Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
[...]FDR, on the other hand, was an internationalist who believed that the USA had a duty to stand up for democracy overseas. He needed a fait accompli to put the USA on a war footing without angering the American public. In 1940, FDR convinced Congress to activate a peacetime draft by promising that draftees would not be deployed overseas. Enough folks in Congress either played dumb or were legitimately fooled into voting for it that it passed. The public largely accepted the peacetime draft because it created paying jobs at a time when the unemployment rate was still really high.
The USA in the mid-1990s was still slightly hung over from the last draft (Vietnam) but I could see Congress passing a conditional draft similar to that instituted by the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 after the Soviets invade China. -
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That is an excellent historical analogy for use in T2K, I think. About every T2K timeline would have to deal with "less peace dividend" (if any) during the 1990s and thus more pressure on Western economies and job markets. Already in the early 1990s a sellout on German heavy industries had begun, the Chinese bought whole running steel plants. And of course, during the 1980s Japan, Taiwan and South Korea had begun pressuring Western markets with their consumer electronics and other tech products.
If the West has less money during the Clinton era ("it's the economy, stupid!"), jobs will be much scarcer. In Germany, we had large problems with unemployment during the 1998-2005 period of chancelor Schröder (who later turned cloaks and is now a Gazprom board member). If that period starts earlier and similar developments occur in other Western countries, including the US, the European Community as well as the former WP members (depending on the timeline/edition) would be much less stable and look a lot more like the 1930s. That might include nationalist, populist and irredentist movements, similar to to what former Yugoslavia and Albania experienced during the period.
If Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and perhaps even Czechia and Slovakia experience similar - yet weaker - periods of instability, big armies wouldn't look out of place at all. That of course sucks even more money out of the coffers.