Worst Screws in AH

What? Do you know anything about the thirty years preceeding the Muslim conquests? The Romans and Persians had spent 26 years beating the stuffing out of one another, were both broke, and had only a fraction of their armies from 600 still intact. The Persians were fighting civil wars after multiple assassinations of kings. Pointing out that the Arabs got lucky in their timing is not "anti-Muslim" bias.
Also it's notable that the Rashidium didn't penetrate the Roman/Byzantine heartland of Anatolia the same way they took Iran, primarily because the Byzantines hadn't yet completely descended into Klingon Promotion territory, while the Sassanids were still beating the stuffing out of each other right up until they got conquered.
 
Show your anti muslim bias, Al-Qaddis was at the same time and the beat the Persian without any help,the same the romans too
@Nivek
Umm.......what? I don't have such bias, and I don't appreciate being labeled as being of an anti-Muslim bias. While I am an open Byzantophile, some of my favorite historical figures are Harun al Rashid, Al Mansur, Ibn Batuta, etc. Plus periods like the Abbasid Revolution against the Ummayads fascinate me.

While the Rashidun had amazing generals at the time, the fact remains that the Roman and Persians were bled white. Against the might of a Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Empire at full or even partial strength would not have been enough. These two were the superpowers of their day. The Eastern Romans had spent 20 long years in a back and forth fight with the Persians. Before that, they were suffering from the Justinian plague, Lombard Invasion into Italy, Avar/Slavic invasion of the Balkans, etc. The Roman Army during the time of Emperor Maurice was a shadow of itself at the height of Justinian's reign. The Eastern Roman Army which on paper was in the hundreds of thousands was now about 100k at best and this was spread all across the provinces in garrisons and fighting on other frontiers. Emperor Maurice had nearly defeated the Avar Khaganate when Phocas decided to rebel which threw the Eastern Roman Empire in chaos. Then the Romans were embroiled in a Civil War between the Heraclians and Phocas which sapped other resources from the Empire. The Sassanids came in saying that they had Theodosius, the son of Maurice in their custody and would restore him to the throne like how Maurice had once helped Khosrau many years prior. Many eastern field armies and garrisons still loyal to Maurice's family surrendered with many towns opening their gates. Of course the Sassanids got greedy and decided that they could take the land for themselves. They at one point managed to conquer the Levant and Egypt also taking large swathes of Anatolia. They were on the verge of restoring the Acheamanid Empire.

At one point things looked so bad that Heraclius was ready to surrender as a vassal to Persians. But the Persians who were winning so far refused, and demanded their total annexation. Thus Heraclius was forced to raise a new armies from the Anatolian core he held which was now mostly Greek speaking. He then managed to halt the Persian advance using the Zagros mountains to defeat the large Persian army after him through defeat by detail. He at one point managed to lay siege to the Persian capital of Ctsephon in 629. This forced the Sassanids to sign a peace returning everything back to the original status quo. Now the Empire despite being victorious was utterly battered. It now had to deal with the issues of re-incorporating Egypt and the Levant whose centuries long continuity of Roman Rule had now been broken. To make matters worse for Heraclius, the Slavs had overrun the Balkans taking Thrace and large swathes of mainland Greece. Heraclius toward the end of his life, also went insane developing a fear of water. This makes things difficult to coordinate especially if you're empire is a Mediterranean based one that relies on it for transport and communication. The Romans were fighting without the best leadership as well due to Heraclius' insanity.

Also it's notable that the Rashidium didn't penetrate the Roman/Byzantine heartland of Anatolia the same way they took Iran, primarily because the Byzantines hadn't yet completely descended into Klingon Promotion territory, while the Sassanids were still beating the stuffing out of each other right up until they got conquered.
The Heraclians had lots of prestige thanks to the efforts of its very successful and competent Emperors aside from Justinian II. The Sassanids were in a massive Civil War by the time the Arabs invaded. Not to mention the tradition Roman and Persian client states/buffer states in Arabia: the Lakhmids and Ghassanids were destroyed by this war. The Romans and Persians used to fight through them via proxy. If Maurice survives, there's no 20 year long war, and these buffer states survive. If these buffer states survive, then they can enlist the help of this new Arabian power that's emerging to threaten them.
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
Because Turtledove doesn’t have an original thought in his head and a Cold War between the two previously allied Powers is what happene coid OTL?


