Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
"...economic fallout from the war in adjacent states. While the war years were excellent for Canadian agriculture and manufacturing, the period between September 1913 and the end of 1915 were economically ruinous for Caribbean countries that had eagerly looked forward to the opening of the Nicaragua Canal as forever changing their economies and placing them square on the path of the newest global trade route, only to see trade via the Canal crawl to about a fifth of its expected volume thanks to the outbreak of war just two months after its inauguration. This stretched from European colonial outposts in the Lesser Antilles having to buff up their military presence to defend themselves out of fear of attack to the Haiti of Cincinnatus Leconte, targeted explicitly by Confederate wolfpacks due to her relationship with the United States and contributing to a siege mentality in Haiti that solidified an esprit de corps across the country and ended any threat to Leconte's Presidency - though ample German investments, and his descent from the Dessalines dynasty, certainly did not hurt. [1]
Particularly hard hit, however, was Cuba and the other Spanish "insular provinces" of Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. Spain's national economy was oriented towards protecting its domestic industries and despite the dominance of the National Liberal Party it had shifted in a more statist, economically nationalist direction that aimed to keep labor and capital in the metropole alike happy. While Insulares were represented in the Cortes, they were politically diffuse (many Cubans elected their own regionalist party, particularly in the island's east) and moderate home rule provisions under the Law of Communities did not solve the biggest issue affecting the three of them - that their trade needs were diametrically different than Madrid's. The evaporation of regional trade at a time when Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar would have been highly valuable thus crushed the islands' economies and plunged all three into a deep depression. While the lion's share of the blame was directed at the Confederate Wolfpacks that made shipping in the region a dangerous proposition (even if they rarely attacked neutral vessels, American ships were responsible for much of non-internal trade with Spain for the three insular provinces), Madrid's increased protectionism and continued - and quite understandable, to be fair to the European Spanish perspective - insistence on remaining solely responsible for a common foreign policy of all Spanish lands became a thing of anger and angst on the western side of the Atlantic.
It was thus the case that the Confederacy - the bete noire of Spain in the Americas - rapidly losing its ability to threaten the Spanish Caribbean coincided with a return of sentiments against the continuing arrangement with Spain, though of a very different nature. The revolutionary mania of the late 1860s and early 1870s had coincided with the Gloriosa in Spain in 1868 and been driven by genuinely radical republican sentiments outraged at the colonial relationship between the islands and Madrid. By the time of Hilton Head, however, the House of Hohenzollern had rebuilt is prestige in the Americas and codified itself as the defender of local interests, particularly the abolition of slavery, against Confederate and perhaps Brazilian designs upon the islands. The decline of the Confederacy's power projection capabilities after the Great American War would seem to suggest that the Spanish approach had borne out, but the sense of alienation was still very real. The vagaries of the sugar market and other cash crops were warped by Spain's frequent tinkering with trade policy; the hacienda system of agriculture, despite the abolition of slavery, was as strong as ever, and particularly in Puerto Rico inequality was steep and poverty high, even as thousands of immigrants flocked to the islands every year.
A divide within and changing of the guard and approach to the revolutionary generations in the Caribbean occurred thus in 1915. To an outsider, it appeared that such sentiments were in decline. The Revolutionary Committees, which had always been in exile in New York City but had also often been dependent on Confederate sympathies, were almost broke with their main benefactors parting ways and going to blows. Jose Marti, the Cuban revolutionary mainstay, passed away on May 30, 1915 in Manhattan, leaving a massive power vacuum at the center of Cuban nationalism. The rest of the exilo class of leadership - Jose Maldonado Roman and Juan Rivera from Puerto Rico, Jose Miguel Gomez from Cuba, Juan Isidoro Jimenez for Santo Domingo - collaborated and continued their push for independent republics in the Caribbean, but they would have been as surprised as any to learn from their meagre outpost in New York that events back in the islands were starting to change under their feet.
