position despite the Soviet political committee of the central committee desiring a harder line.

Soviet power in central Europe was never monolithic, as the Rajk purges ought to demonstrate.

We don't need to answer OP's fantasy with another fantasy.

yours,
Sam R.
 
Which is why Gomułka was able to surround Soviet troops with Polish tanks in 1956 to ensure a "soft" new course position despite the Soviet political committee of the central committee desiring a harder line.

Soviet power in central Europe was never monolithic, as the Rajk purges ought to demonstrate.

We don't need to answer OP's fantasy with another fantasy.

yours,
Sam R.
Of course it wasn't monolithic. Soviet geopolitical control over Poland was more important for Moscow than pretty much any other Warsaw Pact country, but the soviets also had to be more tactful than in other countries. Poland never had the anti-religious campaigns as harsh as other states, and the purges were less bloody in Poland than in Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
 
"Western Hemisphere becomes a Capitalist/American Version of the Eastern Bloc"? You mean the US intervenes to topple what it considers anti-American regimes in the Western Hemisphere as the USSR did to topple what it thought of as (at least potentially) anti-Soviet regimes in the East Bloc? Sounds like OTL...(Guatemala 1954, Bay of Pigs 1961, undermining Allende in Chile, Grenada 1983, support for the Contras in Nicaragua, Operation Just Cause in Panama, attempts to undermine Chavez-Maduro in Venezuela, etc.).

Granted, these attempts were not always successful--but neither were the Soviets' (they couldn't oust Tito or Hoxha or get the West to abandon West Berlin). And they weren't always accomplished by outright US military force--but neither were the Soviets' by the Red Army (the Czech coup in 1948, the crackdown on Solidarnosc in Poland in 1981, etc.)

It's odd if you think "The US starts to heavily focusing on controlling the Western Hemisphere through economic, diplomatic, and sometimes military means" is true only in an ATL!

(Note: I am not morally equating the US and the USSR. I am not suggesting that the regimes the US tried to undermine were necessarily "good guys" by any means. All I am saying is that the US did indeed try to mobilize the Western Hemisphere into an anti-Soviet bloc in OTL, which makes this rather puzzling as a what-if.)
 
the United States reenforces the Monroe Doctrine but with communism being the center threat to it. The US starts to heavily focusing on controlling the Western Hemisphere through economic, diplomatic, and sometimes military means.
This is just OTL

Thoughts-there might-might- be enough of a population base among the pied noirs to support a French government-in-exile for a time, but it will become a quagmire for the Americans very quickly, and the FLN will be getting all the Soviet support they could dream of.

An Italy-in-Africa would just be a complete non-starter generally-any government would be sitting on a throne of American bayonets form day one. (Hell, the PCI already had a non-trivial presence among the colonists in Somalia).

An apartheid (that is, National Party-run) South Africa probably isn't going to be joining any sort of 'anglosphere'. Boer pride and all that.
The problem with this is that the Americans aren't going to institute a repressive dictatorship because the American constitution and the Magna Carta forbid that. The most you can have is a more isolationist America that goes for Canada and sets up a pro-American regime there, but that's near ASB.

I have some bad news for you about British government for a significant majority of the time since the Magna Carta was signed.

(and the US has certainly never shown any hesitancy to engineer dictatorships in Latin America to support their interests.
 
. . . . Many Latin American countries become blatant US puppets but on the plus side much of the Marshall Plan funding goes towards them. . .

. . . and the US has certainly never shown any hesitancy to engineer dictatorships in Latin America to support their interests.
1) Ah, but crucial difference, with Marshall level spending, this might be economic imperialism with genuine uplift.

2) and less sure on this point, but if we’re the somewhat weaker party in a cold war, well, the Soviets were less picky on ideology than we were as long as you’re a buffer state, as long as you’re broadly within the range . . . yes, I know Czechoslovakia would be a counter-example but Yugoslavia with Tito an example in it’s favor.

We might adopt a view, as long as you support the OAS (Organization of American States) with money and troop levels, we are not going to be real picky with whether you get our version of capitalist ideology exactly right.
 
1) Ah, but crucial difference, with Marshall level spending, this might be economic imperialism with genuine uplift.

Total aid to Latin America from 1948 to 1975 (from AID, the World Bank and IDB) has been estimated at $40 billion. https://books.google.com/books?id=x...olicy"&focus=searchwithinvolume&q="total+aid" "This exceeds by a large margin the $14 billion transferred by the United States to Europe under the Marshall Plan during 1948-1954" even taking inflation into account.
https://books.google.com/books?id=x...s+policy"&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=marshall
 
Total aid to Latin America from 1948 to 1975 (from AID, the World Bank and IDB) has been estimated at $40 billion. . .
I welcome the fact that we majorly worked the economic side of the equation. :)

I still think that if the money had come in one large bolus, say, from ‘45 to ‘49, it would have changed the psychology on our part. If we’re making this kind of investment to build people up, get them looking at the good parts of our system, and build bridges on trade and joint projects . . . then I think we’re going to be more hesitant to potentially wreck it all by doing such things as supporting coups and propping up dictators.
 
why?

