What if FDR lived through his 4th term?

warsofasoiaf:

Don’t expect a brave new world or anything like that, I think a lot of things would be very similar.
FDR’s health would still be poor and the strain of the job was clearly
getting to him simply from a health standpoint, so he was not going to
run for a fifth term.

FDR commissioned the Manhattan Project, he would drop the bomb as surely as Truman would, and even though he called Stalin “Uncle Joe” during WWII when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies, the Cold War is inevitable. FDR was not going to sacrifice ties to Europe for greater ties to the Soviet Union, so I’d imagine things proceeding much as they did in our own history.

There’s still going to be a Red Scare in the United States after the loss of China, so don’t think for a second that McCarthy and Hoover aren’t going to get up to old tricks with FDR in the White House. I don’t see socialism catching on in the United States during the specter of the Cold War.

What could be drastically different would be his policy toward the armed forces and Korea. FDR wasn’t anything of the budget hawk that Truman was, so he probably would have had a much larger commitment to the UN-led forces in Korea. MacArthur still handles Inchon, but the question of whether FDR would treat differently with China, or whether China would have intervened in the Korean War all the same. I doubt FDR would let MacArthur nuke China, so I’d imagine it would be the same. 

The Presidency would still expand the scope of its powers drastically, including adopting the nuclear first-strike option as MAD and deterrence still become the prime stances of the Soviet Union and the United States. FDR had always embraced the expansion of the executive branch’s power, so I don’t see him changing that. FDR is leaving office before Khrushchev assumes the Premiership, so speculating on any foreign policy relationship between these two leaders would be pointless.

Ultimately, I do not see much in the way of changes from a foreign policy standpoint. FDR had his successor in Truman. But I would ask @racefortheironthrone for domestic policy changes, because given FDR’s focus on more domestic matters, that would be the area with the greatest potential changes.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

Unfortunately, domestic policy probably wouldn’t have changed that much, because what prevented Truman from making sweeping changes in domestic policy – namely, a Congressional alliance between southern Democrats and conservative Republicans to block further expansion of the New Deal – was the same thing that had prevented FDR from making sweeping changes in domestic policy post-1938.