WWII ends with Allied-Soviet fight

[eurofed]

This TL combines and develops various AH ideas I’m fond of: a WWII with an Allied victory that does not really divide or mutilate the Axis powers; the same conflict ending with a major military confrontation between the democratic powers and the USSR that settles the score with all forms of totalitarianism and prevents the Cold War as we know it; the post-war world gradually evolving into a multi-polar system fairly similar to the post-Cold War one (although with a few inevitable difference, such as a stronger Western world). I’ve already used part of this scenario for my “A different Cold War” TL, although here events in the late phase of the war have a different course and lead to a wholly different outcome.

ITTL Roosevelt died by an early stroke in 1939, and after James Garner completed his term, one among James Farley, Cordell Hull, or Thomas Dewey was elected President in 1940. Although the new President followed an internationalist foreign policy broadly similar to FDR, he was much more suspicious of Stalin and much less prone to acknowledge any important difference between fascism and communism. He was also more willing to grant a lenient peace deal to defeated enemy powers, although he still aimed for their surrender and military occupation. The botched attempt of Britain and France to intervene in the Winter War and deny Germany access to Swedish iron supplies caused the German occupation of Sweden, the Anglo-French bombing of Baku, and a state of war between the USSR and the Entente powers.

Hitler reluctantly accepted Stalin as an ally - even if he planned to attack the Soviets once the British were defeated - and the Axis alliance was expanded to the USSR. The Soviets attacked and overrun Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, while Germany did the same to Western Europe and forced France to surrender. Because of the Soviet co-belligerence, Germany and Italy agreed to cooperate and pursue a Mediterranean strategy, while Spain and Vichy France joined the Axis. Charles de Gaulle died during the Fall of France, so no equivalent of Free France ever arose and France was deemed an enemy power by the Allies.

The Axis forces occupied Portugal, Gibraltar, and Malta, overrun North Africa, drove the British out of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and made inroads into western India and East Africa. The British Empire was in dire straits, despite the generous Lend-Lease support of the USA, when Hitler and the Japanese leaders changed the picture. Hitler deemed he had all but won the war against the British, so he decided to attack the USSR. This turned WWII into a three-way conflict, and the strategic equation further turned against the Axis when Japan brought America in the war with a pre-emptive attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbour.

They decided to seize the European colonies in Southeast Asia to secure a steady supply of resources against the American embargo of Axis countries that was strangling their economy. Trade with the USSR in the co-belligerence period considerably ameliorated the situation, but it turned bad again when Germany attacked the USSR. Unfortunately for the Axis, the Japanese did not trust their invasion of Southeast Asia to succeed without eliminating the potential threat of the Philippines and the US Pacific Fleet on their flank. Although the initial Japanese rampage swept everything up to New Guinea and eastern India, US intervention turned the tide of the war thanks to the mobilization of the vast manpower and industrial resources of America.

US build-up enabled the Allies to push Axis forces out of India, gradually roll back the Japanese in the Pacific, and conquer the Horn of Africa, Arabia, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. American power also turned the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic and the air war in Europe. After these successes, the Americans made a strategic decision to give priority to conquest of Western Europe and defeat of the Euro-Axis rather than liberation of the Balkans and the Near East, despite the contrary wishes of the British. Allied landings in Iberia, Italy, France, and Scandinavia were successful. The war in the Eastern Front eventually turned bad for the Axis after an initial vast success because of its engagement in these other theatres. However the Soviets paid a terrible price in manpower and consumption of resources for their victories. The experiences of WWII and a minor stroke Stalin suffered during the war significantly altered his personality: he became mentally instable, rather more reckless, and even more paranoid and brutal.

Deeming the war lost, the military component of the German Resistance managed to overthrow the Nazi regime. The anti-Nazi faction was able to organize adequately and get sufficient support in the Wehrmacht for a successful coup because they were confident of getting a lenient deal from the Allies after Hitler was removed from power. After they took over, they made diplomatic feelers for peace negotiations with the Allied governments. Although their requests for anything less than surrender were quickly and decisively shot down, they were able to get Allied assent to a peace deal (nominally unconditional surrender, de facto a conditional one) that guaranteed Germany and its allies lenient terms.

They were ensured their national integrity (no forced political division of their countries), their internationally-recognized or ethnic borders (even if the Allies reserved the right to make a few adjustments for the sake of international security), their economic base (no forced deindustrialization or unsustainable reparations), a liberal-democratic political system, eventual return to political independence after a clearing out of fascist elements, and a free-market economy.

Due to the role the German military played in ending the war, the Allies also gave the informal guarantee that their prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity would essentially target fascist leaders, people directly involved in atrocities, and high-ranking members of the fascist parties, paramilitary militias, and secret police. Military and civilian personnel otherwise involved with fascist regimes because of their jobs would be spared and there would not be any mass punishments or prosecutions for waging an aggressive war.

Germany, its allies, and the Anglo-Americans agreed to these terms. The Axis forces started a general pullout from the fronts (France, Iberia, Italy, and Scandinavia) where they were engaged with the Allies. They let the Allied forces advance without opposition across Europe, while they concentrated on the Eastern front to make a last stand. Their objective was to stalemate the Red Army as much as possible before the Anglo-American troops would reach Eastern Europe.

As soon as Stalin got notice of this deal, he ordered the Red Army to press on and advance as much as possible against the Axis and Allied forces, no matter the cost in men and material. He did not expect a decisive victory against the Allies, but he thought it was possible to win the USSR a favourable compromise peace and maximize Soviet war gains. He hoped to do so by grabbing as much land as possible before the Allies reached the Eastern front, and then exhausting the Anglo-Americans with an attrition war. The USSR itself had got dangerously close to complete exhaustion of its own manpower and economic resources in the struggle against the Axis, and the Americans had barely tapped their own potential in comparison. However Stalin was confident the will to fight and ability to bear sacrifices of the USSR under his leadership would turn out to be much greater than the one of the democratic powers.

To maximize the effects of his attrition strategy, he proposed an alliance of convenience to Japan. The Japanese had not joined the Euro-Axis in its treacherous attack against the USSR and leaped at the offer. The aid the Soviets could provide to Japan was fairly limited in practice, but the alliance stiffened Japan’s will to fight. Much like Stalin, the Japanese militarists hoped they could exhaust the Allies into a favourable compromise peace with a war of attrition.

WWII in Europe turned into a race to establish facts on the ground favourable to the Allies or the Soviets. The Axis forces bitterly resisted the Soviet offensives in a last stand sustained by the hope to avoid Soviet occupation of their countries. In the end, the Red Army was eventually able to clear the Wehrmacht out of Soviet territory and conquer Finland, the Baltic states, East Prussia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The Soviets were also able to exploit their control of Turkey and the support of Yugoslav and Greek Communist partisans to seize Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Greece. However the offensive thrust of the Red Army gradually slowed down to a crawl close to the eastern borders of Germany, Italy, and Sweden. It was enough for the Allied troops to reach the Eastern front lines, disarm and disband the Axis forces, and deploy before the Soviet troops in a relatively ordered fashion.

