The civil war of 1804 never happened, due to the revolution’s leader dying of the West Nile virus, since in this universe, his friend wasn’t quite so quick with the fly swatter.
As a result, the Democratic Communists never took power and were never ousted in a military coup. Thus, the space program never got any money, and we never set up a base on Proxima Centauri Delta. Instead, all the money went into terrestrial global domination. Fortunately or unfortunately, we recruited and recruited, but never did get enough numbers to put the plan into action so we have a military of 70,000,000 sitting around.