Well that's just backwards. Davis defended his country from another larger country that would pay an unbelievable price if it insisted on imposing it's will on them.
No rational person would have believed that the North would send so many people to die in a war of conquest. A rational player in the North would not have been willing to let so many die in such a hard effort, and so the chances that the South would beat back the invaders was a reasonable position so long as you have a reasonable person in charge of the invaders.
King George III could have won too, but it would have cost much more in blood and treasure. Fortunately for us, Mad King George III was saner than Lincoln.
His hope was that the Europeans would intervene to save the situation for him.
And that was not an unreasonable surmise either. I just learned over this weekend that "Cinco de Mayo" is a celebration of a Defeat of a French army of 8,000 men by a poorly equipped Mexican army of 4,000 men. It is claimed that had the French maintained their beachhead, they would have thrown in with the South's efforts to become independent.
Mad King George was also at war with the French. A situation Lincoln avoided. He did not have to divide his army and navy to fight two fronts at time.