Even so, the remaining offensive potential of the Red Army (relentlessly pushed forward by Stalin) and the redeployment issues of the Axis-Allies switch allowed the Soviets a few initial victories which turned into inroads in eastern Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, northern Italy, and eastern Sweden. Even in the Near East, the renewed Soviet offensive initially allowed the Red Army to advance into Syria and Iraq. However the Allies were fairly quickly able to stabilize the front and push the Soviets back to the pre-war borders of Sweden, Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovenia, Italy, Turkey, and Iran.

Soviet aggressiveness and the Moscow-Tokyo alliance angered the Allied leaders and made them commit to a policy of liberating all the victims of Stalinist aggression and ending the Soviet threat. They adjusted their strategy and geared up their war machine for one last big effort to crush the Red Army and liberate Eastern Europe and the Near East. They were uncertain about their end goal for the USSR: a few advocated total victory and a march to Moscow to end the Communist threat for good; others feared the huge costs of conquest and occupation of Russia and thought to push the Soviets back in their pre-war borders and crush their military power would be enough; yet others advocated the middle ground of dismantling the Russian empire by means of a Brest-Litovsk-style peace. However they dropped abundant hints that they were willing to grant lenient peace terms to the Russian and Japanese peoples, similar to the ones the Germans had got, if they were to take a similar course by putting acceptable leaders in charge, laying down arms, and throwing themselves at the mercy of the Allies.

The Anglo-Americans decided to give strategic priority to the defeat of the USSR in Europe. So in the Pacific theatre, they would push back the Japanese in their homeland and cut off the strategic link between the Soviets and the Japanese. They would let Japan wither on the vine by blockade and air bombing until the USSR was dealt with or the Japanese were exhausted into surrender. A series of Allied offensives pushed the Japanese all the way back to Japan and Korea, which were made subject to a strict blockade and a bombing offensive with whatever resources the Allies could spare from the European theatre. The Americans landed in Outer Manchuria and seized control of the area and central-eastern Manchuria.

In Europe, the Allies quickly seized complete superiority in the air and made the Soviet logistic network, industrial centres, resource-extracting areas, and troops concentrations subject to extensive and relentless bombing. This quickly and severely disrupted the Soviet war effort, after the Soviet people and economy had been already brought to the brink of utter exhaustion to defeat Germany. Only the factories and resources in Siberia and Central Asia were partially protected due to the vast size of the USSR, but the effects of Allied bombing on the Soviet logistic system pretty much nullified their contribution. The Allies also used their decisive air superiority to attack Soviet army concentrations and support their own offensive drive. A series of Allied offensives gradually pushed the Red Army out of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Romania, Anatolia, and western Iran.

The Allies used their naval supremacy to hit available military objectives in Soviet-held coastal areas and enact landings in the Baltic and the eastern Med that allowed them to liberate Finland, the Baltic states, and Greece. The landings helped clear the Soviets out of the Balkans and the Near East in combination with the land offensives. As a rule, important anti-Communist resistance movements developed across Central-Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and even certain Soviet lands (notably, parts of Ukraine and the Caucasus) that fought Soviet occupation and strived to cooperate with the Allies. In Western Europe, Communist activists attempted to emerge from the underground, re-organize, and disrupt the Allied war effort after the downfall of the Axis regimes. However, due to the role of the USSR in the war, the vast majority of Western European population perceived the Communists as just as bad as the fascists, and they had limited popular appeal beyond the far-left fringe. So the Allied occupation authorities were usually able to crush and suppress them without any real trouble with the cooperation of local anti-Communist forces.

The Allies only met some more substantial trouble in South-eastern Europe where the Communist partisans had some important popular support. Repression of their insurgency represented a significant chore for the Allied forces and significantly tasked their war effort in the Balkan theatre. However the Allies were eventually successful with the help of local anti-Communist militias. Pacification in the Balkan and Near East theatres also got more difficult for the Allies because of the chaotic mess of ethnic, religious, and factional conflicts the war had left behind. In the Allied countries, the course of the war made the USSR look just as dangerous and as much of an enemy power as the Axis powers. Much like the far-right supporters of the Axis powers, the Communists enjoyed limited support beyond the fringe of their hardcore sympathizers. So the Allied authorities were able to suppress the fifth column of ‘Commie-Nazi’ supporters, spies, and saboteurs without excessive trouble by means of police repression and internment.

[eurofed]

As the war continued, the situation of the USSR and Japan increasingly got desperate. Both powers faced socio-economic collapse and famine as the combined effect of Allied bombing, exhaustion of domestic resources, Allied blockade, and the Soviets scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel. The Allied powers experienced a considerable amount of war weariness of their own, due to their lengthy and considerable war effort, hence they re-asserted their willingness to deliver decent peace terms to the Russian and Japanese peoples if they surrendered. However the Allied governments and public opinion adamantly refused to discuss any peace terms with the enemy leaders that had waged the war. The collapse of Allied morale and will to fight Stalin and the Japanese militarists had gambled on failed to materialize. As the Allied forces gripped the USSR and Japan in a steel vice, the American nuclear bombing of several Soviet and Japanese cities proved to be the coup de grace.

Japan broke down and fell on its knees faster, as the Emperor and the moderate faction of the Japanese elites realized the utter necessity of surrender and organized a coup to depose the militarist-nationalist extremists. Hasty negotiations between the new Japanese government and the Allied powers ensured the Japanese surrender in exchange for peace terms similar to the ones Germany had gotten. They included an Allied pledge to preserve the Imperial system and the national unity of the Japanese Empire in its pre-1931 borders. However the Americans reserved the right to make a few border adjustments for the sake of international security and stressed the necessity of a radical reform of the Japanese state to ensure democracy and equality for the Japanese and Korean peoples. The Japanese leaders accepted these terms and the Americans occupied Japan and Korea.

The USSR seemed headed to destruction as famine and economic collapse swept the land and caused so much disorganization that even the steel grip on power of Stalinism began to fail. Stalin and the Soviet regime seemed bound to drag Russia in the abyss with them as the Allies refused any peace negotiations with the Communist tyrant and his accomplices. They geared up for large-scale invasion of the USSR as their forces broke into Soviet territory on multiple fronts. They also kept hammering it with conventional bombing and as many nukes as they got available. In the end, the desperate situation and the growing disorganization of the Soviet state persuaded and enabled a group of Russian officers to act and save Mother Russia from the utter disaster the Bolsheviks had caused. A coup killed Stalin and overthrew the Soviet regime.

The Russian junta started peace negotiations with the Allied leaders, who wished to apply their usual standard of trading surrender for decent peace terms. However, because of their own war weariness and the huge projected costs of occupying Russia, they were reluctantly willing to compromise on their usual demands for military occupation of defeated powers. As a compensation, they became somewhat more stringent about territorial demands. In the end, they agreed for peace terms that imposed disarmament, dismantlement of the Soviet system, and prosecution of Communist leaders and war criminals. They pledged Russia would keep the majority of its pre-war territory, but certain areas in Europe and Asia would be lost for reasons of international security or their apparent wish for a different political status. In exchange Russia would be spared Allied military occupation. The peace terms included a nominal mandate for the democratization of Russia, although in practice its application would be rather more questionable than for Europe and Japan.

