Also, while i can see why russia is starting to move west, putin is still a paranoid wreck that genuinely belive that the cia is a all knowing super agency and will likely obscure any move by the US in his backyard.
Oh absolutely, Putin and the Russian elites still have their own empire building designs. They just happen to coincide with the interests of the United States because no matter what Putin thinks of the CIA, they are infinitely preferable to what COIN and the commies would do to him if they ever win the new Cold War. It helps that the UAR's existence means Western Europe and America need new sources of oil and natural gas (much to the chagrin of Eastern Europe).
No, North Korea's spy agency is nowhere near good enough for that and any attempt at hostage taking would result in DPRK discovering why the UAR has free healthcare.
That's the clincher. If it were the same situation as in our timeline which had the US and China in an uneasy but workable relationship (until the US recognized the PRC as the threat it was around 2013-2015 and began to triangulate against it in earnest), then Beijing could easily find itself with more bargaining power and the UAR would be much less hesitant to antagonize it. For it's part, the US would love to position the PRC as its own asset against the UAR and means to divide the international communist movement just as it did in the 70s against the Soviet Bloc.
But it isn't the same situation. The rest of the world is shaping up to be devoured into a prolonged conflict between a genuine socialist alliance positioning themselves as envoys of a New World (not simply content with making a red-painted alliance of nations like the Soviets did), and the guardians of the Old in NATO and its satellites, looking to rev up another anticommunist crusade to match a much stronger existential threat. If the days of cold realpolitik between peer nations almost always superseding class warfare and ideological concerns weren't gone by the Wamda, they'll be gone by the decade's end.
If China is excluded from the Comintern, even ignoring the certain crisis of legitimacy, it virtually has nothing to offer in the changed geopolitical arena, especially now that its biggest customers are looking to bite the bullet and decouple themselves from the "world's workshop" with Russia in tow, bringing their industrial and manufacturing bases back from the commie developmentalist fence-sitters and to either the metropole directly or to weaker, more reliable satellite states in the periphery. And it's not like China can easily carve out its own bloc from the third world with something like the Belt and Road Initiative when both pre-existing blocs are there to one-up their offer, not willing to concede a sliver of the pie to a third contender.
The DPRK's path is also heading the same way even with the country's sharply differing circumstances. The much greater aid provided to it and open exchanges have already compromised the "hermit kingdom" in numerous ways, and it will find it harder to enter siege mode as it did during the great famine. As a bonus, there could be hope that the UAR's as-of-now cordial relationship with the ROK (going by the last update) can potentially make it a good mediator for an official end to the Korean War and reconcilation between both sides of the DMZ.
To the credit of the CPC there are many who realize that the middle path playing both sides thing is not sustainable and that they need to pick a lane while both sides are still reeling and in need of strong allies. Problem is that wether they are pro-western dengist or pro-Arab neo Maoists they still have to fight against the inertia of the center faction and the fact that the China of the 2000s is a patchwork mess being pulled in a thousand different directions already with the party at its weakest point and government control non-existent in some places.
No, North Korea's spy agency is nowhere near good enough for that and any attempt at hostage taking would result in DPRK discovering why the UAR has free healthcare.
That's one of those things where the UAR being as hard-liner, absolutist, and all-around perfect as you're making it out to be would trigger another crisis, or just never have happened at all.
Look closer at the North Korean migrant labor schemes. Whether it's Russia, China, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, or any of the many southwest African host countries, they all have several conditions that make it rife for empowering the Kim government, and keeping control over the workers even abroad:
1. The contracts are all decided between the states, the workers are lied to about the terms, if they're told anything at all.
2. Managers, who are either North Korean or local officials who helped set up the scheme, confiscate their passports.
3. All wages (in foreign currency) are paid directly to the migrant recruiting agency, or a North Korean government account. At no point are the workers paid by the locals.
4. All migrant workers must be married or have family remaining in North Korea, explicitly to prevent defection.
5. All workers are competing to meet productivity goals where the #1 worker gets not-total-slavery living conditions, a meal at a restaurant, or even a visit to a hostess club.
6. Verbal, physical, and sexual abuse by managers and team leads to keep the workers too tired and exhausted to think about doing anything but work, or just satisfy the urges of the bosses, is systemic and normalized.
