WI: 1965's United States ISOT to 1915 (+1985 version)
- Thread starter F.I.M.M.98
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I think it's an open question what happens in Russia. It's entirely likely that the country dissolves into utter chaos with the Russian left eventually learning what the US has done to them, and why, and what it fears. And in the long run as the technological advantages narrow, I could actually imagine a self-fulfilling Soviet prophecy emerging.
The only alternative would be for the US to come in from outside and stabilize Russia. But the US has a poor track record of actually keeping in office a doddering corrupt autocratic state that lacks popular support for more than, oh, a generation or so....
...
The big issue is that the US wouldn't be realistically capable of extending a net of influence over the entire world without allies.
If the US tries to do this without fighting wars, they'll have to deal with the British and French empires, and also Japan, who will be trying to block Americans from encroaching on their spheres of interest or at least control the terms on which the US can access and influence places. The US has technological advantages, but that doesn't make up for (for instance) the fact that the administrators on the ground are all British and the British are garrisoning the place. Not if you're not prepared to fight a war with Britain to make those facts change.
If the US tries to use warfare to 'solve' that problem, then they run into the fact that there's very little popular support for wars with those countries. If they fight anyway and win, then 1965!US has to garrison literally the world... And this is taking place at a time when 19th century revolts by tribes and fights by kingdoms to throw off colonialist shackles were still well within living memory. The perception that the imperialists are struggling among themselves for dominance will create a lot of opportunites for independence movements... And to fight those independence movements the US would end up having to make the same kinds of moves that OTL led to the debacle of the Vietnam War.
It's lose-lose.
Because of this, the least-bad option for the US is to some extent to tolerate these power blocs, and to mostly abstain from undermining them too badly.
The only alternative would be for the US to come in from outside and stabilize Russia. But the US has a poor track record of actually keeping in office a doddering corrupt autocratic state that lacks popular support for more than, oh, a generation or so....
...
The big issue is that the US wouldn't be realistically capable of extending a net of influence over the entire world without allies.
If the US tries to do this without fighting wars, they'll have to deal with the British and French empires, and also Japan, who will be trying to block Americans from encroaching on their spheres of interest or at least control the terms on which the US can access and influence places. The US has technological advantages, but that doesn't make up for (for instance) the fact that the administrators on the ground are all British and the British are garrisoning the place. Not if you're not prepared to fight a war with Britain to make those facts change.
If the US tries to use warfare to 'solve' that problem, then they run into the fact that there's very little popular support for wars with those countries. If they fight anyway and win, then 1965!US has to garrison literally the world... And this is taking place at a time when 19th century revolts by tribes and fights by kingdoms to throw off colonialist shackles were still well within living memory. The perception that the imperialists are struggling among themselves for dominance will create a lot of opportunites for independence movements... And to fight those independence movements the US would end up having to make the same kinds of moves that OTL led to the debacle of the Vietnam War.
It's lose-lose.
Because of this, the least-bad option for the US is to some extent to tolerate these power blocs, and to mostly abstain from undermining them too badly.
the atom
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I don't think low popular support is a given. First of all, Britain (and to a much lesser extent France) is the only potential obstacle to resources the U.S. might still need abroad. Secondly, the U.S. military industrial complex is going to be put into a tough position to justify itself, and there's no reason to expect they'll go quietly into that good night. Thirdly, with America's traditional opponents gone, both the American government and public are going to have fewer reasons to look the other way from France and Britain's colonial atrocities.
You're right that the U.S. will still need allies abroad but there's already a precedent of preferring pliable third world client states over European imperialists in the American hemisphere and that trend could very well be extended to the rest of the world if American opinion of the British and French starts to seriously sour.
Not so. If we are restricting US administrative and technological progress to a 1965 backdrop as the landmass enters 1915 ISOT style, if it is before the middle of the year then no one outside of NATO intelligence advisors would know that the US already had conducted strikes against targets in Vietnam. If instead the 1965 date was closer to autumn? US and Australia have already stated their intentions with two combat operations (troops and fighters) against the Viet Cong.
Well just look at how quickly word would spread that the US and member countries of the UK Commonwealth* have already aggressed France's "Indochina" to use an outdated expression. By the 1910s the region was split up as part of British, Dutch and French colonial interests, but I think for consistency's sake the Vietnam War was mainly about France losing its colony, so entering into a WW1 France under siege, the sympathy might lean toward helping them however remotely. But I digress.
What really strikes me as more relevant to this sea-of-time scenario is having 1965 US do the trip back, for reasons noted above, as well as LBJ's posturing about Vietnam leading into that year.
