Alternate History Thread

What if the Sassanid Empire Of Persia had managed to capture and hold Constantinople in 626 AD?  

@BadgingBadger
 
Absolutely nothing.
 
Actually taking that land permanently wasn’t the reason they were there. They were there because the Sassanids had invaded to inpart avenge the death of Maurice who had been a close friend to the Sassanid Emperor - Khosrau II - on part of having helped him out regain his throne from a usurper in the previous war. The action that in part spurred the conflict stemming from the military being angry Emperor Maurice cut the Byzantine military budget so entitled generals attacked him, forced the Emperor to attempt to run, and then got murdered. The budget had to be cut in part of the exhaustive previous war.
 
War isn’t necessarily all about land and neither side likely would have allowed themselves that much land to change anyways. Even if the Sassanids were to get land back, the most to be expected would have been getting Mesopotamia back and all that ‘territory’ would just be released from its occupation. And even if it were to be permanently affixed to the Persian state, they would be so exhausted and stretched thin that they wouldn’t have been able to stop the Rashidun any better than they would have in real life.
 
The fundamental difference then would be that Umar’d be fighting one Empire and not two when he broke the Muslims out of Arabia. Dynastic struggled within the Persian Empire too would have made those gains even more irrelevant, and would just play them out over a larger area, bubbling dissent within the ruling family and its internal competitors don’t really fade away on the acquisition of more land. In a way they might be even more exacerbated with the expectation of more titles for everyone, only for them to be revoked by foreign conquest anyhow.
 
So the Sassanids may not last very long anyways and go the way of all other Empires that get too big for their britches. Cultural assimilation may not act so fast that if the Muslims were to take over they’d be augmenting in Persian words to fill in the linguistic gaps in their language to cover civil administration so we can probably rule out the Ummayads considering themselves a new Persian Empire as opposed to a new Roman Empire.

Suddenly i got a mood for malay/indonesian history.  
What if the Majapahit Empire had survived long enough to meet and come into conflict with the portuguese and, possibly, the dutch?  

What if Texas chose to remain independent instead of joining the US?

…What if Israel had lost the 1948 war and was partitioned by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria?

@BadgingBadger  
This will explain it.

What if the US lost the Mexican-American War?

@Pacific Glow  
Well, since Texas was already lost by Mexico at that time, i’m afraid that a later war would happen between the two states over the ownership of gold-rich California.  
“Poor Mexico. So far from god, and so close to the United States.”  
I believe Mexico has a better chance of stopping Manifest Destiny during the texan revolution, if mexican general Santa Anna wasn’t so mistake-prone – with Texas Tejas still a part of Mexico, there would be no mexican-american war.

Haven’t seen this thread before. Let me toss my hat in with a couple of questions.
 
What if Ernst Rohm didn’t die in the Night of Long Knives? And for something more anime, what if Academy ships as shown on GuP actually existed?

@Red Anon  

 
I’m afraid that he’s gonna get persecuted by Hitler to no end, unless Hitler dies and Rohm doesn’t.  
If so, then i could see the nazis being slightly less homophobic, comsidering that Rohm was gay.  
But either way, i don’t know how different were Rohm’s plans for Germany compared to Hitler’s. Perhaps we could see him being more flexible than Hitler. If not, then maybe he’ll be content to just annex Austria, remilitarize the Rhineland, and annex the Sudetenland, and nothing more, unlike Hitler.  
That, or the nazi party suffers a major schism, since Rohm was unpopular amongst… well, everyone in Germany.

@BadgingBadger  
Considering Rohm and Hitler were very close friends it’s possible that Rohm may just wind up with the SA losing quite a bit of power, though not to the extent of what happened in OTL. The way I see it both the SS and SA wind up coexisting as the major powers in Germany for while up until early 1942 due to the massive tensions between both groups.
 
Also something consider is that SA was quite possibly as another way for the communist party to gain power since the SA personnel were mostly the poor and the laborers.

@Red Anon  
Could strasserism gain prominence within the SA?

@BadgingBadger  
What keeps those empires from collapsing/fragmenting/reorganizing into later in history?
 
Those kind of whatifs usally have that thing with country becoming immune to destruction after surviving their historical fall.

@BadgingBadger
 
I don’t know how to anser this one, but that got me thinking: what if the Roman Empire didn’t recover from the Crisis of the Third Century?

@DeathCloud  
Well… it’s mostly to make it seem “cool”, or to look good on a map.  
That, or as just a thought exercise, no matter how improbable it’d be for the roman empire to survive until the 21st century.  
@Mildgyth  
Perhaps the breakaway empires of Palmyra and Gaul could survive and thrive.  

What if… no Timur, the Lame?  

Reviving the thread…  
What if the Philippines were an US state?  
And on the question of the Philippines… what if Koxinga of Taiwan had lived longer and then invaded the islands?