On the topic, how about the USA in DuBois’ Resurrection Day? Victorious (technically) in the “Cuban War”, at the cost of a devastated eastern seaboard and various cities close to military bases, they’ve been reduced to the status of international pariah and dependent on British aid. Ruled by a military dictatorship, their military personnel are considered war criminal and not welcome anywhere in the world. To top it all, they’ve got to watch the British Empire rise from the ashes and begin reversing decolonisation.
Well in Resurrection Day its the USSR that is actually well and truly screwed. Despite all its serious problems the USA is still a major power with a nuclear arsenal. Also I think it could be argued that the threat to the US from Britain is a little overstated. Would they go so far as to risk a nuclear conflict with the US by trying to directly take over the country ? Doesnt seem likely....
 
Gary Gygax's and Terry Stafford's Victorious German Arms: An Alternate Military History of World War II. The Germans adopt a coherent strategy and rationalize production, and as a result everything goes their way. Rommel breaks the El Alamein line, the Vichy French resist Operation TORCH, the Spanish intervene, and . . . the climactic battle, where the combined German, Italian, and French fleets take on the British, American, and Japanese fleets off England, followed by Sealion II, is wild.

It doesn't seem to be available on Amazon, ABEBooks, or Google Books.
 
Quasi-shameless self-plug, but the Goodbye Versailes TL, which I am still writing as of this time, screws the US pretty bad, and is probably among the worst US screws on the site with the main PODs being after 1900. The US grabs the Idiot Ball and is defeated by a Japan that had arrived from the future and is forced to cede all of its Pacific land because Tokyo is wary of the downtime US' Asianophobia and wants to deprive it of any ability to seriously harm it in the future. Decades pass. This is followed by yet another war beginning in 1952 where the US winds up losing the American West and gets occupied by a coalition consisting of what eventually is over a dozen nations.
 
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The United States of America in Drew’s Rumsfeldia. Nuclear civil war, financial collapse, theocratic assholes and a Cuban invasion of Florida abound in the timeline.
 

Kaze

Banned
Mexico.

All of it. IRL and alternate history as well. I have not seen one where there is a successful Mexico.
 
Mexico.

All of it. IRL and alternate history as well. I have not seen one where there is a successful Mexico.

Hah, you reminded me of the worst screw ever.

Mexico ascendent, Mexico becomes a first rate power, the USA is reduced in role to something similar to otl Mexico. This means that it's a USA screw, but the worst screw in that timeline is Russia, they are totalled similar to Anglo American Nazi war Germany, to the point that you have dozens of foreign propped underpopulated, deindustrialized russian statelets left.
 
The very worst screws probably involve WMDs wiping out much of human civilization, such as 1983: Doomsday. But that probably goes without saying.
The United States of America in Drew’s Rumsfeldia. Nuclear civil war, financial collapse, theocratic assholes and a Cuban invasion of Florida abound in the timeline.
That's nothing compared to China from that same timeline:

Kiang Liu said:
I once recalled the story of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, after lamenting that he had not spoken-up when the Nazis came to arrest other opponents, concluded with the line "when they came for me, there was no one left to speak." China in the years of Mao Yang-jin, usually called the Lesser Mao outside of China, was the place where Bonhoeffer's reflection became a metaphor for our lives. There are some who speculate that, had the Lesser Mao not mis-ruled in his Great Uncle's name, we might have been a billion by the end of the twentieth century, or close to that number. If, as some say, that around two hundred million died between 1975 and 1982, and we add to those the uncounted millions who died in the period of chaos afterward, and those who as a result of this were never born, then we say that more were either killed by his hand, or in the consequence of it, or were never born to a number somewhere near the total number of Americans and Soviets combined who lived in that period.
...
By the year 2000 the majority of the Chinese population were under twenty or over eighty, with a great gap in between. Most of the people born between these generations had been killed over the two decades of terror and chaos. (A few lucky ones managed to flee). Almost all of our young people were raised in state orphanages. The concept of family has all but been destroyed on the mainland because so few of the young have ever experienced what a family is. If you meet a Han Chinese of middle age, then the odds are highest that the person had been living in Hong Kong, Taiwan or abroad during this period. Fifty years after the Great Helmsman's Revolution the generation of the revolutionaries and the generation of their children were so reduced that the survivors were regarded with awe, as the supermen who had survived a great storm. Those who had not been driven mad by their experiences, were so scarred inside that they were damaged as humans. I am one of those, perhaps not mad, but I wonder what I might have been had I not steeled myself through the madness.

