Of course not. My point is that the Israelis took what they found and manipulated it, only to find they had outsmarted themselves and created their own Frankenstein's Monster
Of course not. My point is that the Israelis took what they found and manipulated it, only to find they had outsmarted themselves and created their own Frankenstein's Monster
This seems to be a tradition in the Middle East. Like "regime change" splintered Iraq and removed Iran's #1 obstacle to regional influence. Guess who's been indispensable to Hamas and Hezbollah? Oops. Has anyone done an alternate history on the premise that the CIA failed to remove Mossadegh? Probably not, but I do think wonder about it.
I've had a thought about it. A w4estern-influenced democratic regime is able to regain control of its natural resources and put the profits of the sales into developing the country in a democratic manner than benefits the majority of the citizenry and really does lift the lowest. With the support of the U.S., this becomes the model for modernization in the Middle East and it sweeps the region in the 1950s and early 60s, throwing aside all the autocratic oligarchic regimes and spreading democracy through the region. It becomes a force so strong it forces France to voluntarily leave the North African provinces and grant them independence. By the mid-60s, the Middle East is 180 degrees opposite to what we know.
This, of course, follows the decision by FDR (who didn't die - and this is the policy he intended to follow post-war) to prevent the French and Dutch from returning to their Asian colonies, placing those countries under a US-led UN trusteeship to develop the civil mechanisms for independence, gained in the early 1950s. There are no wars in Southeast Asia; 58,000 Americans don't die and their descendants do amazing things. Several million Southeast Asians also don't die with similar but larger result. US pressure on Britain gets the British Asian Empire independence. With its influence in the formerly-colonial world high as a result, the world's first anti-colonialist country also uses its influence to transform sub-Saharan Africa, with UN-led mandates for the former colonies to develop the mechanisms of independent government that had been suppressed and destroyed by the former colonial powers.
By now, the nations of the South have had 50 years of peaceful, democratic development. There's a truly international base on the moon.
A boy can dream, yes? This is an alternate history that could have happened, had the US ruling class that saw themselves as the inheritors of the Pax Britannica had been stymied by FDR and a couple of strongly FDR-influenced US presidents. (which unfortunately means don't go trying to live in cloud land)
Much belated -- I had to think about it, plus I've been reading . . . ;-) What I've been reading is Maddow's PREQUEL and, currently, Jacob Heilbrunn's AMERICA LAST (Norton, 2024), which I've just started. I'm also the kid who did a high school speech on the Sykes-Picot Agreement (and became a competition finalist because, I'm pretty sure, the judges had no idea what I was talking about).
So you can guess my next question: How do we get from WWI (including the final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire) to your scenario? Versailles, specifically the Treaties of Lausanne and Sevres, created an irrational, unsustainable map of the Middle East and put the British and French in charge of it. (By the mid-1920s Ibn Saud had put himself in charge of most of the Arabian Peninsula.)
Arab impulses to independence and even democracy were squelched by Western democracies. Resistance in Palestine started not long after WW1 ended. The Balfour Declaration was a serious factor: it had declared Britain's support for "a Jewish Home" in Palestine, even though an estimated 93% of the population at the time was not Jewish. Oil was already en route to becoming an even more serious factor, putting the U.S. in bed with Saudi -- a theocracy that's about as anti-democratic as you can get.
My semi-informed take is that Western-style democracy was thoroughly discredited by its association with Britain and France (and with Christianity), and the U.S. isolationists weren't interested in exporting democracy -- as Maddow and Heilbrunn argue, many of them weren't particularly fond of democracy at home either. Lacking a democratic tradition and having been cobbled together from often mutually antagonistic parts, several Arab countries (notably Syria, Iraq, and Egypt) turned to autocratic dictators (often replacing British-backed monarchies).
It's a mess, and the more you learn, the messier it gets. But I'm still trying to learn more.
Had FDR lived, he intended to cut the French and British - who by 1945 were completely dependent on us - off from their empires, planning to work to bring the colonized nations to independence. Basically, FDR would have "cut the Gordian Knot" of European imperialism.
He wouldn't have had to do much: the colonized nations quickly set about liberating themselves, e.g., India in 1947 and China by 1949. It was, however, to put it mildly, very messy. I do wonder how things would have developed if FDR had lived, and if the Cold War and McCarthyism hadn't taken such strong hold by the end of the '40s. It's intriguing, and also telling, that the U.S. has continually freaked out big-time about commies and been relatively blas├й about fascists. I wonder if that's beginning to change.
The problem was that the "East Coast Establishment" of the US Ruling Class saw themselves as the inheritors of the Pax Britannica, turning it into the Pax Americana.
So who's included in the "East Coast Establishment"? The right-wingers (e.g., William F. Buckley) don't seem to have been in the same boat as the "Best and the Brightest" of the JFK/LBJ administration, and they also don't seem to have been such big fans of Britain. Though they were gung-ho about killing commies.