So with all that in mind, and the fact that North Korea isn't getting that all too precious foreign currency it needs from the UAF, can you really say that the Kim government isn't going to have bosses making sure the workers stay in line, and have getting any kind of info to help bolster NK's stagnant economy be a priority? The IT contractor who memorized the user manual's getting that heated apartment, and a construction worker who walked out of the airbase job with a few aviation parts shoved down his pants? He's getting that hostess club visit.
If the UAR isn't going to play ball with the North Koreans getting a benefit out of this, there will not be any migrant workers sent over. It'd be like if East Germany letting people walk on over to West Berlin with just a work permit they give out to everyone. North Korea is not going to do what you're saying.
That's one of those things where the UAR being as hard-liner, absolutist, and all-around perfect as you're making it out to be would trigger another crisis, or just never have happened at all.
Look closer at the Norks migrant labor schemes. Whether it's
I would really appreciate it if you didn't use slurs in my thread.
Secondly I think you are misunderstanding the whole thing here, North Korea is not sending workers anywhere nor does the UAR wanted it to, it's the opposite with International Labor battalions moving into NK, the only DPRK citizens going into the UAR rn are diplomatic teams and otherwise highly trusted individuals not considered likely to be influenced by foreign ideology (YMMV on how well that will work).
Then that's not a really a Worker Exchange program, the term you're using is misleading. Nobody's volunteering their labor and experience for a place to stay, there is no mutual agreement of work being done for payment of a wage or in-kind exchange. That's the UAR sending foreign aid and the DPRK conducting normal diplomatic operations.
Which is also how espionage is usually done: diplomats and "diplomats" on their sovereign soil of an Embassy and under the diplomatic immunity of their job.
Breaking that would make a great inciting incident for a Crisis though.
Also, while i can see why russia is starting to move west, putin is still a paranoid wreck that genuinely belive that the cia is a all knowing super agency and will likely obscure any move by the US in his backyard.
"The nations of Africa are not poor, they are just being mugged"--Tarek Afif
The Arab world and Africa had a complicated history for the most part, whether it was the Long March Timeline or the Betrayal of Sankara Timeline.
A huge chunk of the arab world was geographically situated in Africa. The two spheres would trade with, and influence each other over centuries of co-existence and intermingled to such an extent that despite the best attempts of nationalists in both worlds it was difficult to ascertain where the Arabic world starts and the African one ends (and some would outright embrace the lack of defining lines as something to be encouraged and celebrated). Still, the relationship was also marked by several periods of wars and enslavement, whether it be modern Egypt building its fortunes over the backs of enslaved Sudanese toiling in the cotton fields or Oman prospering as the hub of the Arab slave trade and so much more.
Even the UAR itself would have to contend for years with its legacy of complicated relationships with the nations that became the ASU, as well as handling its baggage of racism and discrimination against its Afro-Arab citizens and darker-skinned residents in general. By the time of the Wamda, the Middle Eastern superstate had made significant strides since its early days, especially the upheaval and reformations of the Reforging Decade* with greater attention and investment given to the once-neglected western and southern regions of the republic as well as empowerment for local municipalities, and African influences from across the continent would penetrate the mainstream of UAR culture even as far north as Syria and Sicily.
Of course, the historic relationship between Cairo and Gqebehra, the inevitable economic-infrastructural integration, and the practically non-existent movement restrictions between the two nations helped this along.
All this is to say that the UAR, perhaps more than any other nation in the world at the time, realized the true potential that the African continent holds and the contributions it could make to the tapestry of mankind. Thus seeing what the status of this world's Africa was the equivalent of watching someone pour milk down the sewers just for the sake of price gouging.
Where to their south the Arabs would once see a prosperous billion-strong union of cosmopolitan culture and ecological technology, they now saw a patchwork of war-torn failed states, corporate playgrounds, struggling republics, comprador regimes, and toady monarchies all while the French empire reigned supreme in what would have been the heart of pan-africanism in another time (the fate of the beloved chairman Sankara was merely the cherry on top) all while the Second Congo War raged anew, the tentative peace agreement reached mere weeks before the Wamda falling apart thanks to a combination of Ugandan/Rwandan opportunism, Western interference, the actions of local factions and a genocidal campaign waged against the Mbuti people**.
The delight ecologists had in knowing that this Africa was spared the sheer abomination that was the Congo Lake was cold comfort when compared to the scale of the Biocide taking place, to say nothing of the fact that no one seemed to know or care about climate change.
