Here’s the problem…
For it to be the “evil overlord Alliance” one has to ignore that the Alliance is comprised of predominantly old nations who hadn’t needed to expand or conquer anything for centuries when the orcs first came and if anything, they need to do so even less now with their populations being repeatedly decimated by the past few decades of orcs, troggs, undead and demons depopulating city centers and countrysides.
Whereas the Horde is a growing power driven predominantly by young and rising nation-states looking for lands to conquer and settle while pushing out indigenous peoples in the process.
Just mechanically based on how they were founded, the Horde is basically an empire in search of lands to dominate, while the Alliance is a coalition of long-established kingdoms whose days of conquest are past, trying to hold onto what they’ve already had for hundreds or even thousands of years against a Horde that’s eager to grab any lands and resources it can, regardless of whom they belong to. The last time an Alliance kingdom fought a war of aggression was with the founding of Stormwind when they originally drove the Gurubashi down into Stranglethorn.
Unfortunately even at its best under Thrall, the modern Horde basically started as a landless army looking to take over someplace. That’s not a moral indictment; it’s just the circumstances they ended up being in after the orcs escaped the camps and fled the Eastern Kingdoms, and given the orcs’ disproportionate presence within the Horde, they’ve never completely shaken that mindset. By necessity that made it an aggressive invader of lands that other races had long ago already come to inhabit; it was just a question of who they would be attacking to stake their claim. Early on it was the likes of harpies, centaur and quillboar - basically natives with no allegiances to draw the ire of the Alliance when they were being culled - but then it became the night elves with the orcs’ constantly pushing into Ashenvale.
The Alliance nations used to be like that during their founding eras, but it’s been a long time since they emerged from their expansionist phase, pacified most of their holdings and became firmly rooted nations with borders they didn’t feel needed to grow any farther. The Troll Wars were a long time ago, and the humans and elves stopped actually trying to earnestly snuff out the Amani and Gurubashi once they’d been thoroughly trounced and kicked out of Lordaeron and Stormwind proper, respectively. They just kind of put up with such races still being around as a nuisance, marching in to smack down raids and the like, but otherwise only going all-out when a full-blown gnoll uprising or Gurubashi invasion took place.
Consequently, by default the Alliance ends up on the defensive because they don’t seriously want anything the Horde has that wasn’t taken from them in the first place. Especially in Kalimdor. The only reason they even set foot in Durotar or the Barrens at all is for military reasons, as none of the Alliance races hunger for the chance to resettle those places place with their own peoples. Why would they? The night elves nominally controlled Kalimdor for millennia and didn’t care to really inhabit anything east of Ashenvale or south of Feralas, and the Eastern Kingdoms nations have plenty of land to themselves. With the exception of Lordaeron - which was “taken from the Alliance” by the Scourge - the Horde’s lands are basically undesirable to the Alliance, so when Alliance troops are in them, it’s for strictly strategic reasons that end if the Horde stops being a threat.
Conversely, grabbing everything for themselves to live in and use is exactly what the Horde wants to do whenever it looks hungrily at the lands held by member states of the Alliance. It sees “weak” races squatting on land and resources that the Horde could be exploiting instead, and chafes at not being able to just take them away.
And unfortunately, that remains the case because the Horde is run by orcs and now Forsaken who all but run their societies on providing reasons for war and basically blackmail their more level-headed allies into dying in droves for them whenever they decide it’s time to start butchering the Alliance again. The tauren don’t need to conquer new lands. Neither do the blood elves. Nor the Darkspears. But it doesn’t matter, because the orcs and Forsaken (and frankly goblins as well) habitually use up everything they have and wreck their surroundings, then drag their allies along for the ride whenever they need to raid the Alliance’s pantry again to replace what they’ve wasted.
Loathe though I am to even suggest it, honestly a “time-skip” at some point might serve the world of Azeroth - and especially the Horde - well. Come back in a few decades when the Horde has learned to be a coalition of proper nations that doesn’t burn through the bounty of its lands so fast that it has to constantly conquer new ones. Because unlike the nations of the Alliance, nothing about the Horde makes me think “oh yeah, this can be viably sustained for hundreds of years.” Just the way the Horde functions as-is would burn itself out and collapse in a fraction of that time. They’re like a partially industrialized society without any of the pre-industrial cultural developments needed for industrialization to be supported. They’re comprised of overwhelmingly hunter-driven societies trying to operate on a scale that requires large-scale agriculture to work. Orgrimmar has no “Westfall” of its own, and the orcs show little to no inclination toward creating one. Human and dwarf farms dot the landscape wherever they live; orc farmers are an oddity that stands out because the very idea is so contrary to how orcs usually are. With or without the Alliance, the Horde as it exists now just can’t endure. Wipe out the Alliance next week and in a few decades you’d have the orcs and Forsaken turning on the rest of the Horde to seize resources after squandering their own to fuel the constant, unhindered expansion and despoiling of the land that would result from an Alliance-free world.
That said, I feel like in theory, a few decades with the Zandalari now on board could feasibly make a difference. They have something the rest of the Horde lacks: an ancient standard of densely populated urbanization without needing to be constantly at war to support it, and moreover, their society wasn’t recently devastated to the point of having to practically rebuild it from square one and they weren’t reliant upon unnatural fonts of magic to supplement regular food and water sources. They know how to be a real empire with a solid foundation that can stand the test of time, rather than a perpetually mobilized army pretending to be a nation as it basically forages off the land without a thought to how such an operation can be viably sustained and finds itself in effect having to constantly antagonize its neighbors and ricochet from one war to the next just to keep functioning.
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")