The Russians accepted these armistice terms and disarmed the vast majority of their security forces, even if the Allies allowed them to keep some to deal with the chaotic situation in the Russian lands. Much like Russia itself, Germany, and China after WWI, the post-Soviet space seemed headed to a period of political disorder, socio-economic collapse, and quite possibly civil war and warlord chaos. The Allies were not unwilling to help, but the British were left prostrate by their own war effort and the Americans already had their hands full dealing with the areas they had occupied, not to mention their people’s demand for demobilization and return to peacetime normalcy. Apart from establishing the new borders and sending some aid, the Americans soon decided the post-Soviet mess was too much for them to get seriously involved, and mostly left the Russians alone to deal with it.

The war destroyed the power base of fascism and communism and turned them into pariah ideologies. It made overt racism, anti-Semitism, Marxism-Leninism, and any kind of authoritarian-leaning far-left or far-right ideology unfit for mainstream political discourse. A few exceptions survived, such as the US Southern and South African segregationists, but the future looked bleak for them. The course of the war, the anti-Nazi coup cutting the Holocaust short in its early stages, and the fall of the USSR providing just as extensive and universal knowledge of Nazi and Stalinist atrocities made public opinion assume fascism and communism were but two faces of the same bloodthirsty and tyrannical coin, with most differences being irrelevant window-dressing. Apart from a few specific stereotypes, post-war popular culture usually combined both types of totalitarianism into a broad “Commie-Nazi” archetype, even in most countries that had experienced either kind of regime.

The war also acted as a most powerful confirmation of liberal democracy, with no challenge on the horizon apart from the potential resentment of colonized peoples or defeated powers turning into sore losers towards the Western world. It left America a reluctant master of the world, with nobody left willing or able to challenge its global supremacy for a good while, but with great power came great responsibility. Left to their own, Europe and the Far East would have probably faced conditions just as bad as Russia, given the extensive damage Eastern Europe, the Japanese Empire, and to a lesser degree Western Europe had suffered. However, American presence and economic-strategic interest ensured the prompt availability of strong aid for these areas to contain damage and jumpstart recovery, and this made a lot of difference.

China was another area left with serious problems after the war, due to ongoing civil war, the aftermath of the Japanese invasion, and the legacy of socio-economic backwardness and post-Qing disorder. However the Nationalist government was fairly strong and its power base and prestige were significantly enhanced by victory despite its various flaws. The Nationalists were gradually able to seize the upper hand in the renewed civil war thanks to a combination of American aid, the collapse of the USSR, and the terms of Japan’s surrender awarding them control of most Japanese equipment and occupied areas. The Chinese Communists kept stubbornly fighting like cornered rats, but the world now despised their kind and they had no friends or sources of support outside the important power base they had established in the countryside during the Sino-Japanese war. It seemed that and their unquestionable skill for guerrilla warfare could delay but not overturn the final outcome. India was agitating ever more forcefully for independence as the reward of its long anti-colonial struggle and its war sacrifices, with Southeast Asia and the Muslim word seemingly eager to follow its example.

The world was left to deal with the vast effects of the conflict. The Axis states and the countries they had conquered were subject to Allied military occupation for a while. They underwent a process of reconstruction, democratization, rehabilitation, and re-education aided by generous US economic support. It turned them into functional liberal democracies and unleashed a robust recovery soon exploding into an economic boom. The process also became a solid foundation for the start of the European integration process. US military presence during the occupation period, which the Americans were eager to minimize, and strong interest in the swift stabilization and rehabilitation of trading partners were the main motivations for the generous US economic aid program to Europe and East Asia. The Americans also attempted to send aid to Russia and China, however a mix of factors (lack of direct US presence; chaotic conditions and the legacy of the Stalinist system in Russia; corruption, inefficiency, and socio-economic backwardness in China) made it much less effective than for Europe and Japan-Korea.

Germany kept its 1937 borders, Austria, and the Sudetenland, with the exception of East Prussia. The Allies gave it and Danzig to Poland with the aim to establish a neat and stable German-Polish border that would prevent future conflicts. For the same purpose and as a compensation (the Germans had won some goodwill because of their early surrender), Germany got the Polish portion of Upper Silesia. Italy, France, and Spain kept their 1938 borders. The war caused serious ethnic antagonism between the Flemish and the Walloons that destabilized post-war Belgium, so the Allies consented to the partition of the Low Countries between France (Wallonia and Luxemburg), the Netherlands (the Flanders), and Germany (Eupen and Malmedy). The Czech republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Albania became independent, the Croats with the 1939 Banovina borders, the Albanians with most of Kosovo, and the Serbs with most of Bosnia, Montenegro, and northern Kosovo.

The Allies quickly found Czechoslovakia and more so Yugoslavia were too much of an instable mess due to ethnic tensions to be put back together. They deemed the borders the Axis had established for Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria a reasonably close approximation to functional ethnic borders. So they mostly kept them with a few adjustments, except for the territories Bulgaria had got from Greece during the war. Greece kept its pre-war borders and got the Dodecanese and Cyprus. As a rule, the Allies often used referendums or enacted population transfers wherever seemed necessary to validate or entrench the borders they established in Europe.

The Baltic states recovered their independence, and Finland, Poland, and Romania got back the territories the USSR had annexed in 1939-40. Finland also got East Karelia, and Norway annexed the Kola Peninsula. Poland got the Minsk area and Ukraine with the Kuban, and transformed into a Polish-Ukrainian Federation. Iran got Russian Azerbaijan, while Georgia and Armenia (with Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhchivan) joined into a South Caucasus Federation. China got Manchuria, Mongolia, and Outer Manchuria. The USA annexed Kolyma, Kamchatka, and the Japanese and European island territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean, as war booty or compensation for war aid. Russia kept the rest of its pre-war territory, including Siberia and Central Asia.

The Allies deemed a few more territorial losses might be warranted for Russia than for the other defeated powers since Russia had surrendered last, got no military occupation, and was so damn big anyway. They used a mix of strategic concerns and the perceived attitude of local populations towards Russian rule to establish the new borders. Although Eastern Europe had suffered rather more extensive damage than the Western part of the continent during the war, it got to share in the same favourable conditions for recovery and development. So it experienced the same general course, although at a substantially slower pace than Western Europe, and with important regional differences: Central Europe and the Baltic area performed the best, and the Balkans the worst.

