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Certainly, oil supplies from the Persian Gulf were important, but do bear in mind that the US didn't defend the regime in Iran against hostile takeover, either. In many ways, the loss of Iran represented a much greater strategic setback that Kuwait would have.

Priorities change, but there are definite limits: the British didn't deplete BAOR to send troops to the Falklands; nor did the US empty out their bases in Germany to fight in Vietnam.

Well, there are complex issues at work, and some partial truths. Intervening in Iran was always a complicated matter due to the existing agreement (signed in the interwar period!) between Theran and Moscow, that grants the Soviet Union the right to intervene in Iran if the country is used by a third party to stage attacks on soviet soil... So any intervention in Iran, larger than Eagle Claw (and that was himself quite large for a SOF operation with the seizure of two airbases...) could have landed the US in a difficult position. Add to that the fact that Carter was taken by surprise by the revolution (but again he was considering serious retaliatory measures after Claw's fiasco, but due to the Walker Spy Ring, the Soviets got into alert with their southern military districts...

Said that Carter also created the RDF, then CENTCOM for such eventualities. Yet one of the big issue with the RDF/CENTCOM, something that H. Norman Schwarzkopf touches in his book, and you can see directly in Mark Herman's Gulf Strike early scenarios, is the relative speed (or lack of thereof) of deployment. You can send one brigade of the 82nd, one MEU, the Rangers, quite quickly, then you have a significant buildup. Second lift will be the rest of the 82nd, a MEB coming from Diego Garcia and airlifted, and the then the 101st. The latter requires a whole wallop of air transport capacity. The big punch would be the 24th Mech, and one of the first two Marine Divisions. And these would come in the third lift. So 'fast' option are quite limited, and you also require local support. Something that was not that easy to get on the fly in 1979. In the T2K world even of 4E, well, I assume the 24th has not been reflagged, and it keeps one brigade in Kuwait. The whole XVIII Corps is available (as it was in the 1st and 2nd Editions) to be deployed there. Certainly I see them going there rather than in Europe. Always sent them there in the TWW combined game, with one USMC division to bother.

The big thing is... SL-7 fast transport. They are a precious commodity, do you send them to move the 24th to the Gulf, or another one or two heavy divisions to Europe? Considering the key role of oil in modern warfare, I always sent them to the Gulf.

As for the two other claims. Operation Corporate troop deployment were constricted by logistics. There was just a fixed amount of amphibious lift and sustainment available. When Julian took the 3rd Commando Brigade down south, the bulk of RN amphibious assets were committed, including 'Ships Taken Up From Trade'. When General Jeremy Moore came down with the 5th Brigade he had to use civilian shipping. On top of that, Sending mechanized and armoured regiments down south from BAOR did made no sense at all, considering the absence of the road net, and Julian 'mistrust' )at the time) of heavy armor. Well, I found difficult too to see where anything bigger than a Scorpion could have been employed...

In Vietnam... well the USAF did indeed transfer units straight from USAFE to 7th Air Force (Operation Freedom Train) . The army also ran down units in Europe of NCO and volunteers to keep MACV full strength. That in turn created the so called 'Hollow Army' period.

Said that, all major NATO partners (US, UK, and France) had a reserve of expeditionary units to be used away from Europe. Remember that horizontal escalation (or rather the ability to react to) was a principle of US conventional doctrine from Kennedy onward.

Noting that they kept the M4 Carbine, which was adopted based upon lessons learned in Desert Storm...
The First divergence point is in 1992. Between the successful Coup in the USSR and the lack of mention of the second Kuwait Invasion by Iraq nor US response to it...
The second (and most important one) is H West instead of Robert Joseph "Bob" Dole in the 1996 primaries, and instead of Clinton in the general

Given the lack of mention of the No-Fly zones enforcement, no mention of the Balkan War... I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it's clear that until the second divergence, it's not singificant outside the USSR

Note that the end date for the Gulf War is historically accurate for the end of Desert Saber. (the final stage of active ground invasion).

What isn't mentioned is also interesting...

1. no reference to Al-Qaeda. (1985-present) (which really starts to rise as a terror organization outside the USSR when the US pulls out of backing the Taliban...)
2. No reference to rising Muslim Extremists. (1985-present)
3. No reference to the Liberia (1990) airlift evacuations.
4. No reference to the Airlift Belgian troops into Kinshasa, Zaire (1991)
5. No reference to 1991 stationing of troops to guard the Kurds
6. No reference to the Sierra Leone (1992) airlift evacuations.
7. No reference to the 1992-1996 No-fly zones in Iraq. This is BEFORE the clear divergence of the 8...
8. No reference to the Haitian UN intervention (US participated as did UK) in 1994
9. No reference to the 1995 Bosnian "Humanitarian Aid" and "peacekeeping" forces.

They have essentially made Clinton into a much less interventionist president by these omissions. Sufficiently so that it's out of Character, as Clinton also had a number of less well known interventions going on under the cover of special operations and the "War on Drugs" he inherited from Pres. GHW Bush as well as his own personal interventionist activities in Africa and mesoAmerica. Clinton is when the US really doubled down on BlackOps. (I've heard this from several former US special operators - 2 seals, 1 US Army OpFor, 1 US Army sniper, 1 USAF Combat Controller.)
The Bosnia is interesting and important. The lack of Muslim extremists is tactful but presents some interesting divergence of its own.

