World Without Watergate-Revamped.

Realpolitik

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Oh wow, I never knew that. Nixon was right on that question at the time- the Democratic left-wing has of course done a huge 180 on that question since then.

Sources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/nixon-jerusalem_n_2914905.html

http://www.jta.org/1972/05/30/archi...ion-to-recognize-jerusalem-as-israels-capital

Part of this was probably for Jewish voters, an increasingly important source given the defection of mass parts of the New Deal coalition to Nixon, but part of it also was that the parties were different back then. Israel still was authentically fighting for its life in a lot of ways, and was something of a bastion of democracy in a dictatorial, repressive, and Soviet leaning Arab World-far more important Soviet leaners than North Vietnam. Back then, Israel attracted the "moralistic" attention of the left instead of the Palestinians. MLK was an Israel supporter, and RFK was assassinated by a Palestinian. Very interesting when you look at the opposite line groups like the Baader Meinhof took.

Nixon was also a strong Israel supporter, but his alignment was out of national interests/Cold War politics and far from an unconditional moral attachment common among the Republicans today and the Democrats then. I think he also really liked the "guts" of the Israelis, comparing it favorably to American Jews. He was really scizophernic when it came to them-I'm not just talking about 1973, but before that in the first term with Black September and the Rogers Plan. Nixon considered it hypocritical because that with McGovern's defense cuts, Israel wouldn't have anything to be a capital of if it was attacked over Jerusalem.

The Israeli government ended up supporting Nixon anyway, a wise move considering that his actions would speak louder than words the next year. This was back in the pre-Likud, pre Camp David days, surrounded by enemies but with a government that wanted some realistic long term plan.
 
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Realpolitik

Banned
Well, I've got the next couple of scenes in the Soviet Union and Pakistan worked out. I just need to find time to write them up...
 
What are the chances of creating a liable defense treaty with ROV to ensure the United States would be committed to its defense.

There needs to be way to stop any congressional acts stopping any American involvement in South East Asia. Even though large scale protest have ceased by this point, many of the radical anti war protester were committed to destruction of the Saigon government and many of them had sway over many members of congress. I heard there were many parties all over America commemorating the Fall of Saigon.
 

Realpolitik

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What the Soviets are up to will be interesting. Has the invasion of Afghanistan been butterflied away when 1979 finally comes about.

In the process of writing up a Kremlin scene.

What are the chances of creating a liable defense treaty with ROV to ensure the United States would be committed to its defense.

There needs to be way to stop any congressional acts stopping any American involvement in South East Asia. Even though large scale protest have ceased by this point, many of the radical anti war protester were committed to destruction of the Saigon government and many of them had sway over many members of congress. I heard there were many parties all over America commemorating the Fall of Saigon.

In 1975, not likely. Later is a different story, especially as the image of Nixon fades, both for Hanoi and at home. You'll see.

As I said before, after a 49 state victory, Nixon could probably stave off anything Case Church or War Powers Act like for a while in 1973(the latter in particular would have been unthinkable without something on the level of Watergate), but the Democrats gain even more members of Congress in 1974 and Nixon runs into trouble with the economy/scandal. There is nothing on the level of OTL in this universe, enabling Nixon to support the place while also "washing his hands" of it in case things go wrong, but any enthusiasm to be involved in the region was non-existent.

That's a little much. Most people just did not want to hear about Vietnam anymore. Period. Dot.
 
How would Kissinger fare as US Ambassador to China or even return to Germany and become Foreign Minister under Willy Brandt and/or Helmut Schmidt?
 

Realpolitik

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How would Kissinger fare as US Ambassador to China or even return to Germany and become Foreign Minister under Willy Brandt and/or Helmut Schmidt?

Kissinger, like his boss, would probably prefer to not be hemmed down to one country, however important, and focus on foreign policy as a whole. The strength (and to a lesser extent weakness, when you look at things like Bangladesh) of the Nixon/Kissinger duo was their abilities to look at the big picture and to attempt linkage rather than looking at all components of the world separately on an ad hoc basis. That's very rare for an American administration, to come in planning like that. Most Presidents adapt to foreign policy on the job, based on what comes. Nixon and Kissinger remained pretty consistent to their long term vision and were remarkably good at adapting to the circumstances-abroad. Domestically, they had more issues.

Why would Kissinger return to Germany? He was and is a dedicated American.

Is this still going on?

Yes. I'm so sorry that I forgot, school is really cranking up. I'll try to make up for it if not this week, this weekend.
 
I agree. Goddamn foolish to bring the religious element into it-this isn't the Middle East where you necessarily have to play that game. Diem was a brutal SOB, don't get me wrong, but compared to regional standards... he really ruined his reputation in DC as well.