The economic depression of the war years had, finally, led even monarchist conservatives to begin asking themselves why Madrid, which had entirely different priorities and ambitions than Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans themselves, were denying them their place in the community of American states. The breach finally came when Mario Garcia Menocal - a member of the Conservative Party! - himself in the Cortes gave a speech which he soon expounded upon in a pamphlet back in Cuba called "A Different Relationship," where he suggested that internal home rule, while certainly fine for Catalonia, was not enough for a place like Cuba with entirely different needs, history and experiences from the rest of Spain. This flew remarkably close to the language of men like Marti or his protege Gomez, but for the fact that Garcia Menocal was a committed monarchist. A different relationship did not mean a full revolutionary break - a different relationship, perhaps, meant exactly what it said it meant..." [2]
- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
[1] There was going to be more on Haiti, but I found the dynamic in the Spanish provinces more interesting to write about.
[2] Tipping my hand that I've come around on the provincial method for Cuba, PR and SD probably not working long term and that some kind of Dominion status a la Canada or a junior branch of the Hohenzollerns spinning off their own crown for the area are likely the direction I'll wind up going
Particularly hard hit, however, was Cuba and the other Spanish "insular provinces" of Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. Spain's national economy was oriented towards protecting its domestic industries and despite the dominance of the National Liberal Party it had shifted in a more statist, economically nationalist direction that aimed to keep labor and capital in the metropole alike happy. While Insulares were represented in the Cortes, they were politically diffuse (many Cubans elected their own regionalist party, particularly in the island's east) and moderate home rule provisions under the Law of Communities did not solve the biggest issue affecting the three of them - that their trade needs were diametrically different than Madrid's. The evaporation of regional trade at a time when Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar would have been highly valuable thus crushed the islands' economies and plunged all three into a deep depression. While the lion's share of the blame was directed at the Confederate Wolfpacks that made shipping in the region a dangerous proposition (even if they rarely attacked neutral vessels, American ships were responsible for much of non-internal trade with Spain for the three insular provinces), Madrid's increased protectionism and continued - and quite understandable, to be fair to the European Spanish perspective - insistence on remaining solely responsible for a common foreign policy of all Spanish lands became a thing of anger and angst on the western side of the Atlantic.
It was thus the case that the Confederacy - the bete noire of Spain in the Americas - rapidly losing its ability to threaten the Spanish Caribbean coincided with a return of sentiments against the continuing arrangement with Spain, though of a very different nature. The revolutionary mania of the late 1860s and early 1870s had coincided with the Gloriosa in Spain in 1868 and been driven by genuinely radical republican sentiments outraged at the colonial relationship between the islands and Madrid. By the time of Hilton Head, however, the House of Hohenzollern had rebuilt is prestige in the Americas and codified itself as the defender of local interests, particularly the abolition of slavery, against Confederate and perhaps Brazilian designs upon the islands. The decline of the Confederacy's power projection capabilities after the Great American War would seem to suggest that the Spanish approach had borne out, but the sense of alienation was still very real. The vagaries of the sugar market and other cash crops were warped by Spain's frequent tinkering with trade policy; the hacienda system of agriculture, despite the abolition of slavery, was as strong as ever, and particularly in Puerto Rico inequality was steep and poverty high, even as thousands of immigrants flocked to the islands every year.
A divide within and changing of the guard and approach to the revolutionary generations in the Caribbean occurred thus in 1915. To an outsider, it appeared that such sentiments were in decline. The Revolutionary Committees, which had always been in exile in New York City but had also often been dependent on Confederate sympathies, were almost broke with their main benefactors parting ways and going to blows. Jose Marti, the Cuban revolutionary mainstay, passed away on May 30, 1915 in Manhattan, leaving a massive power vacuum at the center of Cuban nationalism. The rest of the exilo class of leadership - Jose Maldonado Roman and Juan Rivera from Puerto Rico, Jose Miguel Gomez from Cuba, Juan Isidoro Jimenez for Santo Domingo - collaborated and continued their push for independent republics in the Caribbean, but they would have been as surprised as any to learn from their meagre outpost in New York that events back in the islands were starting to change under their feet.
