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@anne-of-lothlorien That’s a really hard question =P

First and foremost, spy fiction is a genre. You should look into that.

The rest of your description doesn’t sound like historical fiction to me. HisFic needs to interact with the real world in some way. If the only possible way a reader could tell the story took place in an alternate version of our world is that you declare it as the author, then the text itself has nothing to do with history and isn’t historical fiction.

If, as Rusted Knight said, you’re diverging from the real world at a certain time and place and then describing an alternate future to that time and place (say, that a certain country developed differently when magic was discovered or that Side A instead of Side B won a real-world war) then you do have a connection to the real world.

This is called a “point of divergence” when discussing historical fiction, by the way. I talk about it, and the implications of deviation in historical fantasy, in my video on Nadine Brandes’ Fawkes: https://youtu.be/BXg6PxDowaU

Your description of a country with cultural elements of other major real world powers couldn’t have come about without big deviations from actual history. If you explain those deviations, you have historical fiction. If you’re simply saying “imagine a world somewhat like ours during this time period,” then you should lean on the spy fiction aspect of genre and not try to categorize it as historical.