Nhu was a VERY malignant influence. Guys like this hanging around didn't help either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ph%E1%BA%A1m_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc_Th%E1%BA%A3o

Ultimately, if Diem had lived, South Vietnam would have been more "self-stable" but probably more rogue. Think Pakistan. It's hard to imagine things being worse for South Vietnam than OTL with the constant coups, but it will be far from a nice timeline. Diem had nationalist streed cred. Thieu was competent(a helluva lot smarter with the Buddhists as well as being a master of intrigue), but he lacked any charisma or ability to intimidate whatsoever(thus inflaming corruption problems), and by the time he took over, he had a near impossible situation on his hands. He also was as paranoid and secretive as Nixon was.

I ordered a book called Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War. I haven't start reading it yet. But the book is supposed to be a form of ''apologetics''
defending Diem from the criticisms used against him. David Moyar the author of the book says most of the criticism on Diem are from misconceptions and Communist propaganda. He is a far capable leader than most people give him credit for.



Perhaps Diem was not as anti-Buddhist as many people argued for.
From the beginning, Diem had given the Buddhists permission to carry out many activities that the French had prohibited. Of South Vietnam's 4,766 pagodas,1,275 were built under Diem's rule,many with funds from the government. The Diem government also provided large amounts of money for Buddhist schools,ceremonies, and other activities. Diem's accusers said that he blatantly discriminated in his selection of officials, with the results that most officials were Catholics, but they were mistaken. In some parts of the government, Catholics did hold a disproportionately high number of positions, and at certain time and places Catholics received limited preferential treatment in hiring and promotion, which South Vietnamese leaders might justify by pointing to the fact that Catholics, and especially Northern Catholic refugees, had dedicated in their anti-communism than the average non-Catholic. The primary cause of Catholic over-representation, though, was not discrimination but the higher proportion of educated persons in the Vietnamese Catholic population, a legacy of the colonial era. But what is most significant is that the Catholics did not come close to dominating the Diem government, not even at the highest levels. Among Diem's eighteen cabinet minsters were five Catholics, five Confucians, and eight Buddhists, including a Buddhist vice-president and a Buddhist foreign minster. Of the provincial chiefs, twelve were Catholics and twenty-six were Buddhists or Confucians. Only three of the top nineteen military officers were Catholics.
Page 216. The book lists many footnotes and annotations to support these claims. That I am too lazy to write down.
 

Realpolitik

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This timeline going to be slowly updated throughout the semester, moreso than the initial pieces. What I'm going to try to do is to make shorter, but more frequent updates as a response. Sorry.
 

Realpolitik

Banned
It was a cold, blustery day as Al Gore stood to take the Oath of Office on January 21st, 2001. For the first time, the Reform Party would have their shot at the Presidency, breaking the stranglehold that the National Party had on US politics since the 80s. And might have had longer, had President Bush not been blown apart by an assassin's bomb in late 1995 in his third year in office, leaving Vice President Gingrich to ascend to office. Gingrich handled the job well at first, proposing his trademark Mars mission, generally conducting affairs successfully, and won in a crushing landslide in 1996.

Then the wind turned. The Reform Party had a slogan-“to dare more democracy”, taken from the SPD of West Germany. Ironic, considering that the original utterer of the slogan, Willy Brandt, was an uneasy partner in the original detente with the Soviet Union of the founder of the National Party. He represented to them the apex of National Gaullist style pseudo authoritarianism combined with the extreme hatred engendered by remnants of the Democratic Party. Once upon a time, there were two parties-Democrat and Republican. They both imploded under the weight of an assassination, an attempted firebombing of the Brookings Institution, a scandal involving a handsome serial killer working in the White House, a couple of failed Presidencies, a spy ring, and a desire to be a more “mature” nation. The opposite had happened in many regards, as the splinter parties grew more and more diverse. Paramilitaries and violence were commonplace, even though the US as a whole grew more stable and economically prosperous-some said too stable after the trying times of the late 70s and early 80s. Congress was widely despised after the initial weakening of Presidential power in the late 70s, thus the Imperial Presidency came back with a vengeance...

All this was helped by the... problems Gingrich had later in his term, thought John Lennon as stood the stage for a Beatles reunion. They had flown all the way from Jerusalem for this gig. It was such a nice, peaceful city under the Vatican-like status that had worked surprisingly well. More peaceful than DC, whose ghettoes resembled occupation zones...