The economic depression of the war years had, finally, led even monarchist conservatives to begin asking themselves why Madrid, which had entirely different priorities and ambitions than Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans themselves, were denying them their place in the community of American states. The breach finally came when Mario Garcia Menocal - a member of the Conservative Party! - himself in the Cortes gave a speech which he soon expounded upon in a pamphlet back in Cuba called "A Different Relationship," where he suggested that internal home rule, while certainly fine for Catalonia, was not enough for a place like Cuba with entirely different needs, history and experiences from the rest of Spain. This flew remarkably close to the language of men like Marti or his protege Gomez, but for the fact that Garcia Menocal was a committed monarchist. A different relationship did not mean a full revolutionary break - a different relationship, perhaps, meant exactly what it said it meant..." [2]
- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
[1] There was going to be more on Haiti, but I found the dynamic in the Spanish provinces more interesting to write about.
[2] Tipping my hand that I've come around on the provincial method for Cuba, PR and SD probably not working long term and that some kind of Dominion status a la Canada or a junior branch of the Hohenzollerns spinning off their own crown for the area are likely the direction I'll wind up going
I kinda love the idea of multiple European countries setting up their own Dominians. At least you can have UK, Spain, and maybe even France depending on how much of a fiasco this French State ends up being.
It's certainly more interesting to me than "colony or bust," and in a more multipolar world creates all kinds of wrinkles (i.e. since the UK and US get on fine but don't have a "special relationship" the UK is going to be much more invested in its Commonwealth, for instance)
Yes, and I kinda like the stronger Monarchist presense in the Americas as well in this ATL - It's a different take from what we saw in OTL as well as in many ATLs. Lets bring on Spanish Dominions each with their own cadet branches - as well as Leconte being named Emperor of the Third (and this one, stable) Hatian Empire after a successful Haitian campaign in the CEW!
I wonder how well Russian industry is doing, in this timeline they dont have the French line of credit and investments but i can imagine that being one of the main neutral Great Powers during the European War would be quite beneficial to its coffers, im sure Germany would be happy to replace its declining grain production due to mobilisation with an Ukranian alternative.
Hell OTL Russia was undergoing a significant growth on various sectors relevant to the expansion of the industrial sector, depending on how badly the French do maybe you see Russian industrial output surpass the French during either the later parts of the European war or during the very early post-war. ( considering the demographics of both countries, its only a matter of time really )
Hell OTL Russia was undergoing a significant growth on various sectors relevant to the expansion of the industrial sector, depending on how badly the French do maybe you see Russian industrial output surpass the French during either the later parts of the European war or during the very early post-war. ( considering the demographics of both countries, its only a matter of time really )
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I have to wonder about the future of South America. Will Chile ever be prosperous again? How well will Peru and Argentina digest their new territorial gains? Shall God punish the Bolivians for daring to have a coastline once again?
Out of curiosity, who comes out better immediately from the war, and then long-term: Mexico or Brazil?
Out of curiosity, who comes out better immediately from the war, and then long-term: Mexico or Brazil?
The Central European War
"...mused that every decade or so the superiority of French versus German military leadership, technology and preparations ebbed and flowed; just as soon as one power was clearly the stronger of the two, the other found a way to be better positioned for a potential war.
Twin anxieties sat at the heart of the strategic state of play in Europe that had persisted, with very little variation, since 1875. On the side of the French was the mounting concern that their longstanding low birth rate compared to those of Germany and Italy would give them a massive shortage of manpower in case of war; on the German side, the fact that they would be forced into a two-front war and had to account for fighting off both France and Austria in the event of conflict. It was taken for granted in Paris and Vienna that their alliance was exclusively the underwriter of European peace that prevented German domination of the entire continent; this was a point of view shared in Britain, though not in the way the French hoped. Meanwhile, in Germany, awareness of internal divisions between Vienna and Budapest as well as France's slow-growing population but considerable material wealth and technological edge (France had the finest air and automobile industries on Earth and was an early military innovator both in aerial combat and motorization) made it imperative that Germany have not only an army large enough to beat both but also with the best discipline and planning, because they would not win based on geography or technology, even though they were catching up rapidly to Skoda's field guns or the air force built almost exclusively by CASD, the world's first aerospace conglomerate.