The Japanese Empire kept the Japanese archipelago, all of Sakhalin, the Kuril islands, Korea, the Ryukyu islands, and Taiwan. It was democratized in a way similar to Europe, and transformed into an East Asian Federation with Japan, Korea, and Taiwan as its top components, although Japanese prefectures and Korean provinces also got important autonomy and representation. Emperor Hirohito abdicated, and the Japanese Yamato and Korean Yi Imperial families were strongly encouraged to intermarry and join ranks to form a single royal house. The Americans considered returning Taiwan to China, but dropped the idea when they observed how little support there was for it in the island. The war had damaged the Japanese Empire somewhat more than Western Europe, but thanks to American aid the area recovered and grew more or less the same satisfying way, although at a slightly slower pace.

[eurofed]

The post-war period was an era of great stability, prosperity, and self-satisfaction for the USA. The global economic, political, military, and cultural hegemony and rise into superpower status America had won thanks to WWII got entrenched, and the American people enjoyed the highest living standards in the world. During the war, the Red-Brown Scare made all known or suspected fascists or communists and their sympathizers subject to imprisonment and internment, or at least aggressive investigations and questioning, loss of employment, destruction of their careers, legal harassment, and social ostracism. With the end of the conflict patriotic mobilization and vigilance against potential spies and traitors relaxed and a drive to return to normalcy became dominant after the upheavals of the Great Depression and WWII. This led to a time of conservative mores and social conformity that often felt quite oppressive for women and minorities. Nonetheless, the American socio-economic model typically looked quite progressive and very desirable for the Europeans and the Far Easterners. They perceived it through the filter of dominant US pop culture and zealously strived to imitate it.

1950s conformism however could not stop the beginning of racial desegregation for Southern Blacks. Despite the fierce resistance of Dixie White segregationists, the movement took wing thanks to the combination of a sympathetic federal government, anti-segregation rulings from a progressive-leaning SCOTUS, growing mobilization of the Black masses, and a supportive Northern public opinion. The movement won important successes in this period, such as desegregation of education and the armed forces, although its complete success was to occur in the future. Much the same way, powerful social forces were incubating across the Western world that were to stage a radical critique and transformation of the conservative norms of the time in the following decades. Industrialization was bringing more and more women in the workforce, and the post-war demographic boom was paving the way for the rise of youth as a separate and powerful counter-culture.

The Americans occupied Europe and Japan-Korea for a few years, enough to get their political and economic stabilization and rehabilitation to liberal democracy well established. Then the American forces were gradually pulled out and redeployed home. The lessons of WWII and their new superpower role made the Americans mindful of the necessity to keep a fairly large and efficient standing army with global force-projection capabilities. However they did not bother sustaining too large a level of rearmament despite their huge potential, because of the apparent lack of enemies. All other powers seemed too friendly, cowed, powerless, or backward to threaten American security or interests. For the same reason America did not expand its nuclear arsenal too much beyond a few hundred warheads nor established formal alliance bonds with foreign powers. However they kept close political and economic ties in a dominant role with Britain, the Dominions, Europe, and the Far East, in addition to their traditional sphere of influence in Latin America. The USA settled down into enjoying the power, prestige, and profits of being the one superpower in the world.

The experience of WWII and the post-war recovery process under American influence triggered the onset of the European integration process in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A widespread consensus arose across the war-torn continent that European integration would be the best way to deal with the lessons of the World Wars, achieve lasting reconciliation between the European peoples, and prevent a recrudescence of nationalism and the destructive conflicts of the past. However, different economic and geopolitical conditions and divergent perspectives hailing from the war initially caused the process to split into three different streams.

The Western European states (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, and Portugal) established the Western European Union (WEU) with a common market, a pan-European military divided into national components at the battalion level with centralized military procurement and a common budget, arms, and institutions, and a supranational parliamentary government to give democratic oversight to the various components of European integration. The latter included a directly elected assembly ("the Peoples’ Chamber"), a senate appointed by national parliaments, and a supranational executive accountable to the parliament.

The common army was established and kept at good efficiency but relatively modest dimensions because the USA discouraged extensive rearmament of formerly defeated powers and, much like the Americans, the Western Europeans did not think of future wars as a clear and present threat. The Western European army was conceived as a tool to prevent future fratricidal conflicts, an instrument to provide border defence and keep order in the colonies, and an adequate way to reconcile the need for adequate continental defence with the controversial character of rearmament of the former Axis countries. For similar concerns the WEU countries shunned the development of a nuclear deterrent of their own. Creation of a single-market area considerably boosted the post-war economic boom triggered by reconstruction and US aid.

The shared experience of WWII, post-war prosperity, and later the resurgence of the Russian threat supported consensus for the Western European integration process until its apparent benefits caused it to develop a strong, self-sustaining momentum. By the 1960s, the process grew successful enough to start including movement of people between member states; police, judiciary, and intelligence integration; an economic, monetary, and fiscal union; and a European Court of Justice. This second-stage development got finalized in the 1970s. At the same time, the originally distinct component organizations of the process, the European Economic, Defence, and Political Communities, were merged into a single organism. It took the name of European Union (EU) and an increasingly explicit federalist character once events drove its expansion to the rest of the continent and caused an overwhelming drive for complete fulfilment of the 'ever closer union' end goal of European integration.

The Nordic and Baltic countries (Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) opted out of the Western European integration process and instead chose to pursue a parallel effort of their own. This grew into the Nordic Union (NU), a confederation that managed security, economic, and foreign policy matters of member states while leaving them autonomy in domestic affairs. Despite being formally separate and distinct, the WEU and the NU developed a cordial relationship and over time economic, security, and judicial cooperation between the two organizations intensified, and a joint single market and open borders area were established. The main issue that justified their separation was a different foreign policy perspective: the Western European states established a close bond with the USA, while the Nordic countries preferred to stick to official neutrality. Much like the WEU, however, the NU established a small but efficient common army.

Eastern Europe chose yet another path, as its own war experiences shaped a wish to keep a close relationship with the USA but avoid too close a bond with Germany and its former Western European allies (especially in the regional leader, Poland-Ukraine). The socio-economic divide between the region and the Western and Northern areas of the continent also played a role into preventing integration between the two halves of Europe. However, Western Europe mostly shared a common wartime experience since all the most important states (including France after 1940) had been Axis countries defeated, occupied, and 'rehabilitated' by the Americans. Eastern Europe on the contrary was split by serious differences between the countries that had cooperated with the Axis and/or the USSR and the ones that had been their victims. This difference lingered in a regional division between the area (most Central European states) that feared a resurgence of the Bear and favoured an anti-Russian foreign and security policy, and the one (most Balkan countries) that supported a good neighbourhood policy and a friendly attitude towards Russia.

As a result of these latent divisions, Eastern European cooperation and integration turned out less extensive and efficient than the Western and Northern European models. The Eastern European states (Poland-Ukraine, Czech republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia) were only able to establish the Eastern European Community (EEC) with a free trade area and a non-integrated military alliance. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece joined the EEC as observers and the free trade area but not the military alliance. The EEC states engaged in a moderate amount of rearmament to protect themselves from Russia but were not able to make it too extensive due to limited resources and lack of integration.