What if “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was a flop?
 
Shudders

Here’s an alt-history scenario i thought of regarding WW2 Japan:
 
The development of the nukes is delayed by a couple of years, long enough for them to be too late for WW2 but still early enough for the cold war to happen more or less as it did IRL.
 
In Europe shit goes down as it did IRL, because nukes weren’t a factor there. Germany capitulates, you know the drill.
 
In the Pacific, the Japanese get beaten back until only mainland Japan remains. Estimating the cost of an invasion to be too high, the Americans put the islands under a naval siege. They try to make Japan capitulate with massive conventional bombing raids, but despite cataclysmic damage to the country the hardliners in the Japanese government refuse an unconditional surrender. That would be a shamefur dispray, and they go full North Korea to keep the people in line.
 
With no way to force the Japanese to capitulate short of an extremely costly invasion, the US government decides to maintain the blockade. With the Japanese air force and navy as well as their industry and cities decimated by American air supremacy, they have no way to strike back at the blockaders.
 
Eventually both sides hunker down, and the conflict becomes a frozen one. An unofficial ceasefire happens, and Japan remains under siege. Once the Americans get their nukes built a couple of years later, the war is considered over and they don’t bother nuking the place up.
 
In the end, Japan becomes an island version of North Korea with an enforced second Sakoku, basically.
 
–  
Just something silly i thought of, feel free to poke holes in the plausibility of this scenario. I didn’t factor in the Soviets, because they didn’t really have the naval capability to invade Japan at the time AFAIK

@PaskaNaakka  
Surprisingly, we had a discussion last night in the politics thread about the implications of the US not bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My stance was that the japanese were already running on low morale after so many costly and fruitless campaigns.
 
––  
Now,  
What if Vercingetorix had managed to beat Caesar out of Gaul?

What if Catherine of Aragon had birthed a child from Henry VIII of England?

@PaskaNaakka  

 
In all reality Japan would have capitulated nukes or no nukes. The story the nukes were needed was created by the administration to cover their asses for using it and not registering the Japanese were already calling for peace and because the US didn’t want to deal with the Soviets; who in the end got what they would have wanted if there were no nukes in the first place.
 
At the end of the war, the islands themselves were already under a state of naval siege, the entire country was cut off from the rest of the world getting no food and all other natural resources on the island having been stripped away years ago (partly the reason the Japanese went on an expansionist campaign was economical, they had nothing on the home-front to provide for any modern industry and they went abroad to steal it). The blockade was so effective Japanese industry had ground completely to a stand-still and what little they could get to work was being built and operated by very, very sub-standard materials (airplanes were being built of pine wood, and fueled by pine tar for instance). And there was little to no food left, the Japanese administration had been notorious during the pre-war for agricultural mismanagement on their part and the stress of the war and the depopulation of the countryside of all working-age young men meant that they couldn’t produce much food to feed even their civilian population.
 
When it came down to invasion plans, the Japanese high-command was prepared to - and honestly could surrender to - a land invasion and they were ready to meet the Americans with bamboo sticks, having no more bullets.
 
And prior to the nukes American bomber command was conducting intense civilian bombing campaigns that in actuality burned Tokyo to the ground. Here’s a picture of Tokyo after a fire-bombing raid, actually:
 

 
Basically, Japan was as described by Paul Ham in his book Hiroshima and Nagasaki “thrice defeated”. Their army was rags with sticks, the navy was at the bottom of the ocean, and the air-force was practically non-existent. Prior to the bombs the Emperor himself was moving to surrender.
 
Expecting Japan to go full North Korea with the removal of the nuclear element would be a profoundly incorrect forecast, since unlike North Korea they had at the time of the end of the war, and in the situation of this scenario have no friends. And by this point they would have surrendered one way or another. It would all be in Truman’s court if he would accept not just the terms of Japanese surrender as provided by Japan (which actually didn’t ever change in the end IRL, the wording was just adjusted), but the nature by which they were offered.

@BadgingBadger  

 
Japanese and even conscript morale was divorced from and largely unimportant to Japanese high-command who lived, operated, and made decisions outside of the life of the supporting population. If the military clique had their way they would have waited for and fought the Americans if they did, or had they landed to invade Japan. Again going back to Paul Ham’s examination of the Japanese court at the time much of the Japanese high-command were the old Samurai class and they would not surrender. They would not even surrender to bombs, and in court discussion over what to do during and after the nuclear bombs were dropped both events were regarded with passing disinterest with a grand total of one invocation before being silently killed by mutual disinterest.
 
They didn’t give a shit.

Reviving thread,
 
What if the roman emperor Valens had waited for his brother Valentinian to come with his reinforcements, thus allowing the romans to defeat tye goths at the Battle of Adrianople?  
Could the Roman Empire(s) have weathered the barbarian invasions better?