*note: Although said Commonwealth was established by QE 2nd in/ shortly after her coronation in the 50's, during WW1 hostilities it might be easy to swallow by each country's administrators, assuming the Queen was simply using KG V's playbook (in power since 1911) or had been a study of Wilson's posturing.
edit: P.S. I think this might be a good "cold opener" for the American landmass as it is about to start traveling back in time - r/WarshipPorn - USS Burton Island (AG-88), USS Atka (AGB-3), and USS Glacier (AGB-4) push an iceberg out of the channel near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, 29 Dec 1965. While all three served in the US Navy and Coast Guard, the Atka also served in the Soviet Navy as the Admiral Makarov (US Navy photo) [5672 x 4496]
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I don't expect it to. The things to remember:
1) The dominant mentality of the time still thinks of the British and French as 'friends.' World War Two is in relatively recent memory for the American populace here, and the Cold War NATO relationship is more recent still.
2) By 1915, the aforementioned colonial atrocities, while still very real, are beginning to wind down somewhat. Voices opposed to massacres, especially of unarmed and peaceful demonstrators, are becoming more common. We are only a decade or two out from Ghandi's nonviolent protests in India starting to work; they would likely not have worked on the 19th century Raj, by contrast.
3) To the typical white (and thus politically in control) American of 1965, the atrocities committed by Britain and France in their colonies aren't that exceptional; their interest in fighting over them will be reduced.
4) Capitalism, and anticapitalists, sometimes forget this, is good at making accommodations to circumstance. One of the reasons it is such a widespread system is that it generally won't break your society's back trying to achieve things it can buy someone else to doing. This system, of course, is no exception to the general principle.
In this case, trade provides the needed resources far more smoothly and cheaply than conquest, for instacne.
the atom
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1) This is true, which is why I said nothing would happen right away. I'm thinking more about 10-15 years down the line, where they've actually begun to settle into this new world and gradually stop viewing it through the lens of the old.
2) Even if they were winding down in a real sense but media interest would be scaling up. In a world where it's mostly just the U.S. and imperialists, journalists won't exactly have much else to talk about. And fewer massacres isn't guaranteed. If WW1 is cut short and France and Britain don't see their empires start to weaken it could potentially go on for much longer.
3) Again, this is something that's true in our world, where little indiscretions like torture and massacres were casually looked over because there were Communists to watch out for and there's trade networks to safeguard. In this world none of this is true. It'll take years for trade to be even a fraction of what it was before, and there's no other rivals for America to prioritize over Western Europe. It's just a few big empires sitting there, slowly but surely becoming increasingly unpleasant to look at.
Journalists and news networks will be more interested, activists will be more interested, and nobody in a position of authority has many reasons to discourage them because to be honest they're starting to have their own issues with the British and French.
So what the average white American is subjected to is a steady drip of anti-Imperialist rhetoric on the news for years and years on end.
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It wasn't just a weakness thing.
By 1915, the French and British colonial empires had pretty much reached their maximum extent outside the Middle East, and the two nations had established an administrative infrastructure over that territory. When you've already toppled the local elites, massacred any tribes that are being really rebellious, and set up your own administration, you just don't need to shoot as many people. And that trend continued moving on into 1925-35, the time period you're talking about.
Think about it. How many bloody colonial wars did the British and French get into in the 1920s and '30s, relative to past decades? There were some, true enough! But many of them took place in remote areas, often in contexts that could be pretty easily presented as "tribes raiding across the frontier and hitting settlements," something that fits pretty comfortably into the 1970s-era American national narrative as "this is at worst morally gray."
I'm not saying that a determined propagandist couldn't credibly present '20s Britain as a bloody-handed tyrannical empire (obvious places to start would include the Easter Rising, where the rebels get American sympathy by being white). What I'm saying is that I think that outside of a few specific issues, it's unlikely to become something that motivates a whole new Cold War from the perspective of the average American citizen.
Yeah, but in real life we get that same kind of rhetoric and the US has failed to surge to its feet and eliminate, oh, hunger in the Third World.
I'm not saying there will be none of it. I'm saying that in the background of an America that is still fairly racist and comfortable-with-destruction-of-the-Indians culture, in the context of the British and French being able to speak up for and justify their own rule, and with that rule still being mostly stable and only sometimes violent specifically at the fringes and in unusual cases...
I don't think it'll escalate to the point where there's popular support for, say, mass American troop deployments overseas to disrupt the British and French colonial empires.
