WI USA "Loses" the Cold War

AFAIK it'd be very unlikely for the US to lose the Cold War either by economic or governmental means. However, there were several instances throughout the Cold War that could have gone either way in my book. I'm interested in seeing how people think the world would look like if the US had not done as well as it did OTL in the Cold War.

So, let's say that while the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis happen as OTL, but most everything else comes to naught, including the Korean War and a more violent repression of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. What would the world look like with the US, and NATO perhaps as a whole, looking much worse off?
 
AFAIK it'd be very unlikely for the US to lose the Cold War either by economic or governmental means. However, there were several instances throughout the Cold War that could have gone either way in my book. I'm interested in seeing how people think the world would look like if the US had not done as well as it did OTL in the Cold War.

So, let's say that while the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis happen as OTL, but most everything else comes to naught, including the Korean War and a more violent repression of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. What would the world look like with the US, and NATO perhaps as a whole, looking much worse off?

Well, I'm not sure that a more violent repression of Hungary and Czechoslovakia is a loss for the US: it makes the USSR look bad, for one thing...



Bruce
 
Well, for the USSR to have "won" the cold war, we need the USSR to still be around, for one thing. Higher oil prices would have helped: OPEC sticks together, or a successful Iraqi-Soviet alliance to keep the oil prices up? A continued Chinese-Soviet alliance probably is good too, although this probably requires whacking Mao at an early stage of things. If possible, a wider wedge needs to be pushed between the US and it's European allies: with a more intransigent USSR in place, can we make it look as if Reagan almost starts WWIII, even if he doesn't mean to? (There is some evidence that he almost (inadvertently) did OTL, although it didn't come out until later). If we can get Europe to essentially neutralize itself to avoid becoming a nuclear battlefield (_not_ Finlandize. Europeans are not surrender monkeys, despite what you may have heard. And especially not the Finns. :) ), it looks a lot like a big loss from the US point of view...

Bruce
 
I suppose that if corporate scandels like Enron were to happen during the 80s and lead to a stock market crash and losts of hard working folk lose their jobs, it might make others look at it and wonder if capitalism is such a good idea. Would it ruin America? Nah, we've bounced back before we can do it again. And as for Communist Revolution? Why have one when you can have a Communist Evolution? Seriously though, I can't figure out how either system works; one is based on government commands, the other on shareholder whims.
 
By "lose" I didn't mean that the US turns communist or the Soviet Union survives until the present day. What I meant is that I'm interested in seeing what would happen if much of what the US got its hands into throughout the Cold War turns nasty for them. Vietnam, Korea, the Middle East, what have you. Yet I don't want it to turn into nuclear war, either.

Basically, what would the world look like if the US seemed like it couldn't do anything right during the Cold War?
 
A lot more Socialist states in Africa and Latin America. The Soviets might invade Yugoslavia and force them into the Warsaw Pact. This would make for a good map; Soviet and allies all in red.


By "lose" I didn't mean that the US turns communist or the Soviet Union survives until the present day. What I meant is that I'm interested in seeing what would happen if much of what the US got its hands into throughout the Cold War turns nasty for them. Vietnam, Korea, the Middle East, what have you. Yet I don't want it to turn into nuclear war, either.

Basically, what would the world look like if the US seemed like it couldn't do anything right during the Cold War?
 

The Sandman

Banned
Greece, Turkey and Italy all go Communist between the end of the war and 1950, with varying degrees of willingness. NATO founders as a result.

The Russians decide that as long as they're occupying Austria, they might as well do a thorough job of it, and force it into their bloc after the war.

The PRC takes Taiwan in 1949.

The US space program continues to suffer embarrassments like Vanguard, while the Russian one forges ahead. They get 3 men on the moon while we're still trying to find a way to get one off the surface without him dying horribly in an accident.

Rockefeller sends the National Guard into Woodstock despite the pleas of the organizers that doing so was both unnecessary and counterproductive. A few insults and an itchy trigger finger later, thousands of American kids die in a massacre and the resulting panicked stampede.

Three Mile Island turns into a full-blown disaster, with the reactor not only suffering a complete meltdown but also breaching containment and releasing immense amounts of radioactive dust into the atmosphere after it hits the coolant and triggers a steam explosion. The winds carry the fallout east-southeast, right over Philadelphia, Wilmington, a huge portion of southeastern Pennsylvania, and big chunks of northern Delaware and southern New Jersey.

Encouraged by Russian bribes (who make sure to keep oil supplied at fairly reasonable prices to their puppets and allies), OPEC continues to squeeze oil prices for at least another year before letting them start to come down.
 
Okay.. let's say the USSR puts nukes in Cuba, violently oppresses Hungary, stops the Airlift, and pwns Afgahnistan.

Does this really solve any of the fundamental problems that led to it's collapse? Not really. It gains them prestige and nothing else. Oh this may lead some subborn folks to hold on while the ship is sinking so give the cold war another three to five years tops.
 

DISSIDENT

Banned
Its hard. The USA has its own problems and despite my citizenship in it, I expect it will follow its Red antithesis to the historical obituary some day, some way, just because all empire end eventually. Our economy and political system seems more sustainable and well tried over a longer historical period though.

The USSR failed due to its economic policies and social utopianism running nastily into the reality that human beings are selfish, greedy, paranoid and vindictive even when nobody gets paid more than anybody else. More foreign satellite states does not get people off bread lines. Soviet cosmonauts on the Mare Tranquilatis is all well and good, but it doesn't mean the local commissar isn't drastically exaggerating the boots produced in his factory quotas and running his own black market operation out the back room.

That is happened to one superpower means it could happen to the other. The US has been around longer and outlasted its evil twin. No one ever thought the USSR was going to break up though, even when it did.

For all the almost nuking each other stuff, we weren't really all that different. Federal structure combining local regions under a strong central government over a wide geographic area with multiple local cultures and ethnic groups willingly or unwillingly governed by it. Ostensible democratic government structure subject to dominance by a favored elite that effectively limited public participation.
 
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