"What if Peace broke out in December of 1914?" Topic

Assuming that The Germans, French and British could come to terms on the Western Front. Status Quo Ante terms, but the armies have seen the devastation of modern warfare since most of the initial forces are gone with the leaves

Will that crush Russia and still bring on the Bolshevik Revolt?

No Weimar, No Nazis?

Will the US remain essentially isolationist?

For the US, no devastated Europe means that there is less of a boom in the 20's

I'll bite, still commie Russia just later. Germany and France Go to war again in the late 20's (the Great War not bloody enough to stop it) Britain still supports Belgium if Invaded. USA still profits from war joins France to protect its Investment. 20's boom moved to the 30's. And I still don't get a flying car.

Also Balkans still the Balkans

Too many had died to go simply back to the "Status quo ante bellum " The Christmas Truce was an anomaly and was very much localized On both sides plans were well underway for the war winning spring offensive of 1915 Generals still thought the war was winnable and had yet to adjust to the reality of trench warfare

I'll bite, still commie Russia just later.

Except at that point (late 1914), Lenin is still, IIRC, a prisoner of the Austro-Hungarian authorities and the nascent Bolsheviks haven't received the funding and support of Germany. Also, Russia hasn't suffered the years of human loss and, more importantly, national humiliation requisite to fully undermine the Tsar's authority. I think some sort of Revolution would be inevitable, but I expect it would be of a milder type and likely to put the likes of the Kadets and SRs into power.

In regards to Russian communism, I think it inevitable that Russia would go through some sort of (likely) traumatic transformation into who knows what. If that's communist then it depends if Lenin gets released into the wild or not.

In regards to Germany I think also there's an inevitable rise of nationalism that many nations at that development phase experience. But certainly no Nazis, their entire justification was WW1. It would be the rise of a politically active middle class that would be the most interesting and different, but nothing like the Russian revolution, or even the rise of the Nazis.

Black Tuesday probably also still occurs, but what influence that has on the outcome of any counterfactual would take more time and length than TMP allows.

There was more than enough carnage and trauma from the fighting up to December 1914 that I genuinely think the major powers would be gun shy over the years to come.

After the killing in the previous months, the only way I can see a truce/armistice being agreed is if some short of revolution/military coup would have provoked a collapse of one of the alliances. The problem is that in December 1914 the momentum for a peace initiative didn't exist yet. The belligerent powers still believed that victory was within their grasp, and in neither of them existed an organized opposition to the war yet.

You need to enter a variable that would have changed that scenario. Perhaps, an Austro-Hungarian complete collapse in the Eastern and Balkan front after the reverses in Galicia and Serbia. With the Austro-Hungarian empire out of the war, Germany would have been, probably, forced to seek some kind of agreement while they still had the upper hand. In that case, I seriously doubt that the Kaiser would have survived the political backlash. It is possible that France, Great Britain and Russia would have accepted more lenient terms than those agreed at Versailles, but the Kaiser's government would have been mortally wounded, politically speaking.

In that scenario, it is plausible to think that some short of Socialist revolution would have happened in Germany and/or Austria-Hungary empires in the late 10s-early 20s. How the Army would have reacted to the threat is the most important question. If it would have supported the Revolution, we would be explaining now how a Centroeuropean Communist block was created and how that lead to a global war later in the 20s or the early 30s. Although it is also possible that at least France, and maybe even Britain, would have been too pre-occupied with their own Socialist movements to oppose a Germany-lead communist bloc.

If the Army would have reacted against the revolutionaries, most probably both Germany and Austria-Hungary would have evolved into some kind of ultra-nationalist states, and war would have been a distinct possibility again. But which would have been the actual shape of those ultra-nationlist states? That is the key question. The Nazis were an effective counter-revolutionary movement precisely because they provided a pseudo-revolutionary narrative that attracted many working class Germans; however, an ultra-conservative ruling class would have lacked that potential of seduction. It is plausible to think that they would have tried the old and well tested foreign threat in order to distract the German middle and working classes from opposing the regime; but it is also equally possible that they would have been afraid of a new war that could have unleashed the revolutionary potential of their peoples.

As I said before: too many variables.

We'd all have a lot more great-uncles, uncles and cousins.

Difficult to see Britain and France being willing to sue for peace with much of Belguim and parts of France still occupied, and Germany wouldn't have felt exhausted enough.

How would technology have been affected? Would tanks have been invented? How would aircraft be different? etc.

Ignoring the likelihood of an actual end of the war:

Given that tanks were first used in combat September 15, 1916, I suspect that tanks would still have been developed. After all, the trench systems were already partially developed by the time of the Christmas Truce, and tanks were developed specifically to cross no-man's land and trenches. Development might have been a bit slower, but not by much. Not more than 5 years delay by 1940, IMO, and possibly not delayed at all, given the probability of smaller wars to test the ideas.

Aircraft, on the other hand, would have missed out on 3.5 years of rapid development and would probably have been a good 10-15 years delayed compared to actual history. The smaller wars would not have had enough aircraft deployed to push the rapid development we saw in WW1.