Russia stayed on the brink of complete collapse into a failed state for a while after the war, being beset by political instability, economic depression, a difficult transition from Stalinist command economy to capitalism, ethnic conflicts, and the appearance of warlords. Gradually and painfully it pulled back together and into shape thanks to the efforts of a coalition of members of the security forces, nationalist politicians and militiamen, and emergent businessmen that enriched themselves with privatization. This clique entrenched its power and established an authoritarian regime by crushing opposition, suppressing ethnic insurgencies, and crushing or co-opting warlords. They were able to stabilize and bring some growth to Russian economy by enacting a privatization program and more importantly extensive exploitation of the agricultural and mineral resources of Siberia and Central Asia. Although Russia regressed to dictatorship and remained poor and backward in comparison to America, Europe, and the Far East, recovery of political and economic stability represented a definite improvement and brought popularity to the regime. Exploitation of the resources of the Asian regions caused a substantial degree of colonization and Russification of Siberia and Central Asia.

The new regime embraced a nationalist ideology that called for a strong Russian state, supported a recovery of Russia’s lost territories and its rightful role as a great power, and blamed America and Europe for pretty much all the suffering and misfortunes of the Russian people. Towards the Tsarist and Soviet past they took a stance that glorified the successes of the past regimes regardless of the means employed, blamed their flaws and foreign malice for their failures, and took an apologist stance towards their human rights abuses. Economic recovery allowed Russia to invest into extensive rearmament. Increasing military power in turn allowed the regime to assert an increasingly bold and aggressive agenda of reasserting Russia’s status as a great power and recovering its lost territories and sphere of influence.

After crushing all domestic resistance, the first big step to enact Russian ambitions was encroachment in South Caucasus. The Russian government exploited political instability, ethnic conflicts, and the alleged mistreatment of minorities to foster rebellions in the border areas of the South Caucasus Federation and northwestern Iran. When the governments intervened to suppress the uprisings, the Russians picked it as an excuse to invade Georgia-Armenia and northwestern Iran. The rebuilt Russian army easily crushed Georgian-Armenian and Iranian resistance and occupied the region. Rigged elections ratified the annexation of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan (including the pre-WWII Iranian portion) to Russia. Emboldened by this success, the Russian regime soon started to apply the same strategy elsewhere by stirring up instability and agitation in the Russophile minorities and border areas of Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland-Ukraine through infiltration of paramilitary operatives and feeding support to local nationalist radicals. When incidents ensued and the local governments tried to restore order, the Russians blamed them for their ‘provocations’, ‘aggressions’, and ‘oppression’ of Russophile minorities.

In China, the Nationalist government was able to win the civil war and crush the Communists by the end of the 1940s. It co-opted or forced to submit all the warlords. For a few years after the war the regime focused on nation-building and kept a moderate, pro-Western foreign policy. The course changed radically when supreme leader Chiang-Kai-shek died in a plane accident and after a succession struggle a radical nationalist leadership seized power. The new leaders increased the authoritarian and centralized character of the regime and pursued a ruthless effort to build up the power of the Chinese nation and restore its past greatness. Much like Russia, they engaged in extensive rearmament and exploited the manpower and natural resources of China to develop its economic strength with a focus on areas and projects with military dual applications. To defuse potential popular malcontent for the authoritarianism, corruption, and cronyism of the regime, they increasingly embraced an hard-line nationalist stance and propaganda that blamed foreign powers for almost all the past and present problems of China.

This included the Europeans for their 19th century colonialism, the Japanese for their 20th century aggressions, and the Americans for their friendship with both and imperialist hegemony. Despite their basically xenophobic attitude and potential territorial conflicts with their northern neighbor, however, they sought an alliance with Russia out of similar ideology and strategic convenience. The Russians, too, saw the benefits of this partnership and accepted the Chinese offers since they privileged their claims in Europe. The combination of Russian resources and know-how and Chinese manpower turned to the economic benefit of both powers and fuelled their rearmament. The Chinese, and by extension the Russians, took the pose of being a champion and protector of the peoples oppressed by Western colonialism and imperialism. Chinese expansionism first manifested with the invasion of Tibet, which had been de facto independent since the fall of the Qing dynasty. Tibetan resistance was brutally crushed and the area brought under total control of China.

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Soon after the end of the war, India and Southeast Asia underwent decolonization and achieved independence. Wartime Japanese and Soviet invasion of northern India initially toned down the Muslim Indians’ calls for a separate homeland of their own, but the defeat and apparent powerlessness of Russia after the war drove the Muslims to renew them. In the end, a partition scheme prevailed that split the British Raj and the princely states between India, Burma, and Pakistan. India got the vast majority of the Indian subcontinent, including Ceylon. Pakistan got the western, Muslim-majority regions, including Baluchistan, the north-western frontier areas, Kashmir, Sind, and most of Punjab, as well as eastern Bengal. The partition took place with massive migrations and population exchanges, violent ethnic clashes, and armed conflicts between India and Pakistan about contested border areas in Kashmir, Punjab, Sind, and Bengal. This created a legacy of antagonism, suspicion, and resentment between the two states.

Independent India established a secular, socialist, federal republic with a multi-party democracy, strived to establish a mixed economy with an agrarian reform and rapid industrialization, and sought to abolish the caste system and increase the legal rights and social freedom of women. Its foreign policy sought to balance neutrality, peaceful coexistence with the great powers, and a fierce criticism of colonialism and imperialism. After a few years of experimentation with instable parliamentary democracy, Pakistan became a military dictatorship. Chinese occupation of Tibet and contested borders heightened tensions between India and China that exploded into war. The well-armed Chinese army decisively defeated the ill-prepared Indian forces, allowing China to conquer all the contested border areas. Pakistan exploited the opportunity to intervene in the war, defeat the Indians with Chinese help, and annex part of eastern Punjab and western Bengal. The war drove India to tone down its neutralist stance, align closer to America, and intensify cooperation with the Western powers. Pakistan joined the Sino-Russian bloc.

In Southeast Asia, the defeat of Communism in Russia and China cut off the support for Communist and leftist nationalist elements across the region. This allowed the Western powers to crush them and manage decolonization of the region in a manner convenient for their interests. This was achieved through a mix of deal-making with moderate nationalist leaders and military and economic support to conservative forces. However elimination of Communist sympathizers in certain cases escalated to large-scale purges that caused considerable loss of life, such as in Indochina and Indonesia. After decolonization, the region got divided in the states of Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, the Malay Union, the Indonesian Federation, and the Philippines. Thailand formed a confederation with Cambodia, Vietnam absorbed Laos, and Indonesia formed from the fusion of the Dutch East Indies, British Borneo, and Portuguese Timor. The anti-Western and expansionist turn of Chinese foreign policy however brought new problems to the region. The Chinese exploited political instability in Vietnam to send support to the remaining radical nationalist elements, revitalizing their faction. Chinese-backed destabilization ensured into an attempted coup and a civil war that gave China a pretext to intervene. The Chinese forces occupied Vietnam, turning it into a client state. Chinese-sponsored unrest of Chinese minorities also became a serious security problem across Southeast Asia.

