Recent content by raharris1973

Viet Minh had showed decent survival/durability capability already. Forcing a final victory or making a military achievement like Dien Bien Phu would be tougher for the Viet Minh. Not having the over the border Chinese help is a disadvantage compared to OTL, but it is not some sort of spell of...

If northern Persia stays Russian for as long as Central Asia, especially if Russia goes through a Soviet era and Stalinist style population movements, the long term differences could be quite profound. See this interesting article by this niche academic substacker, The Great Gender Divergence...

WWI via the path we knew could be derailed. .....but we could get there, via the same, Sarajevo, station, without the Libya, Rhodes, Albania, Macedonia, Chatalja stops in between. Precedents and steppingstones and breadcrumbs to an Austro-Serb blow-up were already starting to form a pattern -...

Media habits (the attention economy) make us do it this way I guess.

Not only was Manchuria as a whole majority Han by 1900, Liaoning, southern Manchuria, that whole area around the Yellow Sea, bridging to Korea, including Mukden/Shenyang and the Kwangtun/Guangdon peninsula, *that* had been majority Han for at least 500 years. The Han exclusion only ever applied...

Did you read the Zelikow book on this overall topic, by any chance?

But even without the exagerrated faith in the majestic , decisive, deterrent power of the bomb, would the US in the mid and late forties have had the political will to maintain a large standing army, and get over its historical aversion to maintaining one on a permanent basis? Despite the WWII...

With a Soviet collapse being after Pearl Harbor, but before the beginning of 1943, Japan can gain some short-term benefits. *If* the Soviets via defeat are brought into an armistice and forced to yield track and cargo space, Soviet territory can be used for strategic trade between the European...

These ethnic minority majority areas, especially in the northwest like Azerbaijan and the north like the Gilan Caspian coast were anything but sparsely settled in Persian terms. They were some of the most densely populated parts of Persia. Then, and to this day, the population in Iran and...

Do you think it was really plausible to have gone that far, and that, at that historic juncture, Afghanistan internally and tribal religious networks across the border in British India, and Muslim communities, lacked the money, media, community sense, international networking to get a...

There "should" be, there "could" be, there often is, from a common AH.commer's POV, which I find pretty Cold War inflected. But there was also in the interwar Germany, including on the right and in the Reichswehr, a significant, "let's split up Poland" contingent who sought to destroy and...

I really think it would have been an inefficient employment of US resources, with virtually no visible improvements over OTL on the campaign map within calendar year 1942, because of the logistical and distance challenges of getting US aircraft and pilots and basing them near points of contact...

This is completely imaginable. The Japanese don't rape Nanjing, they line up and pay their fees at tow/city red light district brothels like (relatively) civilized men. All these alternatives are conceivable. They may seem a little strange to us, but stranger things have been proposed, and...

These responses all assume *too much* that for greater Soviet gain, and aggression, there *must* be an equal and opposite anti-Soviet Western Allied reaction. I say to the contrary, not at all. Soviet aggression against Poland, the Baltics, Romania, did not cause permanent unforgivability of...

They were by 1936 facing a lot of resistance, or desire for it, in the northwest - from the warlords who kidnapped CKS, Yang Hucheng and Xiang Xueliang, and Fu Zuoyi, who in 1936 inspired even more resistance sentiment by successfully repelling a Japanese probe deeper into his own part of...