I once asked a friend what we could call this period, meaning what symbol we could use to describe this time of horrors. He drew a skull. It was correct: the Years of the Skull.
In the Gumboverse, America might be a basketcase of a failed state, but China - that country with multiple billions of people in OTL - simply doesn't exist. It was annihilated and nipped in the bud within a single generation. And not even (for the most part) through nukes. Gumboverse!China is basically Cambodia*10^2 - one giant killing field.
 
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The novel December 7, 1941: A Different Path. Japan decides to attack the Soviet Union, which somehow causes it to completely collapse and the rest of the Allies to go "Oh, well, I give up,"

Among the insanity is Japan genociding Australia, Germany nuking New York, and America standing as one to fight the expansion of the Holocaust to the occupied US.
 
In the Gumboverse, America might be a basketcase of a failed state, but China - that country with multiple billions of people in OTL - simply doesn't exist. It was annihilated and nipped in the bud within a single generation. And not even (for the most part) through nukes. Gumboverse!China is basically Cambodia*10^2 - one giant killing field.
Sounds like Jack London's Unparalleled Invasion, which talks about the rest of the world deciding to exterminate China with plague and clean-up operations.
 
Sounds like Jack London's Unparalleled Invasion, which talks about the rest of the world deciding to exterminate China with plague and clean-up operations.
The scariest part is that London paints this as a good thing. The Chinese try to take over the world with waves of immigrants, so the European great powers murder all of them to stop the "Yellow Peril."
 
For smaller-scale screws, a good example would be Sweden in The North Star is Red, as Beria's USSR kills 1/4th of the Swedish population through unleashing a full-yield 100 megaton Tsar Bomba on Stockholm (a heavy concentration of the Swedish population in one city coupled with such a high-yield bomb resulted in such a disaster). The nuclear attack wipes out the Swedish government, causes Sweden and Denmark to enter a personal union, and drives Swedish politics to the radical right. While Sweden is recovering by the "present day", getting reconstruction aid from the rest of Western Europe, the fact the USSR killed a fourth of the Swedish population is bound to be a traumatic experience for Sweden.
 
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Hah, you reminded me of the worst screw ever.

Mexico ascendent, Mexico becomes a first rate power, the USA is reduced in role to something similar to otl Mexico. This means that it's a USA screw, but the worst screw in that timeline is Russia, they are totalled similar to Anglo American Nazi war Germany, to the point that you have dozens of foreign propped underpopulated, deindustrialized russian statelets left.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...e-of-a-failed-texan-revolution.405905/page-66 this one? USA even conquered canada, is not a screw at all
 
Its a screw, they didn't "even" conquered Canada, they conquered it but that is it.

The USA was a dictatorship in the 30s and 40s, it's now a terrible flawed democracy like Brazil, it's living standart I lower than the Mexican one.
And i argue is not a screw, a bigger screw would be losing Louisiana purcharse land, being divided among the original 13 colonies and those too weak to care, this one is just a defeated, they conquered canada to get more land, so hardly the bigger screw.
 
And i argue is not a screw, a bigger screw would be losing Louisiana purcharse land, being divided among the original 13 colonies and those too weak to care, this one is just a defeated, they conquered canada to get more land, so hardly the bigger screw.

Well, it's a screw nevertheless...
 
And i argue is not a screw, a bigger screw would be losing Louisiana purcharse land, being divided among the original 13 colonies and those too weak to care, this one is just a defeated, they conquered canada to get more land, so hardly the bigger screw.

It's almost an alt-history cliche that in scenarios where the US loses territory it has in our timeline, usually to the CSA but occasionally to Mexico or an independent Texas or California, they'll annex some or all of Canada as a sort of weird compensation.
 
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