The Great American War's impact on the road to a similar conflagration in Europe is an area of scholarship that has only now begun to assert itself and gain its proper due, particularly in the Old World's academy; the general view, for decades, was that the two were entirely unrelated conflicts that had little to nothing to do with one another. If one is considering all events external to deteriorating European conditions from 1912 to 1919, then the war for supremacy of the Western Hemisphere certainly does rank below colonial disputes in Africa, access to Asian markets and the influence vacuum in European affairs left behind by Britain's turn inwards to focus on pacifying twin crises in Ireland and India. [1] However, it is not entirely irrelevant, and not just because of the boosted presence of German and French vessels in the Caribbean but more around the lessons that war taught the countries that within half a decade would be engaging in an apocalyptic struggle of their own.
For von Kluck and his chief deputy, Max Hoffmann, what interested them the most was the intersection of industry and warfare that had made itself plain in the United States, one of the few countries in the world that Germany and to a lesser extent France could consider a genuine economic peer. Most remarkable was that there hadn't been any particular foresight to this; the United States had underinvested in her army for decades compared to the European land powers, and before the war began the liberal-conservative Liberal Party of President Charles Evans Hughes had generally viewed the state and industry as occupying very distinct spheres with the former only stepping in to curb the excesses of the latter in the most egregious of cases. Within six months such laissez-faire philosophy that had once been a hallmark of American economic thinking was evaporated; the Hughes administration had put in place temporary price controls and production quotas for grain and nationalized the railroads, and opposition parties despite being very cooperative in wartime suggested that the wartime Cabinet had not done enough. The War Department of the United States, after an inept start in the first few months of combat, was now a well-oiled machine coordinating shell and casing production across an economy larger than Germany's and Britain's combined and over fronts the size of the whole of Western Europe, all while making sure vehicle production grew month-over-month though carefully-monitored contracts and aggressive testing and quality control.
The sheer scope of the theaters of war across North America made that aspect of the Great American War difficult to compare to the relatively narrow fronts that were likely to develop in the event of a war between Berlin and Paris, but the lessons on economic planning and coordination as an aspect of modern war leapt out at the Generalstab, particularly Hoffmann. In July 1915 he published a confidential but highly influential report in his role as Generalquartermeister titled "Auf Totaler Krieg" - On Total War. In it, he outlined the lessons drawn from his military observers on the front lines in far-off Virginia and Tennessee, detailing the remarkable ability of the War Department of the United States to quickly learn from its mistakes and despite a fairly anti-statist point of view compared to many European countries rapidly build a behemoth of a war machine based on a triangular partnership between military, civilian and industrial leadership. "The American, a comfortable and heterogenous race that has never been particularly warlike unless they have the ability to beat down on the Indian of the North American continent where they enjoy every advantage, have in less than two years time reoriented the entire industrial capacity of their state, one of the most fearsome in the world, around their war aims and view every factory laborer as being as key to the final victory as the soldiers in the field, a view shared unilaterally across their state."
Explicitly expounded upon in Auf Totaler Krieg was the longstanding German stereotype of Americans as a soft and affluent people who were decidedly un-martial in their thinking, and if they could place their entire economy behind the war machine, then the German Army could do wonders with a similar approach. Thus as early as 1915 the Generalstab began to re-draft their war plans to not only account for the lessons of trench warfare and aerial combat that had become critical to incorporate after the Great American War but also the ideas of total war, planning out a dedicated office of the Prussian Army to directly coordinate military goods and the mobilization of the entire industrial capacity of the state behind the men mobilized into the field and giving the former a weight nearly equal to the latter, a dramatic change in Prussian thinking. [2]
By contrast, France - which was already starting to buckle a bit under the expense of its extant military spending by late 1915 - continued to rely upon its large standing army and technological edge, and looked instead for lessons from across the Atlantic about how to incorporate concepts of combined arms into its doctrine, a comprehensive reform of French strategy that would only be fully implemented down to the division level by the time war broke out in March 1919. It can thus be said that the flow of military advantage was already flowing back to an emboldened Germany as early as 1915 and would never ebb back, and that the choices both countries made in how they drew upon the tragic conflagration in North America spoke to the initial successes of the French in the opening months of war followed by the long-term position of Germany to sustain a total industrial war from then on..."
