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That is my assumption, honestly.

Alternatively, WI you avoid the Korean War altogether? Without the devastation of that war and later radicalization, maybe you could have a more nornal country.

Indeed. The problem of how to make a Communism viable in a middle-income area verging on high-income status was one that never got solved.

It is not clear to me that an Austria so notably reduced would be capable of going to war against a neighbour, at least not successfully. I am also curious about how Hungary survived versus Russia.

I do like that quite a lot!

I once played with the idea of avoiding a Great Migration by having black people in the South get locked down in serfdom-like conditions. Not sure, now, how that would work. Beyond that, I think a relative lack of immigration restrictions would work, by allowing previous migration flows from...

None of those countries, though, were autarkic. All of them were deeply embedded in different alliance structures. Even an East Germany that had much the most disappointing performance of the four countries you name was still a world trading owner. North Korea happened to be run by nationalist...

As for transplanted Australasia, this TL might actually be one where CANZUK makes sense with a relatively continuous band of British and British-controlled territories extending across the North Atlantic.

Both Spain and Portugal will find themselves in a relatively stronger position versus their Pacific holdings, although it is open to question what sort of Spanish-Filipino relationship you could make. Cuba is likely to split away from the Spanish empire, while Puerto Rico is anyone's guess. I...

The problem with this scenario is that unlike Communist Vietnam, which did reunify the country, or the People's Republic, which unified the entire country save for an island, the DPRK did not reunify Korea under its rule. That demonstrable failure is just the sort of thing that I think would...

I mean, there are a lot of islands. Is Manhattan taken? Is the Hochelaga archipelago on the St. Lawrence, which hosts Montréal and most of its conurbation, included? Is there a minimum size?

The idea that lands populated by Germans could be kept from Germany by an upstart Czech state was unpopular enough. (There was also a small Silesian territory that was directly ceded by Germany to Czechoslovakia.)

The critical problem with this precocious scheme for European integration, as much as I think it could have produced much better outcomes than OTL, is that Germany was still a revisionist power. It was able to tolerate its losses to France and Belgium and Denmark, but its losses to Poland...

That makes sense, especially with Romania next door as a deeply negative example. Could this be a TL where Yugoslavia just.manages to survive?

Is this a TL that, paradoxically, sees Japan's growth limited, with an expensive Taiwan keeping Japan out of continental Asia?

This seems most likely. Especially when faced with a regional transformation and a deeply shaky domestic scene, I am skeptical that Romania can hold out longer than Albania. I wonder what might happen with Moldova, faced with an unreformed and presumably deeply nationalistic Romania next door.

I understand that, in the late 1980s, Hungarian reformists were actually considering that they might want to keep Soviet troops in-country precisely to deter Ceaucescu. This TL may well be one in which you get a substantially greater exodus of ethnic Hungarians, possibly to the point of leading...

Perhaps if Spain had an alliance with a stronger power—perhaps Germany, maybe France—it could wage a successful defensive war? But then you need to explain what is in it for the stronger power.

Point. The shame of it is that North American integration is a good idea made unimplementable by these conspiracy theories.

This is true, but the comparisons of Mexico with East Germany never mind North Korea overlook the fundamental differences. Those countries did (or would) have to make fundamental political transitions, changing over their basic ideologies and transforming utterly their systems of government...