Karl Rove, meanwhile stood in the distance. He could not believe this had happened. As one of the “spin doctors” in the administration, Rove had struck fear into political enemies, all the moreso when Lee Atwater passed away thanks to brain cancer. You crossed Rove lightly. He had done what he could, covering up the scandals of the Gingrich administration and the excesses of the national security state under the National Party. He had ruined a career or two. But sometimes, you couldn't fight everything. But they would be back-the Congress still had a fair amount of Nationals in them, and Gore had only won by a hair. Nearby, one of Rove's bodyguards dragged off one man who screamed he was pay his party back, how the late Lee Atwater (God bless his soul) had ruined his life, for getting him sued for sexual harassment, ruined his career, his wife got custody of Chelsea... Rove yawned. He heard it all before. The National Party, which had seemed invincible in 1996, was fractured with mass dissent rising between different factions. The bubbling had started after the death of “the Old Man” in 1994, who many suspected (correctly, as Rove well knew from his run-in with him in '92-he had never seen someone who was less inclined to gracefully retire) was playing the subtle puppetmaster and kingmaker all along with the National Administrations in the last ten years of his life. Then came Bush's death. Some began to question the party's increasingly privatized turn with the ascenion of Gingrich, and many questioned if the party was loosing touch with what made it great, the working-class, the lower-middle class, the immigrants who had increasingly gained wealth and were beginning to question if, like in 1959, it was time to aspire to something higher.

Gore proceeded to mention American values, specifically the question of supporting American values abroad, denouncing the Syrian Army's recent suppressing of protests in Beirut, with the unstated implication that the National Party had traditionally looked the other way. The Russian and Chinese ambassadors both looked upon him warily. While relations had gotten cooler if not openly antagonistic under the more hawkish Gingrich, they had grown accustomed to a mutually respectful and economically cooperative relationship with the Dole and Bush administrations, and it was no secret who they preferred in the election when the Reform Party began to bring up the issues of human rights.

The looks of the foreign ambassadors were tame compared to the losers of the election. Many of the Gingrichites were staring at Gore with daggers in their eyes. He was walking into a tiger pit. Gore was an acceptable choice for many National voters, as a Southerner and someone who had worked with them. Gore's fame to claim was the rise of the Internet, which he had gotten the Bush administration interested in. It was taking off. But he was a dedicated Reformer, which seemed all too much to remind them of the 60s, and what they fought against originally. The slogans at the convention halls... far too negative, openly stating what many old fighters in the party thought but weren't supposed to say. “Dope is an enemy of a strong society”. You weren't supposed to SAY that in the year 2000, you needed to just talk about stuff that got the press off your dick. What do you think that did to the younger generation who only knew prosperity?

Rove thought it was all so stupid. The leftist media was a problem, they made people think. He then surreptitiously put on a pair of headphones so he wouldn't have to hear those hippies yap. Joey Ramone was coming to join them, for Pete's sake-the singer of one of the world's most famous older rock band was a dedicated Reformer, of course... why did the damn guitarist have to get shot instead of him?




I'm BAAAACK... (Steven Tyler esque scream).
 

Realpolitik

Banned
That was unexpected. Looks like the Imperial Presidency is stronger than ever, nice world building though.

At least the Beatles get a reunion.

John Lennon is alive. Because Nixon had him deported. The hippie better be grateful.

More importantly, I decided to let one of Nixon's more interesting ideas and run with it. Forming a new Gaullist style party out of the conservative New Dealist white working class-the Daley/Rizzo Democrats in the North and the Southern Democrats-the suburban middle class, Hispanics/Asians, and Midwest style "balance the budget" Republicans. Center right, culturally populist, pragmatic on economic questions in order to entice the working class, strong realist foreign policy, and "keeping the Reaganites and McGovernites forever out of power", in his words. So think Reagan but with some important differences. No Gospel of Wealth(more revenue sharing and New Federalism rather than cutting everything and spending it on the military), and the strategy to pick up the working class actually includes things like a health care plan. No room for the neocons either, as the National Party unashamedly embraces Nixonian realpolitik abroad. However, Nixon makes up for this by creating an authoritarian atmosphere in this party that translates in policy.

Tricky always had a populist strain to him. By the summer of 1972, Nixon was thinking that if he couldn't get Connally the Republican nomination in 1976, he might try. He doesn't immediately ATL, but he will eventually try. Something often missed is that Nixon strongly preferred the hard hats to the country club/blue suit types, and if he were to be the conservative coalition founder instead of Reagan, we could see a different emphasis. Something I found interesting was how little Nixon thought of Wall Street when he worked there. He thought of the GOP as the "World's Biggest Rotary Club" and blamed them for being boring/stuffy and unappealing when they failed to take Congress in '72.

The end result of a Nixon-led conservative movement is that social inequality isn't the problem-or as much of one. It is state abuses and paranoia. It's also a little more scary, because this conservative movement is somewhat smarter. The "Old Man" made sure that Grover Norquist didn't open his piehole in '92 when he was about to ruin Bush...

And the opposition is more interesting. You have Goldwater style libertarians/Silicon Valley tech people joining forces with the ex-McGovernites and social/sexual minorities that the National Party has alienated. Helped by the fact that Bush got killed, and Gingrich as I mentioned alienated a few people in his last years in office.
 
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An American Gaullism would be a conservatism I could vote for! And yeah, that hippie Lennon better be damn grateful...
 
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