20 Maps That Never Happened

You are probably pretty familiar with maps of the world, especially maps of the English-speaking world. But if history had been a little different, our maps might now be very different. What would Europe look like if the Nazis had won World War II? Hitler had a map for that. What would have happened to the U.S. if Germany had won World War I -with the help of Mexico? There’s a map for that, too. Where would Africa’s national boundaries be if the continent had never been colonized by Western powers? It might look like Nikolaj Cyon’s vision of national divisions along ethnic boundaries. Vox has twenty maps that give us a glimpse of alternate history, including the 1998 map shown above of how at least one Russian envisions the economic breakup of the United States.


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Don't doubt the Chinese are going to call in their debt and alter the US map in the process. We have become the bully of the block, and the block has one huge kid capable of kicking our asses, all he needs is the motivation.
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"War Plans" are intellectual exercises for training and evaluation. A friend of mine was involved with one where colonels had authority to use tactical nuclear weapons. There was an interesting one where we were invaded by space aliens.
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"War Plan Red" is odd... The US has long had some single-minded obsession with invading Canada that I just can't understand... Happened during the revolutionary war. It was step #1 in the war of 1812, which went wrong and incidentally the White House was burned down. Then with the Oregon territory dispute of "54-40 or Fight!" fame, as if history had shown war to be such a great idea.

Whatever obsessed Napoleon with Russia seems to exist in US/Canada relations, too.
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