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Maria Theresa's Revenge

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The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 would always be remembered as a war of Prussian blunder. While some military historians argue that the Prussians' advantages (and the Austrians' disadvantages) made Prussian victory possible, in the end the numerically superior Austrian military and the intervention of France on behalf of the Austrians ended the war in Austria's favor. The Austrians regained Silesia and secured their position as the dominant German state. The humiliated Bismarck was driven out of office, and Prussia's kings became far more willing to listen to their Austrian neighbors. 

In the meanwhile, the breaking of Prussian power restored focus to Europe's other questions of balance of power. The Anglo-Russian "great game" and the decay of the Ottoman Empire set East vs West. The rise of nationalism was a concern for both Austria and Russia, multi-ethnic empires, and they saw what it did to their longtime rival: the Ottoman Empire. Although Austria and Russia competed over the Balkans, both Vienna and St. Petersburg worked out their differences out of concern that The ethnic conflicts in the Balkans would cause a general war between the two empires, something neither desired. 

The French and the Austrians grew cooler after the defeat of Prussia and rivalry threatened to start a war over Italy the nationalist regime of which was supported by France and sought to take territory from Austria. Perhaps most surprisingly the British set aside their differences with the French in order to counter Russian and Austrian power on the continent and to ensure that neither Vienna nor St. Petersburg gained too much influence over the former Ottoman Empire. The fall of the Ottoman monarchy and the rise of the Islamic State in the early 20th century almost threatened to plunge Europe into a great war over the issues that had started the Crimean war in the 1850s. In fact British and Russian fleets engaged to one another in the Dardanelles. But cooler heads prevailed and a general European war was averted. 

But this would not stop the Eastern/Western divide, one that would continue for nearly a century afterward. As the airplane, the jet engine, the oil revolution and nuclear fission arrived, the rivalry between the European powers simmered. The loss of India to a communist revolution, and the brief communist revolts in France, America and the German states, united the two sides for the duration of the 1940s, but as the communist threat fizzled out, the rivalry returned.

It is now 1966, and the nuclear stalemate has guaranteed that any war between East and West would end in the destruction of human industrial civilization in the Northern Hemisphere. The Entente has had a new member in its ranks since the 1930s - the United States of America. The American government joined the Entente during the Red Rebellion, and now have formal military ties with France and the UK for mutual defense. The Entente powers are mostly liberal democracies, either republican in the case of America, or monarchical in the case of the European Entente. The Entente have stronger economies and larger navies and air fleets than their rivals, the Holy Alliance, but there are fears that the Alliance could overrun Europe if Anglo-American help doesn't reach the continent in time.

The Holy Alliance is frequently decried as a bloc of reactionary autocracies, and but a decade ago this would have been true (at least in Russia). But reforms in Austria during the 1930s, and Russia in the 1950s, have greatly increased power in parliament and devolved power to ethnic minorities. Granted, the monarch still has to approve all legislation, is the de jure commander-in-chief, but these monarchs have learned from the Red Rebellions and the fall of the Ottoman Empire that they need to listen to their people. The Prussians, who were more democratic than their allies, also served as an example. The Holy Alliance's armies outnumber the Entente's at least five to one, but the fear of nuclear annihilation keeps these armies behind the Rhine.

The other powerful states on Earth are very nasty autocracies. The Empire of Japan, once a strong British ally, has become dominated by militarists obsessed with fulfilling Japan's "divine destiny" of ruling the East. Opposing them are the Chinese State, a brutal autocracy that was born from the chaos of the Qing Empire and had already fought the Japanese in three separate wars. The Islamic State has mellowed out since its heyday of supporting Islamist movements throughout Africa and the Middle East, but it remains an Islamic theocracy whose caliphs still use the rhetoric of holy war against the infidel West and whose genocidal treatment of those who are not Muslims or "people of the book" horrifies the outside world. India remains a bastion of communist revolutionary ideology, spread by its operatives around the world and slavishly devoted to the "Obliterators of the Self," the communist "cult" founded by the People's Messiah, Mohandas Gandhi. India's recent detonation of a nuclear weapon has caused concerns among both the Entente and the Alliance, as the Indians are infamous for their belligerent threats against the "imperialist West." Who knows if they will make good on this threat?
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f1222's avatar

Does anyone else get the feeling that this was written just to get Nuclear Gandhi?