- The Central European War
[1] Something to consider here is that the collapse of British authority and ability to pay attention to what's going on elsewhere in the world thanks to labor unrest, Ireland and now India has arguably caused both the GAW and soon the CEW - this is a Britscrew precisely because people are deciding they don't really care what London has to say anymore, Royal Navy be damned.
[2] To put it mildly, this was always something that eluded Germans in both WW1 and WW2
Twin anxieties sat at the heart of the strategic state of play in Europe that had persisted, with very little variation, since 1875. On the side of the French was the mounting concern that their longstanding low birth rate compared to those of Germany and Italy would give them a massive shortage of manpower in case of war; on the German side, the fact that they would be forced into a two-front war and had to account for fighting off both France and Austria in the event of conflict. It was taken for granted in Paris and Vienna that their alliance was exclusively the underwriter of European peace that prevented German domination of the entire continent; this was a point of view shared in Britain, though not in the way the French hoped. Meanwhile, in Germany, awareness of internal divisions between Vienna and Budapest as well as France's slow-growing population but considerable material wealth and technological edge (France had the finest air and automobile industries on Earth and was an early military innovator both in aerial combat and motorization) made it imperative that Germany have not only an army large enough to beat both but also with the best discipline and planning, because they would not win based on geography or technology, even though they were catching up rapidly to Skoda's field guns or the air force built almost exclusively by CASD, the world's first aerospace conglomerate.
The Great American War's impact on the road to a similar conflagration in Europe is an area of scholarship that has only now begun to assert itself and gain its proper due, particularly in the Old World's academy; the general view, for decades, was that the two were entirely unrelated conflicts that had little to nothing to do with one another. If one is considering all events external to deteriorating European conditions from 1912 to 1919, then the war for supremacy of the Western Hemisphere certainly does rank below colonial disputes in Africa, access to Asian markets and the influence vacuum in European affairs left behind by Britain's turn inwards to focus on pacifying twin crises in Ireland and India. [1] However, it is not entirely irrelevant, and not just because of the boosted presence of German and French vessels in the Caribbean but more around the lessons that war taught the countries that within half a decade would be engaging in an apocalyptic struggle of their own.
For von Kluck and his chief deputy, Max Hoffmann, what interested them the most was the intersection of industry and warfare that had made itself plain in the United States, one of the few countries in the world that Germany and to a lesser extent France could consider a genuine economic peer. Most remarkable was that there hadn't been any particular foresight to this; the United States had underinvested in her army for decades compared to the European land powers, and before the war began the liberal-conservative Liberal Party of President Charles Evans Hughes had generally viewed the state and industry as occupying very distinct spheres with the former only stepping in to curb the excesses of the latter in the most egregious of cases. Within six months such laissez-faire philosophy that had once been a hallmark of American economic thinking was evaporated; the Hughes administration had put in place temporary price controls and production quotas for grain and nationalized the railroads, and opposition parties despite being very cooperative in wartime suggested that the wartime Cabinet had not done enough. The War Department of the United States, after an inept start in the first few months of combat, was now a well-oiled machine coordinating shell and casing production across an economy larger than Germany's and Britain's combined and over fronts the size of the whole of Western Europe, all while making sure vehicle production grew month-over-month though carefully-monitored contracts and aggressive testing and quality control.
The sheer scope of the theaters of war across North America made that aspect of the Great American War difficult to compare to the relatively narrow fronts that were likely to develop in the event of a war between Berlin and Paris, but the lessons on economic planning and coordination as an aspect of modern war leapt out at the Generalstab, particularly Hoffmann. In July 1915 he published a confidential but highly influential report in his role as Generalquartermeister titled "Auf Totaler Krieg" - On Total War. In it, he outlined the lessons drawn from his military observers on the front lines in far-off Virginia and Tennessee, detailing the remarkable ability of the War Department of the United States to quickly learn from its mistakes and despite a fairly anti-statist point of view compared to many European countries rapidly build a behemoth of a war machine based on a triangular partnership between military, civilian and industrial leadership. "The American, a comfortable and heterogenous race that has never been particularly warlike unless they have the ability to beat down on the Indian of the North American continent where they enjoy every advantage, have in less than two years time reoriented the entire industrial capacity of their state, one of the most fearsome in the world, around their war aims and view every factory laborer as being as key to the final victory as the soldiers in the field, a view shared unilaterally across their state."
