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I'm following up on my alternate history scenario from a few weeks ago.
In this timeline some damn fool thing in the balkans causes the great war, just like in our world. But the US is distracted with the still-ongoing Indian wars. The sinking of the Lusitania is a footnote in history books and the Zimmerman telegram was an offer of perpetual alliance to the US, and military advisors and technical assistance, if America would invade Canada. This offer was politely declined, and the great war ended with state failure in Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire simultaneously. Emperor Karl got German intervention- at unknown cost. The Ottoman empire underwent a popular revolt and would be forced out of the war with major territorial concessions. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother Michael, who calmed the mutiny in the army by promising peace. Brest-Litovsk in this world made large territorial concessions and promised food exports sufficient to keep Germany and Austria in the fight for another year. Operation Michael did not succeed, but brought General Hindenburg and the French and British to the same page- a white peace was needed. Germany, Britain, and France, as the remaining great powers, agreed to status quo ante in the west, each agreed to guarantee Belgian neutrality and agreed that the three would have the right to gain new colonies. A French-British-German commission would oversee the Ottoman empire, currently embroiled in a civil war, but Russia would be left to sort out its own problems. Aggressive war on (the western portion of)the continent would be outlawed. Italy and Belgium, having little choice, agreed.
As it became clear that communists would gain the upper hand in the Ottoman civil war, the commission granted Greece permission to invade and occupy the Greek-majority portions of Anatolia, and Greece received substantial assistance from all three. The southern Levant would be a French mandate, supplying arms to Assyrian rebels in northern Iraq/Western Syria, and to a lesser extent Armenians. The end result- an Assyrian state cutting off newly communist Turkey from access to much of Mesopotamia, French plans for a Maronite state to supplement it... eventually. In Europe, Austria would remain under German occupation, their militaries would remain under joint command and while Austria would maintain separate embassies for quite some time, it de fact retained no independent foreign policy. Karl I managed to retain domestic independence, despite some border revisions, and his concessions to the Croatians and Czechs brought some German disapproval but both Karl and his successor Otto were insistent on domestic independence. Today the Austrian empire is a developed country divided into domestic administration on language grounds, but no longer has an independent foreign policy or military and remains poorer than Germany. The monarchies sit at equal level, but the joint parliament underweights non-German Austrian votes, and non-German Austrians are discriminated against in the military- probably the single most influential institution in the de facto joint government. Austrian regions are essentially SARs in the German empire who share a separate monarchy.
Russia spent the twenties and early thirties defeating nationalist revolts. Tsar Michael proved a more capable ruler than Nicholas, and reformed the army while making enough concessions to forestall further instability. The first foreign war was conquering Turkish controlled territory under the guise of protecting the region's Armenian majority; this was allowed to happen as a check on communism. Border revisions with Germany proved less successful, but outside of Eastern Europe the Russian Empire reached its old borders, and clashes in Ukraine and the Baltics never turned into a major war.
The real equivalent of WWII is termed, in English, the Pacific war, a clash between (originally)Britain and the Netherlands on one side and Japan on the other. After a surprise attack on the British naval base in San Francisco- with substantial collateral damage- the Republic of Texas declared war, and due to threats to their concessions in China Germany entered. The war had a few major effects, chiefly the revision of naval warfare towards a carrier dominated model, and was forced to an end when a German army, shipped to India and marched overland by British logistics, threatened the Japanese concessions in China while the attack on Hawaii- headquarters of the IJN eastern fleet- became too entrenched to be easily pushed out. Japan was forced to return territories taken from Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, and France, but allowed to keep territories captured from other minor powers. The other main effect of the war was integration of white commonwealth countries into the UK more intensively, with South African refusal being a minor crisis. The Indonesian war of independence was here a failure; the Dutch army was considerably stronger without the occupation of its homeland, and the formation of a pro-colonial alliance with South Africa and the Republic of Texas bolstered the colonial administration further. That assistance was paid back in the Nicaragua crisis, where Dutch troops assisted the Republic of Texas in preventing the Nicaraguan government from allowing a Japanese and US backed canal project which would shorten maritime trade routes from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and in South Africa resisting German colonial expansionism.
Today, Japan is the master of the Pacific, with seventeen carriers and 25 cruisers, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and most of coastal northern China are well-integrated into the empire. The commonwealth, with fifteen carriers and fifteen cruisers, relies on allies to match Japan in the Pacific, but is generally on even terms elsewhere- except for the north Atlantic, where it's the dominant power. France and the United States have much smaller navies and would rely on allies to fight either of the giants anywhere in the world, while Germany and Russia are land powers. There are a bevy of middle powers- the Netherlands, Texas, Brazil, etc- which would need their allies to defend themselves against any of the four sea powers. Turkish, Serbian, and interior Chinese experiments with communism are failures with bodycounts, but this is a world with more oppressive governments and frequent warfare than in ours; communism doesn't stand out in quite the same way. The European powers have retrenched from most of Africa- France maintains control of Morocco and the Commonwealth still rules Egypt and Kenya- but with much heavier internal interference than in our world. India is independent, and is a civil war ridden wreck under perpetual Russian threat, but Sri Lanka remains a colony, as do Indonesia and Indochina. Brazil is a middle power, but other parts of Latin America are not so lucky- Peru and Argentina(although wealthy in this timeline) are Japanese protectorates, Texas and the USA maintain colonial rule in large swaths of the Caribbean and central America, Mexico is a poor flyover country frequently bullied by more powerful countries, with its wealthiest regions from our world part of Texas. Venezuela is German controlled, still, after the pre-great war Monroe doctrine proved toothless.
Interesting stuff, why does India leave the British? Aren't the British still very strong as a power, the Americans weren't slapping them down? Do they pull out because it wasn't cost efficient to hold onto or something?
My general althistory headcanon is that a lot of anti-colonial revolts/insurgencies would've been put down hard if the two superpowers (USA and USSR) hadn't been anti-colonialist. Nerve gas and bombers is a tough combo to beat.
A couple brigades of Wagner are sufficient today to overthrow a mid-sized Central African country, one would think that some big power or other would end up running these places if only to secure gold mines and oil wells.
I think decolonization was a historical inevitability after WWI, and the northern part of the Indian subcontinent in particular was probably difficult to hold on to. Gandhi specifically probably succeeded in large part from American pressure, but I doubt the British empire even absent WWII keep India in the face of another sepoy revolt. My head canon is that local revolts push British control south, possibly with Russian assistance and the mainland Indian subcontinent is notionally a single state but realistically far more fractured than IRL, and that the commonwealth was more concerned with the transition to an oil-based empire than with territorial expansion. But, there’s definitely a greater extent of colonial rule in the second and third rule, and complicated statuses in between independence and full colonization make more sense than fighting a bloody war.
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