Post-war reconstruction and development of Japan-Korea largely followed the successful European pattern, although it was significantly slower because of the damage caused by the American conquest. Nonetheless US aid and the drive of reconstruction fuelled a gradual but robust postwar recovery and economic boom that established the Far Eastern state as the third industrialized powerhouse of the Western world after the USA and the WEU. In perspective, Japan-Korea seemed poised to eclipse declining Britain. Despite some bad blood from the colonial past, democratization, economic growth, and federal reform helped the Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese peoples bury resentment and achieve a friendly and productive coexistence within their union. Much like Western Europe, the Americans allowed Japan-Korea to rebuild a small but efficient army, but not extensive rearmament or a nuclear deterrent.

Russian and Chinese rearmament and repeated acts of destabilization and aggression eventually woke up America, Europe, and the Far East about the potential threat and the realization the outcome of WWII did not necessarily mean eternal peace. The Western powers had to acknowledge Russia was coming back strong and bellicose, China had turned from a friend into a potential enemy, and both powers had formed a rather threatening compact. America and on a lesser scale the Dominions reacted by staging an extensive rearmament effort and encouraging their Western partners to do the same. The WEU and Japan-Korea underwent ambitious expansion programs of their armies with the blessing of America, all previous concerns about rearmament of the former Axis countries being forgotten. The Eastern European countries and Britain tried to do the same, although with more difficulty because of economic constraints.

The Western countries were struggling to shake off the effects of post-war complacency and catch up with military preparedness. In the long term, they were bound to be successful, thanks to the vast economic and industrial power of America and Western Europe. Their superior know-how would also give them an important quality advantage. In the brief term, however, the early rearmament and vast numbers of Russia and China gave them a serious advantage on their neighbors. This and confidence for their early successes gave the Russian and Chinese leaders the determination to exploit their advantage to the fullest to fulfill their ambitions.

After the Arab world got liberated from Axis and Soviet occupation during WWII, the victorious Allies decided to discard the post-WWI political status quo of the Arab lands and enact their extensive reorganization in a few stronger states. Their motives included creating a check against possible Russian threats, a wish to give some satisfaction to rising Pan-Arab nationalism, and dissatisfaction for the ambiguously collaborationist stance of the Saudis during the war. Turkey annexed the Kurd and Turkmen areas of northern Syria and Iraq. Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Trucial States, Bahrain, and Qatar were merged in the United Arab Kingdom, ruled by the Hashemite family. Egypt annexed North Sudan. The Maghreb lands (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) were returned to the control of Spain, France, and Italy due to the presence of a sizable European settler community. Morocco was reunified, joined with Western Sahara, and turned into a French-Spanish condominium; Tunisia was likewise turned to joint Franco-Italian administration.

The Nazi Holocaust and Stalin’s paranoia turning to anti-Semitism during the war claimed the lives of a large number of Jews during the war. However the early fall of the Nazi regime and the defeat of the USSR stopped the Final Solution and the Stalinist purge of Jews early enough to leave a sizable number of European Jews alive. Widespread sympathy for their plight provided strong international support for the Zionist cause. This persuaded the Western governments to allow free Jew immigration to Mandatory Palestine, ensuring the vast majority of surviving Jews resettled there, despite the fierce hostility of the Arabs. The Arab-Zionist conflict soon reignited and escalated into a bitter armed conflict with the forces of the Arab states. The Zionist militias won a decisive victory, and the vast majority of the Palestinian Arabs were expelled or fled to Egypt and the UAK.

The European Jew immigrants, soon joined by their expelled Middle-Eastern kinsmen, established the Zionist state of Israel as a Jewish homeland across all of Mandatory Palestine plus southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, the eastern bank of the Jordan valley, and the border areas of the Sinai peninsula. The shock of defeat in the Arab-Israeli War, resentment for European colonial domination, and Russo-Chinese support were among the factors that fuelled the rise of the Pan-Arab nationalist movement across the Arab world. Prevalent ideology in the movement (sponsored by the Baathist party and nationalist cliques of officers in Egypt and the UAK) combined radical Pan-Arab nationalism with authoritarian nation-building broadly based on the Sino-Russian model. As Russia and China increased their strength and turned to an expansionist-imperialist agenda, they sent generous support to the Pan-Arab revolutionaries.

In the Maghreb the movement took the form of an anti-colonial insurgency, while in Egypt and the UAK (renamed United Arab Republic) there were Pan-Arab nationalist coups and revolutions that overthrew the monarchies and set up Baathist regimes. The new Arab regimes aligned with the Russo-Chinese bloc, nationalized the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern oilfields, and sent support to the insurgents in the Maghreb. They also blocked transit in the Suez Canal and the Tiran Strait to Israeli shipping and supported guerrilla raids against Israel as they prepared for war against the Zionist homeland.

By the early 1960s, Russia and China built their first nukes and felt strong and confident enough to fully deploy their expansionist-imperialist agenda against their neighbors. Picking the excuse of mistreatment of Russian minorities, Russia invaded Poland-Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltic states. At the same time, China and Vietnam attacked Japan-Korea and Thailand, with their claims on Taiwan and Cambodia and supposed mistreatment of their ethnic kinsmen in Southeast Asia as the casus belli. The other states of the NU and the EEC joined the fight to stop the aggressors. However the Eastern Europeans, Nordics, Japanese-Koreans, and Thai were hard-pressed to stop the Russian and Chinese forces that occupied Karelia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Sakhalin, and Cambodia. The Russians invaded Poland, Finland, and Romania, while the Chinese did with same with Korea, Hokkaido, and Thailand. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece left the EEC and backstabbed their neighbors by picking pro-Russian neutrality and providing logistical support to the Russians. In the Middle East, Egypt and the UAR attacked Israel, while Kurd nationalist insurgents started an uprising against the Turks and the Iranians. The Russians invaded Turkey and Iran to link with their Middle Eastern proxies. Russian and Chinese forces also occupied Afghanistan to link with friendly Pakistan.

Being hard-pressed by the Russo-Chinese onslaught, the attacked countries appealed for help to America, Western Europe, and the Commonwealth, and the Western powers answered the call. The USA, the WEU, the UK, and the Dominions declared war to Russia, China, and their allies, expanding the Eurasian War to WWIII. America quickly rebuilt the Allies coalition with Britain, the Dominions, the WEU, the EEC, the NU, Japan-Korea, Israel, Turkey, Persia, and Thailand. The resistance movements that formed in the areas occupied by the Russians and the Chinese supported the Allied war effort. India, too, joined the alliance out of its fear of renewed aggression from China and Pakistan and its wish for revenge on the same. So did the Malay Union, Indonesia, and the Philippines because of their ties with America and fear of Chinese expansionism. However they experienced some serious trouble with uprisings by their Chinese minorities that China strived to stir and support. Russia, China, Egypt, the UAR, Pakistan, Vietnam, and various nationalist insurgent groups formed the enemy coalition. Burma picked pro-Chinese neutrality.