Naturally, for the nation that played a pivotal role in uniting the continent in its own TL and hosted over 6 million new citizens displaced from the ASU (a number that expanded to 11 million if one included those who had dual citizenships or resided in the UAR prior to the Wamda), there was a big push to do something, anything about this state affairs and allow the red green black flag to fly high once more from Adis Ababa to Johannesburg. Idealism aside it was undeniable that the UAR's economy, especially its nuclear power generation, had become heavily reliant on the abundant resources of its ASU partner, even if the latter had significantly lowered its mining output in the name of environmental preservation and the wellbeing of local communities.
But for the first two years post-wamda the UAR had to prioritize its internal emergency restructuring and aid its allies in the neo-Comintern (while also having to deal with the headache of handling their often degraded socialist apparatuses, when any existed at all), meaning its direct actions in Africa for the time being would be limited to the quiet de-facto annexation of the remaining half of Mauritania and the silvers of South Sudan and Somalia(done in the immediate aftermath of the Berlin Talks).
On the flip side at least, the Middle Eastern socialists were quickly finding that sometimes all they had to do was wait for Africa to come to them, as nations like Angola and South Africa were eager to make friends with Cairo after seeing the rapid recovery made by Cuba and the Muritanian remnant (and Laos and Venezuela to a much lesser extent) with Cairo's help and were eager to regain some of the benefits they had back when the soviets were still around.
Talks were complicated by the fact that the UAR lacked currency, but reconstruction aid agreements, resource exchanges and mass scholarship/industrial training programs would be worked out instead, with the UAR/Comintern discussing plans for an African Mutual Development Organization to expand its aid programs across the continent; with even the likes of Swaziland beginning to curry favor with Cairo thanks to the Arabs' extensive medical research and expertise in the treatment of ICS (or AIDS as it was known in this world) even creating something close to a cure through maintaining libraries of HIV resistant donated bone marrow stem cells (though the cure remains under heavy scrutiny due to it being greenlit months before the Wamda and the procedure is usually reserved for severe or otherwise special cases). The nations of South Africa were rather disturbed, however, when Arab epidemiologists were relieved that "only" 20% of the population was on average infected in the worst cases and horrified to learn there were regions in the Long March Timeline where close to 40-60% of the population was infected.
As all this was happening, hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants would pour into the UAR, mainly from the DRC but also from almost all the nations that bordered the red colossus and beyond, and for once the nations of the West were grateful for the republic's existence as it acted as a sponge absorbing all the surplus populations and keeping them from arriving on their shores, and with any luck the resulting overpopulation and culture clash would destabilize the red renegade republic and accelerate its collapse at no cost to the Imperial Core.
But rather unknown at the time but perhaps most consequential would be the formation of the Pan-African Liberation Army.
The UAR as mentioned before had a huge reserve of ASU citizens of various ethnicities, and many of them had both the combat training and eagerness to perform more direct actions in rebuilding some semblance of their lost homeland, and the Cairo Majlis would sense a great opportunity if it could direct these revolutionary energies. Thus under the guise of training more IRB regiments, the UAR with the aid of ASU diaspora-dominated community leaders and municipalities would recruit thousands of men and women for the task of establishing a revolutionary foothold across the entirety of the African continents, with the majority being aimed at the bordering war-torn DRC, whose current fluid conflict and weak state authority made it seem like an excellent place to build dual power (and gain access to some much-coveted resources).
Though no expense was spared in equipping and training this new shadow army, the UAR's hopes for it were measured, at best Cairo expected to establish an informal foothold in the region that may grow to a pseudostate that can be used to launch further revolutionary expeditions over the next 5 years.
As it happened though, the newly formed PALA would prove the UAR's expectations utterly false..
| In a way very few would have expected |
*The 90s basically
**IOTL The agreement generally ended the Second Congo War outside of low-scale ethnic conflicts and the Kivu war in the northeast, but the Mbuti genocide was something that happened in IOTL as well.
Nice to see AIDs/ICS treatments have advanced so much! Clown ass capitalists thinking that a country that managed to unite all the separate cultures and ethnicities of MENA is going to collapse because of a few million refugees lol. And nice to see the beginnings of the PALA, guess they ended up rolling a few natural 20s in the Congo?