Explicitly expounded upon in Auf Totaler Krieg was the longstanding German stereotype of Americans as a soft and affluent people who were decidedly un-martial in their thinking, and if they could place their entire economy behind the war machine, then the German Army could do wonders with a similar approach. Thus as early as 1915 the Generalstab began to re-draft their war plans to not only account for the lessons of trench warfare and aerial combat that had become critical to incorporate after the Great American War but also the ideas of total war, planning out a dedicated office of the Prussian Army to directly coordinate military goods and the mobilization of the entire industrial capacity of the state behind the men mobilized into the field and giving the former a weight nearly equal to the latter, a dramatic change in Prussian thinking. [2]
By contrast, France - which was already starting to buckle a bit under the expense of its extant military spending by late 1915 - continued to rely upon its large standing army and technological edge, and looked instead for lessons from across the Atlantic about how to incorporate concepts of combined arms into its doctrine, a comprehensive reform of French strategy that would only be fully implemented down to the division level by the time war broke out in March 1919. It can thus be said that the flow of military advantage was already flowing back to an emboldened Germany as early as 1915 and would never ebb back, and that the choices both countries made in how they drew upon the tragic conflagration in North America spoke to the initial successes of the French in the opening months of war followed by the long-term position of Germany to sustain a total industrial war from then on..."
- The Central European War
[1] Something to consider here is that the collapse of British authority and ability to pay attention to what's going on elsewhere in the world thanks to labor unrest, Ireland and now India has arguably caused both the GAW and soon the CEW - this is a Britscrew precisely because people are deciding they don't really care what London has to say anymore, Royal Navy be damned.
[2] To put it mildly, this was always something that eluded Germans in both WW1 and WW2
Idk if each state would get its own cadet branch or just have a British Dominion arrangement, but I have plenty of time to decide.Yes, and I kinda like the stronger Monarchist presense in the Americas as well in this ATL - It's a different take from what we saw in OTL as well as in many ATLs. Lets bring on Spanish Dominions each with their own cadet branches - as well as Leconte being named Emperor of the Third (and this one, stable) Hatian Empire after a successful Haitian campaign in the CEW!
My rough rule of thumb is that Russia is about 10 years behind developmentally at any given point sans the French credit, so if it avoids war, in 1925 it'd be the emerging industrial power of OTL 1915. Avoiding alt-WW1 makes a huge difference.
All will be revealed!
As for the second part - Brazil short term, Mexico long term.
They are stronger than their OTL equivalent, granted. That said a quick loss is prob better than a long one
Any timeline where the US gets their teeth kicked in leads to more interesting geopolitical situations in the rest of America since it gives the other countries more options/smaller chance of getting coup'd.
*adjusts glasses* AcKsHuAlLy, Brazil owns that little penisula on the east of Uruguay.
Yeah, getting shot and dying quickly is better than death by a 1000 cuts.
Bolivia having any sort of coastline is such an unholy abomination. This timeline is truly lost.
In Europe, the steady march towards war continues, and some the key OTL lessons from WW1 are being learned before the war starts, thanks to the GAW. It seems like Germany is learning the more important lessons, which makes sense given that we already know that they're going to win.
And in the Spanish Caribbean, the march towards sovereignty is starting to pick up steam. If even the conservatives can see that the status quo can't hold, it's only a matter of time now. Of course, nothing will happen until Madrid says so, and its unlikely they'll be very keen to voluntarily loosen their own authority, so I'm guessing that it'll still be a while until a political settlement is reached. In the meantime, the sovereigntist movement still has some questions of its own to answer, of both the more esoteric (dominion vs cadet branch) and the more practical (whether or not to split the 3 islands up into their own entities) variety.
And in the Spanish Caribbean, the march towards sovereignty is starting to pick up steam. If even the conservatives can see that the status quo can't hold, it's only a matter of time now. Of course, nothing will happen until Madrid says so, and its unlikely they'll be very keen to voluntarily loosen their own authority, so I'm guessing that it'll still be a while until a political settlement is reached. In the meantime, the sovereigntist movement still has some questions of its own to answer, of both the more esoteric (dominion vs cadet branch) and the more practical (whether or not to split the 3 islands up into their own entities) variety.