Firstly, anyone in telecommunications will tell you that it doesn't matter how outdated the modem and other equipment, all of it is getting ripped out and replaced with the latest and greatest. I once overheard how China completely skipped landlines for its rural townships and went to everyone having cellular phones. Now, where might 1965 American be on the fast swap-out tech tree? About two decades too early for Motorola's cell phone idea, and two decades after the first experimental car phones in WW2 vehicles. A goldilocks zone I tell you!
Anyhow, what would make this island-in-time hopefully more engaging is if American mainland was 1965 era while American military bases the world over were 1985.
the atom
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I'm saying the determined propagandists would do exactly that though.
American media was perfectly capable of lionizing groups of non white resistance fighters, even back then.
Why would Americans be interested in that sort of thing?
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the atom
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There's a direct financial incentive to push this narrative this time around, and relatively little of note to distract the media?
I suspect the British and French will help this process along if/when spies start getting caught trying to steal military secrets.
Jester, pleased to get your feedback in this thread again. I think the best explanation is how America shifted demographically and how the government's clarion call for warfare began to fall on deaf ears over a grim period lasting a half-century. So the White House quietly rebranded the motive or mantra behind military actions, which bit the LBJ administration in the butt pretty ferociously.
This shift can be traced by authors and historians of the subject, a large part I'm drawing from is the biographies of Navy Chiefs who had to sit through the Oval Office rhetoric, as well as the tour of duty of Chester Nimitz and McCain Sr. (who both served between WW2 and Vietnam and offered crisp perspectives of the fighting going on in that part of the world).
Firstly, from the voting age folks who were born during WW1, their households were already incensed about Germany's antagonism that a German-American who otherwise had a Catholic background could not clinch the Presidential vote in the close of Woodrow Wilson's last term. He had to drop out pretty quickly. It would take another thirty years for before Kennedy ran. And this can further indicate how Americans were identifying with anti-Imperialism.
But jumping to this immediate period where the sentiment toward Germany was still heated, in comes one of the biggest disruptions to the perceived merits of the political and socioeconomic institutions the world over: the Great Depression. Intriguingly, it was none other than the South American countries that weathered the Depression pretty steadily, posting increases in. Their economies, much like the Progressive Era US, were under varying levels of state-controlled directives. But it was the end of any semblance to military dictatorship, and a strengthening middle class, that pushed America's neighbors out of the Depression.
And if that wasn't enough, the Allies befriending Soviet Russia in WW2 and defeating fascist Italy, Germany and Japan, breaths life into revolutionary, democratic uprisings (many of them using confiscated IJA troop standard issue armaments) that by the time Queen Elizabeth II was addressing the world in public addresses, most if not all of the world's empires were collapsing inwards. The newly liberated colonies all would begin United Nations recognition (a process that takes 10 years minimum) or become fodder to the Soviet Bloc. In either case, it unsettled the families started by WW2 vets abroad enough to move to the bustling maritime USA, one of the few capitalist powers still "master of his domain" to quote Kennedy's promise to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and stave off them damn dirty Commies. But I digress. Demographically, we weren't doing the moon landings live yet to where the whole world was American for a day, where perhaps more folk would be in a renewed colonial mustering mood. Instead you can tell from TV broadcasts of that period some years before Vietnam took center stage, the Cosmopolitan USA person had gone from a quaint 17th century European in sailor getup to one in five Americans non-white.
This shift can be traced by authors and historians of the subject, a large part I'm drawing from is the biographies of Navy Chiefs who had to sit through the Oval Office rhetoric, as well as the tour of duty of Chester Nimitz and McCain Sr. (who both served between WW2 and Vietnam and offered crisp perspectives of the fighting going on in that part of the world).
Firstly, from the voting age folks who were born during WW1, their households were already incensed about Germany's antagonism that a German-American who otherwise had a Catholic background could not clinch the Presidential vote in the close of Woodrow Wilson's last term. He had to drop out pretty quickly. It would take another thirty years for before Kennedy ran. And this can further indicate how Americans were identifying with anti-Imperialism.
But jumping to this immediate period where the sentiment toward Germany was still heated, in comes one of the biggest disruptions to the perceived merits of the political and socioeconomic institutions the world over: the Great Depression. Intriguingly, it was none other than the South American countries that weathered the Depression pretty steadily, posting increases in. Their economies, much like the Progressive Era US, were under varying levels of state-controlled directives. But it was the end of any semblance to military dictatorship, and a strengthening middle class, that pushed America's neighbors out of the Depression.
