“A Confederate victory during the Civil War would have fundamentally altered the history of the modern world,” this writer says.
Yeah, that’s obvious. He continues, “The United States would likely never have developed into a world power …,” which also is a no-brainer.
He says, “The First World War would probably have ended in a German victory, causing a fundamental shift in the European and world balance of power … [and] there would have been no Cold War” because the U.S. would have been a wuss on the world stage, and “the Russians’ domination of the world would have been unchallenged.”
But he thinks that also means “the Second World War and the Holocaust would not have happened,” and hostile nations “probably would not have developed nuclear weapons.” (I’m not so sure.)
However, he believes that in most respects the differences “would have been for the worse: slavery would have continued for decades if not centuries more; the expansive dictatorships of Germany and Japan would have gone unchecked, and [much] of the material progress brought about by a prosperous United States would have gone unrealized.”
This is all highly conjectural, of course, and he acknowledges that, “One of the difficulties in playing the ‘What If’ game” is that the farther one goes back from the present, the harder it is to “see into” the alternate reality of what might have happened, because “more factors come into play.” Thus, a world in which the present-day USA was divided into two hostile countries “would have been even more alien than we can imagine.”