Turns out that having the vast majority of the human population be well-fed and well-educated means you get x100 the number of scientists and researchers working on the same issue which tends to be great to speeding up discoveries in certain fields, helps that unlike OTL, HIV not only showed up earlier but was taken dead seriously by the Comintern rather than either ignoring it or actively working to make things worse like certain goverments (thanks apartheid)
Nice to see AIDs/ICS treatments have advanced so much! Clown ass capitalists thinking that a country that managed to unite all the separate cultures and ethnicities of MENA is going to collapse because of a few million refugees lol. And nice to see the beginnings of the PALA, guess they ended up rolling a few natural 20s in the Congo?
Even if the US now knows that the UAR is not the USSR, there are still some lingering brainworms among policymakers and afterall it was ethnic differences and chuavinism that brought down the USSR and Yugoslavia IOTL and they are still used to a MENA rife with sectarian conflicts.
Where to their south the Arabs would once see a prosperous billion-strong union of cosmopolitan culture and ecological technology, they now saw a patchwork of war-torn failed states, corporate playgrounds, struggling republics, comprador regimes, and toady monarchies all while the French empire reigned supreme in what would have been the heart of pan-africanism in another time (the fate of the beloved chairman Sankara was merely the cherry on top) all while the Second Congo War raged anew, the tentative peace agreement reached mere weeks before the Wamda falling apart thanks to a combination of Ugandan/Rwandan opportunism, Western interference, the actions of local factions and a genocidal campaign waged against the Mbuti people**.
As fun as it is to perpetually pick on the French, the problems aren't all on them. In many places, the former colonial powers haven't been around or even had economic influence for some time.
The delight ecologists had in knowing that this Africa was spared the sheer abomination that was the Congo Lake was cold comfort when compared to the scale of the Biocide taking place, to say nothing of the fact that no one seemed to know or care about climate change.
Eeeeeh... Yes, no, it's not a straightforward answer. The TNO timeline has more pollution due to decades of unrestricted handwavium industrialization from places like Nazi Germany, and when the Comintern in its more global state says something's a concern, it's immediately a global issue. But here, pollution is not as bad, and there's a more global movement of both high profile public officials and local activists discussing it.
On the other hand, the UAR policy to poachers is probably nothing like what anyone else in the world is doing: COIN.
The nations of South Africa were rather disturbed, however, when Arab epidemiologists were relieved that "only" 20% of the population was on average infected in the worst cases and horrified to learn there were regions in the Long March Timeline where close to 40-60% of the population was infected.
Yeah, the average rate in most places south of the Sahara trend closer to 9%. Compared to the UAR, or even the European hotspots like Germany, that's much less of a crisis. Still horrible and utterly awful, but that's all resources that can put put into other solutions.
As all this was happening, hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants would pour into the UAR, mainly from the DRC but also from almost all the nations that bordered the red colossus and beyond, and for once the nations of the West were grateful for the republic's existence as it acted as a sponge absorbing all the surplus populations and keeping them from arriving on their shores, and with any luck the resulting overpopulation and culture clash would destabilize the red renegade republic and accelerate its collapse at no cost to the Imperial Core.
But rather unknown at the time but perhaps most consequential would be the formation of the Pan-African Liberation Army.
Is it wrong of me to imagine that forming the PALA went like that IL-76 unloading scene from Lord Of War, but instead of Nick Cage it's Gaddafi?
Would the UAR focus on putting former child soldiers through therapy and keeping them in a stable environment, or would they accept them into the military and just try to make it less terrible for them?
Though no expense was spared in equipping and training this new shadow army, the UAR's hopes for it were measured, at best Cairo expected to establish an informal foothold in the region that may grow to a pseudostate that can be used to launch further revolutionary expeditions over the next 5 years.
As it happened though, the newly formed PALA would prove the UAR's expectations utterly false..
On the one hand, the heavily decentralized and heavily sectarian states are probably not gonna be able to stand up to an elite, well-trained army of infantry backed by air forces and light mechanized transports.
On the other, much the UAR's existing population from the region is now mixing with a whole bunch of people who believe conspiracy theory grade lies about each other. If the PALA experiment's going to fail, I really do think it's because the time wasn't taken to build up a sense of cohesion and everyone's just drifting back into factions.
I don't see a insurgency failing into a conventional conflict being an issue for the UAR, and that's kind of a foundation for how I'm evaluating the scenario. If they don't have the people for an insurgency, just roll the tanks in and start Shock and Awe-ing the enemy military. After all, since the UAR nuked the Royal Navy into irrelevance, who's going to jump in to save the local stroma-Oh. Oooooh. French Nuclear Doctrine rears its ugly head.