And if that wasn't enough, the Allies befriending Soviet Russia in WW2 and defeating fascist Italy, Germany and Japan, breaths life into revolutionary, democratic uprisings (many of them using confiscated IJA troop standard issue armaments) that by the time Queen Elizabeth II was addressing the world in public addresses, most if not all of the world's empires were collapsing inwards. The newly liberated colonies all would begin United Nations recognition (a process that takes 10 years minimum) or become fodder to the Soviet Bloc. In either case, it unsettled the families started by WW2 vets abroad enough to move to the bustling maritime USA, one of the few capitalist powers still "master of his domain" to quote Kennedy's promise to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and stave off them damn dirty Commies. But I digress. Demographically, we weren't doing the moon landings live yet to where the whole world was American for a day, where perhaps more folk would be in a renewed colonial mustering mood. Instead you can tell from TV broadcasts of that period some years before Vietnam took center stage, the Cosmopolitan USA person had gone from a quaint 17th century European in sailor getup to one in five Americans non-white.
I broadly agree with the idea that the US media and public in this ISOT would be strongly anti-colonial, simply because they were in OTL. One of the big points that the US wanted (and got) after WWII was the dissolution of the colonial empires. The reasons for WHY they wanted this are a bit varied and complex, but I personally think it was a mix of "manifest destiny" adapted for the post WWII world and a near religious belief that self-determination and democracy is the only way to go. Again, I'm not arguing actions or results here, just a supposition of the average American's belief on how the world "should work."
With that said, I think the US will take a strongly "anti-colonial" stance, while desperately expanding its influence and market share wherever it can.
This is after fighting (and crushing) the CP in WWI, because 1) at this point in time, 65, 85, doesn't matter, stopping the rise of Nazism is a major priority, and in the mind of most Americans Germany is the enemy second only to the USSR (seriously, take a look at some of the US army training vids for the German occupation). 2) WWI only just kicked off, the US can literally be in Berlin before Christmas, and right about now the US is feeling anxious, powerful, and that they have the opportunity to change history for the better. And here is the antagonist of two world wars, weak and utterly unprepared for an uptime way of war. In other words, the perfect punching bag to distract the US people from the economic disaster heading their way, and prevent the rise of Nazism as an actual state.
France and Britain. Well, in WWI (much like WWII) the US sold massive amounts of supplies and equipment to the allies at a steep discount along with many loans. However, to the mind of 1915 British or Frenchman the US is a isolationist upstart of a country too big to really ignore, but not really a rival the way Germany, France, Britain, Russia, or the two old men of Europe (Austria/ottomans) are. Now, the US is expecting (at least subconsciously) that their erstwhile NATO allies will treat them the same way as in 1965/85, and basically fall in line. This... is not going to happen. Right now both of these countries are in full on Imperialist mode. Some sort of conflict is going to be inevitable.
With that said, I think the US will take a strongly "anti-colonial" stance, while desperately expanding its influence and market share wherever it can.
This is after fighting (and crushing) the CP in WWI, because 1) at this point in time, 65, 85, doesn't matter, stopping the rise of Nazism is a major priority, and in the mind of most Americans Germany is the enemy second only to the USSR (seriously, take a look at some of the US army training vids for the German occupation). 2) WWI only just kicked off, the US can literally be in Berlin before Christmas, and right about now the US is feeling anxious, powerful, and that they have the opportunity to change history for the better. And here is the antagonist of two world wars, weak and utterly unprepared for an uptime way of war. In other words, the perfect punching bag to distract the US people from the economic disaster heading their way, and prevent the rise of Nazism as an actual state.
France and Britain. Well, in WWI (much like WWII) the US sold massive amounts of supplies and equipment to the allies at a steep discount along with many loans. However, to the mind of 1915 British or Frenchman the US is a isolationist upstart of a country too big to really ignore, but not really a rival the way Germany, France, Britain, Russia, or the two old men of Europe (Austria/ottomans) are. Now, the US is expecting (at least subconsciously) that their erstwhile NATO allies will treat them the same way as in 1965/85, and basically fall in line. This... is not going to happen. Right now both of these countries are in full on Imperialist mode. Some sort of conflict is going to be inevitable.
The US heading off the bloodiest part of the Russian Revolution would be next on the list if WW1 subsides prematurely. And to your point @Causeimboredrigh about hindsight suggesting previous NATO members would be on board with an experimental push of NATO early alpha. Well, what for the longest span was mainly an intergovernmental nuclear counter-exchange umbrella could be redrawn as "you need war material, we need something to shoot at."