During the cold war, we were against land reform in Latin America, against labor unions, against New Deal-style governments, and against some other pretty good stuff.

why?

I think because we had a clearly winning hand and so we had the luxury of going paranoid. Like a football team playing a prevent defense, we went super risk-averse. And we were against anything that might even conceivably lead to communism.

=========

In a cold war in which we’re clearly in second place, we don’t have the luxury of going paranoid.
 
I welcome the fact that we majorly worked the economic side of the equation. :)

I still think that if the money had come in one large bolus, say, from ‘45 to ‘49, it would have changed the psychology on our part. If we’re making this kind of investment to build people up, get them looking at the good parts of our system, and build bridges on trade and joint projects . . . then I think we’re going to be more hesitant to potentially wreck it all by doing such things as supporting coups and propping up dictators.

But remember that the Latin American countries had not experienced the physical destruction during World War II that Europe had undergone. So it is not really realistic to expect them to get the same amount of aid in the late 1940's.
 
But remember that the Latin American countries had not experienced the physical destruction . . .
All the same, if we’re living in an ATL in which the Soviets have most of Europe and big chunks of Asia, we might want to build up our allies where we can! :p
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=l...v=onepage&q=Peru inauthor:Mankiewicz&f=false

Frank Mankiewicz:

‘ . . . Peru, which had a sizable Indian minority who spoke Quechua (a non-written language), had long been regarded as a U.S. satrapy under the control of well-provided generals, with scant history as a democracy, and a social system that would have bern called feudalism in any other century. . . ’
So, we ended up with a foreign policy highly likely to turn people against us in the long-term, and the mid-term!

U.S. international policy in Latin America during the cold war OTL is kind of a mystery to be explained.
 
So, we ended up with a foreign policy highly likely to turn people against us in the long-term, and the mid-term!

U.S. international policy in Latin America during the cold war OTL is kind of a mystery to be explained.

I agree, it's a big mess and I've never understood it, but I wouldn't limit this feeling to just the Americas. America showed a pretty high degree of sophistication in dealing with Europe and Japan, maybe parts of the Middle East. But the way we largely treated the rest of the world had no sneak about it. The most basic "not a commie/let's us make money off them" litmus tests were about as far as we usually got across most of the globe. The answer to me seems obvious (dismissive racism/general sense of cultural superiority) but maybe I'm just giving the US intelligence apparatus too much credit in Europe/Japan/ME.

Considering the intel/statecraft community tended to stick around longer than US political leaders, maybe we can look through the personnel files and find a person or two to "Hoover" up the place. Basically go in and remake US institutions in their image. It was a bad thing when J Edgar did it, but finding someone or a few someones with a more sophisticated outlook and the will to dominate a bureaucracy could be a fun AH exercise.
 
why?

During the cold war, we were against land reform in Latin America, against labor unions, against New Deal-style governments, and against some other pretty good stuff.

why?

I think because we had a clearly winning hand and so we had the luxury of going paranoid. Like a football team playing a prevent defense, we went super risk-averse. And we were against anything that might even conceivably lead to communism.

=========

In a cold war in which we’re clearly in second place, we don’t have the luxury of going paranoid.

The Soviet experience would seem to indicate otherwise-a sense of being besieged and losing ground tends to make paranoia and desperation worse among decision-makers, not better.

That said, I should point out that there actually a good deal of variety in the particular flavor of brutal repression practiced by American clients down south. Central American plantation economies, Chilean neoliberalism, Brazilian corporatist developmentalism, etc.

So, we ended up with a foreign policy highly likely to turn people against us in the long-term, and the mid-term!

U.S. international policy in Latin America during the cold war OTL is kind of a mystery to be explained.

A big chunk of it is a colonial hangover, of course-American attitudes towards Latin America are basically analogous to the modern Russian view of their 'near abroad'-a natural sphere of influence whose leaders should be grateful for the privilege. Compounded several times over by racial issues, of course, then another couple times by how wild the CIA was running in the period.
 
I think that here, you would have Atlanticism be a major stabilizing force. I think that the so called White Dominions, plus other democratic states of the Americas or what has remained in Europe, would be fiercely pro-US, to the point where you could have a much, much more integrated NATO like alliance, with many EU elements around, perhaps going even further. A common currency, a common army. Expect things like a Western Political/Economic/Defence Community being set up, directly analogous to what Western Europe was trying to do, only this time, with American bases everywhere. Given that Britain is also something of a powerful player here, you either get something analogous to the Sinosoviet split, with Britain turning more and more pacifistic & social democratic, or the opposite, where Deep integration between Britain & the U effectively leads to a single Anglosphere nation, with an overarching government structure, in practice if not in paper. That, in my view, would also be the only way out of a staggering economic slump the loss of Europe would mean: more integration, perhaps Africa is governed by huge Apartheid like states, with a French Government in Exile being propped up and either adopting a twisted Lusotropicalism or going genocidal on the natives. Replicate that across africa, with rump Belgiums, Italys, and so on. As for Asia, I guess that Japan or South Korea(if they still exist) are going to be heavily involved in this alliance/union/community.
 
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