Pax's Alternate History Snippet repository.

[ATP]

Yup,you need to live with steam engines at least one generation.Probably more.
And airfields - for planes of your times,you really do not need much.And you would not need till you get B.17.

P.S soviets blaming jews for Lenin death...you knew,it could help world.In OTL jews in West helped soviets,here it could stop.And even if WW2 do not change in Europe nytching,soviets could still do not get A bomb here,and,as a result,get it in 1953 or 1954,not 1951/in 1949 they had only warhead,not bomb in which they could drop it/

 

[Imperator Pax]

June 1923
Li's grasp as president of the republic had always been tenuous. He'd been a compromise candidate for the Beiyang and the last few months would have been trying for anyone. Truth be told his choice had still been controversial given he had invited the pony tail general into the capital in 1917, and now was back in office so soon after the recent struggle. The papers could wag their tongues about that sort of thing, but the truth was he was a compromise candidate because he was toothless.

... thus realistically he probably couldn't have done anything for that alone. Toothless was not what the Republic needed.

"What do you make of it?"

"Of Li leaving?"

"No, the idea of a war against the Russians, we gonna tell Iseburo," It was funny how Cole said we, when what he really meant was 'are you gonna tell him'... not that Allen really had a problem with that. "Don't get me wrong I agree a lot more with Bill's idea of using the geography to our advantage a lot more than with Percy's parliamentarian, but Mackinder isn't completely off his rocker either."

"You see a problem with the strategy?"

"The russians got knocked out the war by the Germans. I could see the bolsheviks collapsing but only if petersburg and moscow both fall. We're not the ones to do that. Neither is Japan." Both men understood and for that matter the staff graduates understood why the Russo-Japanese war had stalled out, "I figure there is a good chance Germany and the Reds are going to make good on Rapallo and team up, where that leads... I figure that its going to be bad for everyone."

The best hope was to apply the lessons learned from the European war, but there were limits to that.

The Western Siberian Plain lay east of the Ural Mountains. It was the geographic expanse that the Bolsheviks had seized after Omsk had fallen. The Whites in Central Asia, popularly Kirghiz to Xian's vernacular, controlled the south, which included the spur of steppe that by passed the Urals and that needed to be reinforced and defended even if it was never used as a springboard for offensives.

"Which is exactly," Cole remarked to the observation that France and England will ask for if we all get into it, "We don't have the manpower, and frankly the Whites are going to want something even if we can't drive the bolsheviks out of power entirely." He paused, "Look this'll sound devious but we'd be best off agreeing in principle that they take and administer Western Siberia and that we hold defensively killing grounds against well the bayonet charges from the reds that we can rightfully expect to come in a fight." Despite the thrashing at the Lake doctrine had not changed.

Iseburo had told him of the lake battle, what he had not expected was that the Japanese had taken film of the battle. It was as surprise, and something of a novelty and frankly the real work had been done by artillery, but Iseburo had let the red cavalry try a brazen cavalcade action before opening them up with shot and machine gun fire from three sides.

It was a brutal display, but one to be commended. Iseburo had enveloped them in a textbook maneuver and settled the business. After chasing all the way from Omsk the Bolsheviks had to run all the way west for fear of a few japanese divisions. What railways that the Whites hadn't torn up in retreating the Reds did or Iseburo did in his forays to clear his frontier. It was also why the Japanese aligned whites, smaller and more fragmented didn't question Iseburo's 'advisory counselorship' to their various local governments.... and in the years since particularly as Japanese and Koreans and chinese workers brought their families in to settle or work in towns first it had been railways and post offices then it had been other civil administration... after Kolchak after Omsk there just hadn't been anyone influential enough to knit the patchwork together and Iseburo's railways brought stability and control to the region, and law followed. Even though Akashi had passed away, Iseburo took his cues from the dead colonel, and from his father on how to establish local administrations which as a result reported to his centralized administration in Irkutsk. That in turn had lead to some reported problems with the Kwantung administration south of Iseburo... which was ironic since Iseburo had been in a slot to be in charge of them but now it was parochial departments squabbling.

Regardless of Iseburo's age, the status of elder statesmen was not hereditary, but he might if he cared be able to be prime minister one day. The problem was Allen couldn't see Iseburo doing that willingly, not with the old man dead. It would have been one thing if Yamagata was alive but even then Iseburo was willing to break the government over budget issues... and the thought of Iseburo ending up in the Foreign Office was potentially a good thing, but also not likely to last long. Iseburo supported the Washington Naval Treaty for fiscal reasons, wanted an Anglo-AMerican-Japanese entente for the obvious economic and military benefits the alliance would provide but all of that boiled down to balance book calculations and he'd didn't really understand other view points.

"We have time, and Iseburo won't support his officers haying off and starting something." Allen remarked, "But we have time because Lenin's dead." Even if he hadn't been the Bolsheviks were in no position to restart the civil war and most of the credit there was probably for the Poles in the west showing the Bolshies away from the Vistula. So for at least now whether anyone liked it or not they had to accept the current status quo as the borders and boundaries.

Those were certainly boundaries Allen could live with. "Right now there is a buffer state, whether there is oil there or not for now the west siberian plain keeps the bolsheviks having to look in three different directions." They didn't have to look north it was just ice up there... then again the Germans had taken the third largest city in the Tsar's empire by amphibious action the Mission they had called Albion, so maybe the reds should look warily at the north... "They have to look east against Japan, against Iseburo, they have to look South to Kirghiz, and they can't leave their western border unwatched."

It was a balancing act. It was grand strategy. "Kirghiz makes a fine buffer for us, but I shouldn't tell you that in the long run, and Bill, and Vickers before him is sure there is oil in that basin, it will be available eventually."

"They'd need foreign investment."

"Ford is making them tractors, and his deal with them isn't much different from ours."

Allen nodded acknowledging the point. They needed to make the most with the time that they had. "Waite will never agree to a foreign service body, he'll stamp his feet, and drag his heels for as long as he can," much as he seemed to want to delay on the matter of staffing the supreme court.

"What's our alternative then, not have an official foreign service?" Cole replied, "The trade missions are just that, and besides Peking is falling apart." Li leaving the presidency presented a problem, because he had been harmless, a compromise candidate who didn't have the resources to be Duan never mind Yuan Shikai. Cao was talking about wanting the presidency and leading China, but that was about policy... Zhili's dujun had no plan to bridge the divide across the Beiyang factions. He didn't appear to feel he needed to.