Funnily enough I never seen Clinton as non-interventionist, but other people I know seems to portray him in that light. Maybe FL writers just bought that version.

From the alpha the rest of the world outside Europe had received no more than a slim coat of paint... and quite transparent... all in the name to buil up the Moscow's scaremonger and make NATO look weak. There is also no mention of how the real-world breakaway soviet republics are kept in the fold. If violence was indeed used, you can argue that a coup-produced government who had removed the main US-NATO link in Moscow (Gorbachev), that is willing to use force, and has also a significant nuclear force, will certainly not be taken lightly, and certainly not prompt peace dividends.

But we are just re-hashing the same complaints... that I am afraid stem from the fact the world building lacked research, and the war building lacked even a single session of wargaming behind it...

Just catching up as I grabbed the PDFs right before heading off the grid for four days.

A key thing I'd note is that "lack of mention" is certainly not the same thing as "it didn't happen," and probably at least half of those events listed don't have a massive impact on the setting. I take it as two things: first and foremost, the writers are trying to be efficient and stick to a page count. Second, you as the GM (er, "Referee" -- always thought that was a poor word choice) have the freedom to toy around with those aspects as you see fit.

You need to keep in mind that this background history is written in Sweden, and so largely reflects the Swedish perspective. And the common Swedish image of Clinton is one of a very non-interventionistic president.
In Swedish discourse, the two Bushes are by contrast generally described as very interventionistic, if not outright warmongers, whereas Clinton was at the time — and even more so in hindsight — portrayed as a liberal peacemaker.
All in all, I feel the picture given here is very familiar ... it seems entirely consistent with how educated Swedes usually view the period.

Most of the items on aramis's list passed Swedish media coverage, and thus public, by at the time with little or no impression. With a few exceptions, you needed to follow media channels like the BBC or CNN to really notice them.

So, I believe Arrigo has the right of it, there.

Does them not being mentioned mean they didn't happen in the game's history? Probably ... I feel at least some of those (not least the ones that did rise above the Swedish media horizon) were significant enough to merit mention in a "Condensed World History" text.

Chris Lites is the lead setting writer.

That makes it ... interesting.

But as Arrigo noted, that view is not exclusive for Sweden; it's just that it's pretty much exclusive in Sweden.

Well,

my perspective on Clinton was basically largely Italian, I was living exclusively there during his presidency. US politics were seen as mirroring Italian ones (the horror at the time!) with Democrats being left, Republicans being right. So Clinton was seen as a left leaning peaceful president. It was a really simplistic view, but even educated locals here tend to be simpletons (serious educational system failures...). But interventions piled up, and Clinton had clashes with the Italian leadership on the Balkans a couple of times. In 1999 Clinton was seen as a sort of warmonger...

Funnily enough I had the same discussion with a Japanese friend, who wrote her MA dissertation comparing Wilson and Clinton interventions, and re-assessing her evaluation of Clinton on the matter (in Japan the approach was similar that the one in Sweden and Italy). We had the same supervisor (MA for her, PhD for me), and he (an expert on US Military History) also highlighted this strange view of William Clinton. And if you want to laugh a lot... the year before, when I was doing my MA... I had a classmate from California who loudly stated that Clinton had never send the military overseas... he was also unwilling to accept the idea US had troops deployed in UK, Germany, and Italy... oh... before you wonder... MA in War Studies... so you expect some basics...

But in hindsight Bush senior was extremely reluctant to commit troops abroad. He had Panama, but it was a previous commitment and Noriega was actively aggressive against US forces stationed there. Desert Storm was something that literally begged commitment. On the other hand Clinton saw military intervention as a mere tool to support other foreign policy endeavor, often done on the cheap, and in limited fashion. As Akiko says back in time, Clinton used the military to simply further his foreign policy agenda, while Bush senior used it to answer immediate crisis. Clinton intervention were institutional part of his presidency, Bush senior were military answers to military crisis.

Again one can say a lot of stereotypes in the writing, little research.

As a US citizen without CNN at the time... I voted against Clinton because I knew of so many interventions, black ops, and bits of brinksmanship that, years later, I couldn't even consider voting for H. Clinton. (She's come across more hawkish than Bill...)

The US was involved in no less than 20 military interventions of various kinds during Pres. Clinton's first term alone. Some are still not public knowledge. Some were just US Airlift of NATO allies' citizens from hostile regimes (Liberia, Sierra Leone), at least one attempt to infiltrate Libya and secure one or both of the Lockerbie suspects (unsuccessfully)... In 1992, I fully expected a move to take out Gaddafi, who was considered to be an ally of the USSR, as a sponsor of international terrorism.

Another thing to remember: the US Left is not significantly less warmongering than the US Right. Our biggest military interventions have been by Democrats: FD Roosevelt (Got us into WW 2 on both fronts), Harry S Truman (Korean War), Lindon B. Johnson (Kept the US in Vietnam and massively increased manning there.)

Republican General DD Eisenhower was also massively interventionist, but throughout the rest of the 20th C, the other republicans have done what Dwight did: Make big threats and small interventions. The exception being the last 1.25 years of the 20th century... GHW Bush and the "war on terror."