Of course not. My point is that the Israelis took what they found and manipulated it, only to find they had outsmarted themselves and created their own Frankenstein's Monster
This seems to be a tradition in the Middle East. Like "regime change" splintered Iraq and removed Iran's #1 obstacle to regional influence. Guess who's been indispensable to Hamas and Hezbollah? Oops. Has anyone done an alternate history on the premise that the CIA failed to remove Mossadegh? Probably not, but I do think wonder about it.
I've had a thought about it. A w4estern-influenced democratic regime is able to regain control of its natural resources and put the profits of the sales into developing the country in a democratic manner than benefits the majority of the citizenry and really does lift the lowest. With the support of the U.S., this becomes the model for modernization in the Middle East and it sweeps the region in the 1950s and early 60s, throwing aside all the autocratic oligarchic regimes and spreading democracy through the region. It becomes a force so strong it forces France to voluntarily leave the North African provinces and grant them independence. By the mid-60s, the Middle East is 180 degrees opposite to what we know.
This, of course, follows the decision by FDR (who didn't die - and this is the policy he intended to follow post-war) to prevent the French and Dutch from returning to their Asian colonies, placing those countries under a US-led UN trusteeship to develop the civil mechanisms for independence, gained in the early 1950s. There are no wars in Southeast Asia; 58,000 Americans don't die and their descendants do amazing things. Several million Southeast Asians also don't die with similar but larger result. US pressure on Britain gets the British Asian Empire independence. With its influence in the formerly-colonial world high as a result, the world's first anti-colonialist country also uses its influence to transform sub-Saharan Africa, with UN-led mandates for the former colonies to develop the mechanisms of independent government that had been suppressed and destroyed by the former colonial powers.
By now, the nations of the South have had 50 years of peaceful, democratic development. There's a truly international base on the moon.
A boy can dream, yes? This is an alternate history that could have happened, had the US ruling class that saw themselves as the inheritors of the Pax Britannica had been stymied by FDR and a couple of strongly FDR-influenced US presidents. (which unfortunately means don't go trying to live in cloud land)
Much belated -- I had to think about it, plus I've been reading . . . ;-) What I've been reading is Maddow's PREQUEL and, currently, Jacob Heilbrunn's AMERICA LAST (Norton, 2024), which I've just started. I'm also the kid who did a high school speech on the Sykes-Picot Agreement (and became a competition finalist because, I'm pretty sure, the judges had no idea what I was talking about).
So you can guess my next question: How do we get from WWI (including the final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire) to your scenario? Versailles, specifically the Treaties of Lausanne and Sevres, created an irrational, unsustainable map of the Middle East and put the British and French in charge of it. (By the mid-1920s Ibn Saud had put himself in charge of most of the Arabian Peninsula.)
Arab impulses to independence and even democracy were squelched by Western democracies. Resistance in Palestine started not long after WW1 ended. The Balfour Declaration was a serious factor: it had declared Britain's support for "a Jewish Home" in Palestine, even though an estimated 93% of the population at the time was not Jewish. Oil was already en route to becoming an even more serious factor, putting the U.S. in bed with Saudi -- a theocracy that's about as anti-democratic as you can get.
My semi-informed take is that Western-style democracy was thoroughly discredited by its association with Britain and France (and with Christianity), and the U.S. isolationists weren't interested in exporting democracy -- as Maddow and Heilbrunn argue, many of them weren't particularly fond of democracy at home either. Lacking a democratic tradition and having been cobbled together from often mutually antagonistic parts, several Arab countries (notably Syria, Iraq, and Egypt) turned to autocratic dictators (often replacing British-backed monarchies).
It's a mess, and the more you learn, the messier it gets. But I'm still trying to learn more.
Had FDR lived, he intended to cut the French and British - who by 1945 were completely dependent on us - off from their empires, planning to work to bring the colonized nations to independence. Basically, FDR would have "cut the Gordian Knot" of European imperialism.
He wouldn't have had to do much: the colonized nations quickly set about liberating themselves, e.g., India in 1947 and China by 1949. It was, however, to put it mildly, very messy. I do wonder how things would have developed if FDR had lived, and if the Cold War and McCarthyism hadn't taken such strong hold by the end of the '40s. It's intriguing, and also telling, that the U.S. has continually freaked out big-time about commies and been relatively blas├й about fascists. I wonder if that's beginning to change.
The problem was that the "East Coast Establishment" of the US Ruling Class saw themselves as the inheritors of the Pax Britannica, turning it into the Pax Americana.
So who's included in the "East Coast Establishment"? The right-wingers (e.g., William F. Buckley) don't seem to have been in the same boat as the "Best and the Brightest" of the JFK/LBJ administration, and they also don't seem to have been such big fans of Britain. Though they were gung-ho about killing commies.
Wall Street, the Ivy League, the leading parts of the two parties back then, the people who founded the CIA, the major media of the time.