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Idk if I'd quite go so far as to say the US gets its "teeth kicked in" here, but the geopolitical situation is nonetheless very changed up by all those major Gulf ports not having direct rail lines to Northern industrial cities attached to them and there are significant limitations on US power projection abilities into the Caribbean and beyond as a result.
That being said, one of the ironies of TTL is that since the US isn't getting involved in WW1 and then the undisputed leader of the post-WW2 liberal world order after helping Britain and the USSR defeat the Nazis, its geopolitical ambitions are considerably more cabined and hyperfocused at its near abroad - so, ironically, you may get a US that's even more interventionist in the Americas, a la OTL's occupations of Nicaragua and Haiti, while having no military bases in Europe and only one or two leases in the Far East (they already have Port Hamilton and Chusan, and it might not go beyond that)
Gives some semblance of a Habsburg entity a better chance of surviving, at least. What shape that would take I will keep mum on, for now.
Sometimes the right thing is the wrong thing
You nailed it! I got the idea from some comments back during the Boxer conflict about hopefully the combatants learning their lesson initially from trench warfare around Peking and it occurred to me that France, Germany, Italy and Austria (and, uh, a fifth combatant that we all love to hate) will have had a roughly three-year bloodbath in the Americas to observe to see what modern war looks like. This'll help keep casualties in Europe much lower; that, and that so many of the theaters of war (Austria v Italy, Austria v Germany, Italy v France) are so mountainous and thus difficult to sustain Western Front-style offensives on.
My thinking on the Spanish Caribbean is that on the one hand, a union of Cuba, PR and SD would be a legitimate force in Latin America; on the other hand, having exited out from under control of Madrid, Puerto Ricans, for instance, would probably start chafing pretty rapidly at being dominated from Cuba, since Havana would rapidly emerge as the political, cultural and economic heart of such a union. So my instinct would be three separate states that are nonetheless in some kind of mutual commonwealth with a customs and passport union with a central body to coordinate policy and cooperation; weaker than the EU, stronger than the OAS/OTL Commonwealth. We'd probably see something like this emerge in the successor states of Atlantic Canada, too.
Housekeeping Update:
I've been studiously avoiding doing much combat updates since launching the sequel thread since that came to dominate so much of the last hundred pages of the OG. We'll probably have a way less combat-heavy narrative moving forward since I find that stuff tedious to write, but I do have to map out the pace of events between now and the end of the war (I've settled on a very allegorically appropriate endpoint for the GAW) and some of the major battles in between, but we might not be getting the same kind of battle-by-battle detail. I also need to plot out the Ghadar Mutiny a bit since I wrote myself into a corner there and figure out how to stick the landing in Ireland.
With that in mind, I wanted to open the floor to any requests on content for the 1915-17 cycle that I may not have considered in my notes, since I was so focused on getting to May of 1915 that my notes from here on out are (once again - not the first time this has happened!) thin.
I've been studiously avoiding doing much combat updates since launching the sequel thread since that came to dominate so much of the last hundred pages of the OG. We'll probably have a way less combat-heavy narrative moving forward since I find that stuff tedious to write, but I do have to map out the pace of events between now and the end of the war (I've settled on a very allegorically appropriate endpoint for the GAW) and some of the major battles in between, but we might not be getting the same kind of battle-by-battle detail. I also need to plot out the Ghadar Mutiny a bit since I wrote myself into a corner there and figure out how to stick the landing in Ireland.
With that in mind, I wanted to open the floor to any requests on content for the 1915-17 cycle that I may not have considered in my notes, since I was so focused on getting to May of 1915 that my notes from here on out are (once again - not the first time this has happened!) thin.
Since Persia and DEI doesn't have too much updates, they would be a good start for one.(Especially how Persia developes without Reza Khan/ Indonesia without Japanese would be interesting..)
Updates on reactions of Gandhi Bose and Nehru on Ghadar would be interesting too I guess..
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