The Americans, Europeans, and Japanese-Koreans enacted total national mobilization of their manpower and industrial resources which they used to stage a massive expansion of their armed forces to WWII levels. The Americans also started a vast build-up of their nuclear arsenal, and the WEU, Britain, and Japan-Korea strived to follow their example by developing their own nuclear deterrents. However the American government decided to try and win this war by conventional means, and not to stoop to nuclear genocide, as far as possible. It pledged not to use nukes unless attacked first or in extreme circumstances, and the other Western governments followed its example.

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A massive mobilization of manpower and economic resources on both sides quickly followed expansion of the war to global dimensions. In the long term, the superior technical know-how and greater industrial base of North America and Western Europe were bound to give a decisive advantage to the Allied coalition. In the brief term, however, the Sino-Russians exploited their own mobilization, their vast manpower resources, and their initial military successes to reap one last impressive swath of victories. The Russians occupied most of Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, and in cooperation with their Arab and Kurd allies most of Turkey and Persia as well. The Chinese overrun vast swths of Korea, Hokkaido, and Thailand. Both made important inroads in northwestern India in cooperation with Pakistan; however the Himalayas barrier largely protected India from a Chinese offensive coming from Tibet. Israel valiantly fought off and pushed back any offensive attempt of the Arab armies, which were thrown into disarray.

As time went on, however, the Western war effort entirely stopped the Russo-Chinese strategic offensive drive dead in its tracks. Then it started to gradually push them further and further back as the tide shifted and the entire course of the conflict was reversed. Much like it happened during WWII, the Allied air forces gained an increasing superiority in the air war up to a solid strategic and tactical supremacy. They exploited it to harass and damage enemy army concentrations, disrupt their supply network, and support their own offensives. The Russian, Chinese, Arab, and Pakistani logistic networks, industrial centres, resource-extracting areas, and troops concentrations became subject to extensive and relentless Allied strategic bombing. In Eastern Europe, the Allied counter-offensive led to the liberation of Poland, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. Because of the logistic support of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece for the Russians, the Allied powers delivered them an ultimatum to drop it and grant free passage to their own forces. When it was ignored, they invaded and occupied the Balkan states.

An Anglo-American-European expeditionary corps landed in Egypt and Levant-Mesopotamia, occupied the Canal Zone, defeated the Arab armies with Israeli support, and pressed on to occupy the Egyptian and UAR major cities. The Allied forces crushed the Arab troops without excessive difficulty, occupied the Egyptian and UAR territory, and overthrew the nationalist regimes. Conquest of Egypt was relatively swift and easy for the Allies since the Egyptians were cut off from Russian aid and the Arab armies were decisively inferior in quality and efficiency to the Western ones. Conquest of the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Arabia was somewhat more difficult and costly for the Allies since the Russians were able to field a considerable amount of their own forces in this theater. But in the end the Allied forces were able to push the Russians back in occupied Anatolia and Persia.

In the Far Eastern theater, a series of Allied land counter-offensives and amphibious landings led to the liberation of Korea, Hokkaido, and Thailand. The Allies gave strategic priority to the European, Middle Eastern, and East Asian theaters, so the South Asian one remained relatively static in comparison to the other ones. The Western powers provided generous support to the Indians, helping them stop the Russo-Chinese-Pakistani offensive drive and gradually re-conquer their lost territory. However they abstained from engaging in major offensive efforts towards Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Subsequently, the Allied strategic offensive gradually pushed the Russians out of the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, Anatolia, western Persia, and southern Caucasus. The Russians tried a series of counteroffensives in Eastern Europe and the Near East, but after some initial successes, their efforts was contained and pushed back. In East Asia, the Allies landed into and overrun Taiwan, Hainan, Sakhalin, Indochina, and Manchuria despite a stubborn Chinese resistance and counter-offensive attempts. The Russians and the Chinese gradually came to face total defeat in the near future as the Allies relentlessly bombed them, pushed them back into their prewar borders, fought their way beyond that, and geared up to invade their core territories. The Western governments refused to talk about any peace terms that did not entail a complete neutralization of the Russian and Chinese war-making potential and removal of their bellicose regimes from power.

Out of growing desperation, the Russian and Chinese leaders tried to force the Allies to a compromise peace by threatening to use their WMD arsenals. They hoped to scare the Allied powers into leniency, although it was a very risky gamble since the Allies had built up a decisive air supremacy and a vast nuclear superiority. Moreover, the Russians and the Chinese only had long-term bombers as a delivery system, unlike the Allies. Once their threats were ignored, the Russians and the Chinese launched a desperate first strike that destroyed about a dozen targets in North America, Europe, India, and the Far East. Fortunately for the Allies, their decisive air superiority enabled them to intercept all the other Russo-Chinese bombers and limit damage. Nonetheless, the Allied nuclear reprisal was inevitable and devastating. The Allied counterstrike destroyed over an hundred targets in Russia, China, and Pakistan, in addition to all the known or suspected sites of their WMD arsenal. Once the conflict escalated to large-scale WMD use, the Allies threatened to continue their nuclear bombing of Russia and China to their utter destruction if the enemy powers did not surrender.

The surviving Russian, Chinese, and Pakistani leaders complied with the Allied ultimatum and WWIII came to an end after three years of fierce fighting. The Allied nuclear strike, on top of their conventional bombing offensive, threw Russia and China into chaos. Nonetheless, Russia had rebuilt itself out of a similar situation after WWII to threaten Eurasia again, and had been the aggressor twice in the last two decades. So the Western leaders decided to spare no efforts to eliminate the threat of Russian revanchism once and for all, despite the huge costs a military occupation and reconstruction of the Russian territories entailed. The Western alliance occupied Russia and made it subject to the same kind of extensive reconstruction, rehabilitation, and re-education program that Europe and Japan-Korea had experienced after WWII. The costs of occupation and reconstruction were burdensome for such a huge area, but the joint effort of America and Europe was able to bear them, and they got the help of Britain, the Dominions, Japan-Korea, and India.

The second defeat at the hands of the Allied powers in a generation demoralized the Russian people and discredited anti-Western nationalism. The outcome of the war promised a slide into failed-state chaos, but the Allied occupation forces were able to contain and reverse it with some effort. Their presence ensured the fairly efficient delivery of a considerable amount of relief aid and later support to reconstruction. This greatly helped counterbalance the destructive effects of the Allied conventional and nuclear bombing and the inevitable resentment it fostered. The Allies prosecuted and punished the Russian war criminals, surviving leaders of the nationalist regime, and key members of the repression apparatus, but treated the Russian civilians and professional military decently. For these reasons, the vast majority of the Russians accepted the outcome of the war in relative good grace as a verdict of history on their cause and collaborated with the Allied occupation authorities. Nevertheless, Russia could not entirely avoid a punitive peace deal.