They should be fine if they just stay out of the countries France has security agreements with, but maybe with US backing they'd be willing to draw a line in front of a mass insurgency outbreak or a mechanized/airborne push to the Antarctic Ocean.
Would the UAR focus on putting former child soldiers through therapy and keeping them in a stable environment, or would they accept them into the military and just try to make it less terrible for them?
I think Always Late is asking about now adults who were previously child soldiers. Either way I can't imagine the UAR doing that, they aren't desperate enough for troops to ever consider sinking so low. Why would you even think the UAR would do this?
Also, something to keep in mind about child soldiers who are now adults is that...they are still incredibly traumatized and changed by the life they've lived. Being a child soldier is one of those things that changes a person and makes them highly dysfunctional in a conventional military, not least because efforts at cohesion and organization will run directly counter to the child soldier's 'expertise.' I cannot stress enough how a lifetime of violence and instability makes a person unsuited for a non-shitty military structure. The violence is so ingrained that they will use it upon their fellow soldiers to get them back in line and behaving properly.
You don't want to use child soldiers as your soldiers if you want your military to in any way humane.
Except this is the United Arab Republic from The New Order: Last Days of Europe and The Long March. We've had it repeatedly emphasized that they are used to an absolutist, total mobilization state. Everyone gets a gun, because the fascists will not just kill women and children, but inflict every cruelty upon them and have a gigantic war machine backing them up. The UAR has kept on a constant hair-trigger because the irrational hatemongers next door can decide to come pay a visit at any point.
On the flip side, IIRC as far back as the aftermath of the liberation of Africa, the Comintern put an emphasis on treating PTSD and suicide interventions. As they expanded and the global conflicts happened, other priorities came up but at even recently the push came from up top to help with the persistent trauma shared by all members of the Comintern and the liberated peoples of Europe.
If we want to talk about "logic" or "rationality", in a historical early 2000s timeline, there is no real reason to use child solders in a frontline capacity. But the UAR isn't necessarily going to act like that. They see themselves as still surrounded by fascists, but now they're cut off from the Comintern and only have communists barely worthy of the name for help. They're scared, they're angry, they're determined, and they're dead-set on bringing the Revolution to the entire world no matter what world they're on.
People can and have justified doing just about anything and everything because it was an emergency, crisis, or Armageddon. I can see the issue going either way. Hence me asking. Does the UAR see itself in a big enough crisis to hit Scraping The Barrel?
People can and have justified doing just about anything and everything because it was an emergency, crisis, or Armageddon. I can see the issue going either way. Hence me asking. Does the UAR see itself in a big enough crisis to hit Scraping The Barrel?
...You have read TLM right? Where the Comintern has consistently always tried to take the most moral option even if it cost us? At what point would the UAR ever need to use tramuztized child soliders in any fashion? They have a population in the hundreds of millions with a highly trained military and a large surplus of civilans with military training. When would they need to scape the barrel?
@Always Late
Even if you are working with "total mobilization" as a going concern, it's something you do when you're losing. At time of the wamda, the UAR has *won*. The majority of the world is under comintern influence. Even after the wamda, they are a massive industrialized polity, at their height.
Even with the hit of the wamda, the point of "give baby a gun" was 25 years before the wamda, if ever.
I could see some of TLM Comintern members having less problems using children soldiers than others. Zapadoslavia, for instance. But the UAR is liable to be one of - if not the - most resistant owing to it having been one of the most militarily powerful and secure of the Comintern for the longest amount of time. I remember one quote indicating that a UARs officer reaction to CAR using child soldiers during the '84 wars was one of abject horror. If there are any paramilitary training among militias* in the UAR which train or otherwise involve children in their activities, I imagine they'd be strictly defensive.
*And they're liable to be ACTUAL militias that answer to the UARs government, rather then being private gangs like American "militias" are.
I read a quest where the Comintern was a disparate collection of nations and revolutionary movements that had to figure out both how to liberate the workers of the world and care for the people under their protection… while factions both beneath the Comintern level and the players in the thread had intense arguments over what that meant and how best to deliver it.
But my description is emphasizing the things I took away from it. It's not invalid to say they read a quest about a monolithic moral order building up to a juggernaut of industry and righteousness.
People can and have justified doing just about anything and everything because it was an emergency, crisis, or Armageddon. I can see the issue going either way. Hence me asking. Does the UAR see itself in a big enough crisis to hit Scraping The Barrel?