Finland, Norway, the Baltic states, the South Caucasus Federation, Poland-Ukraine, and Iran recovered their pre-war territories, sometimes with a few important border changes in their favor, such as the Polish-Ukrainian annexation of eastern Belarus and the Don region. Northern Caucasus got partitioned between Ukraine (the northwestern and central portion), Turkey (an exclave encompassing the southwestern area), and Iran (the eastern portion). The Allies expelled pretty much all the Russophile Russian-speakers from these lands to end the threat of Russian irredentism once and for all. The Americans considered an annexation of eastern Siberia on top of Kolyma and Kamchatka they had got after WWII, but ultimately they dropped the idea since they did not want such an extensive land border with Russia. Moreover, the Western powers could obtain pretty much all the economic rights they wanted for the Russian resources thanks to the occupation regime. Afghanistan annexed Tajikistan, but otherwise the Allies allowed Russia to keep the rest of its Central Asian territories. The region had got an extensive deal of Russification after WWII, the native populations historically showed lukewarm support for independence from Russia, and the geographical position of the area between Russia and China made the Western powers skeptical its forced separation from Russia was worth the effort. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece were perceived by the West and treated as turncoats and defeated enemy states: they got a similar treatment as Russia, although to a less extensive degree.

For China the situation got different: much like Russia, the outcome of the war had triggered a slide into failed-state chaos. In this case, however, a return to the division and disorder of the warlord era proceeded essentially unopposed since the victorious powers were reluctant to engage in large-scale military occupation of the country. They were concerned with the vast size and huge population of China, the fierce nationalist character of its people, and previous failures of would-be conquerors in the modern era. Moreover, they already had their hands full with the occupation and rehabilitation of Russia, reconstruction of the areas damaged by the conflict in Europe and the Far East, demobilization, and a return of their own societies to peacetime conditions. Nevertheless, previous experiences of the 20th century made the Western powers aware of the risk defeated great powers or emergent revisionist polities left too much to their own devices might rebuild themselves, turn rogue, and threaten global security again, no matter how much their present situation looked hopeless. Germany had done it, Russia had done it, the concern was the cycle might happen again in the future with China, the Arab world, or other disgruntled actors.

Few were willing to contemplate the risk of the Western world falling into complacency again and having to fight yet another world war a generation or so down the line, with nuclear proliferation potentially threatening the very survival of civilization. In the end, the Western powers decided to spare themselves the over-extension headache of large-scale occupation and extensive reconstruction of all the defeated enemy powers. However they would commit themselves to establish and protect a new world order that would enforce global security and suppress emergent threats to peace, such as a resurgence of hostile nationalism. In this framework, the Western powers would keep, entrench, and intensify their cooperation and integration to form the cornerstone of the new international order. China proper was spared foreign military occupation – in hindsight, it later got questionable it was the best decision – but its lost almost all its border territories. Tibet got independence under the protection of India and its Western allies. Japan-Korea annexed Hainan, Mongolia, and Manchuria. Almost all the Sinophile Han inhabitants of these areas were expelled to remove a potential source of Chinese irredentism. Hainan was integrated with Taiwan and Manchuria and Mongolia merged to form a few new major territorial units of the East Asian Federation. The Mongols, the Manchu, and the non-Han peoples of Hainan became component nationalities of the EAF, although the new territories also got a considerable amount of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese settlement over time.

The Western powers allowed China to keep Xinjiang more or less for the same reasons they let Russia keep its own portion of Central Asia. They made an effort to provide generous humanitarian relief to the Chinese, but given the chaotic situation in unoccupied China and the lack of Western forces on the ground, such aid proved to be of overall poor effectiveness and got largely wasted, except to a limited degree for the coastal and border areas. Therefore, after a while, the West largely left China to its own devices, only taking care that its domestic disorder would not become a serious threat for the stability of its neighbors. Indochina mostly reverted to the pre-war political settlement, although all of the region was now firmly under Western influence. Pakistan was partitioned: Afghanistan got the northwestern areas, Iran the Baluchistan province, and India annexed Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Sind, and Bengal.

The outcome of the war and the sorry state of postwar China caused a large influx of Chinese refugees which threatened to flood the rest of East Asia. Japan-Korea largely kept its borders closed to them and as a matter of fact they made an effort to remove the Han from their recently-acquired territories, so most refugees went to Southeast Asia or Siberia. This further heightened the ethnic tensions created by the war in Southeast Asia, eventually leading most states in the region to enact a crackdown of Chinese refugees. Eventually, most of them found their way to the Western states. Much the same way, the war also caused a sizable flow of Eastern European and Russian refugees to Western Europe and North America. This vast immigrant influx caused some serious social and political tensions, out of the usual nativist backlash to immigration spikes but also because of the former enemy status of the Russians and the Chinese. With time, however, resentment toned down and integration of the immigrants proceeded fairly well, mostly thanks to ongoing postwar prosperity and confidence in the Western nations and because the newcomers largely proved loyal, hard-working, and willing to integrate.

In the Middle East, Israel annexed the Sinai peninsula and got a few other favorable border corrections. It came to own Mandatory Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, northwestern Jordan, the east bank of the Jordan Valley, and southern Lebanon up to the Litani River with the blessing of its Western allies. The Suez Canal zone was detached from Egypt and put under international (i.e. Western) administration. Most Arab inhabitants of these areas fled or were expelled. Monarchies were restored in Egypt and the UAK and a mix of Western-leaning officers and conservative Muslims took power as their new ruling elites. The Arab oilfields were returned to control of the Western companies. The humiliating defeat of Baathism in WWIII discredited secular nationalism in the Arab world, but it stoked resentment for Western imperialism in the Middle East. In combination with the authoritarian and corrupt character of the Arab regimes, these conditions created a political vacuum that the rise of Islamism was eventually to fill. Unlike Russia, the Western powers did not really bother trying to enact an extensive reconstruction and reform of Arab societies in their own image.

The decisive defeat the militant Arab regimes and their allies suffered in WWIII, as well as the huge discredit this dealt to ethnic nationalism worldwide, crippled the nationalist insurgency in the Maghreb. This helped the European military crush the rebellion with the help of their American allies in a bitter and brutal armed conflict, and made a compromise possible with the moderate elements of the anti-colonial movement. Despite their military victory, the European governments reluctantly came to realize continuation of the colonial status quo was not sustainable in the long term and would eventually lead to new rebellions. So they negotiated a compromise that allowed Europe to keep a few areas of the Maghreb with an important European settler population and/or special economic or strategic value, which got most of their Arab and Berber inhabitants with questionable political loyalties removed. The rest of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya was merged into a North African Confederation with the Alaouite family at its head that got self-rule but kept a political and economic bond with Europe.

With the progress of European integration, this bond soon got a Pan-European dimension. One of its main manifestations was the establishment of the European Neighborhood Area, a free trade and economic cooperation system between the EU and the NAC that brought a significant amount of industrialization, development, and stability to the Maghreb. European-North African cooperation however maintained strict limits for Arab immigration to Europe even when the EU established free movement of people, since anti-Western Arab nationalism and the influx of Chinese, Russian, and Eastern European refugees made the European leaders wary of uncontrolled Muslim immigration. This policy later got entrenched once the Islamist problem started surfacing.