Should we have added Canada to our system? We actually tried to do that, but failed.
The thought has occurred to me that American involvement in World War I, created the conditions for World War II, Communism, Atom bombs, and a whole host of other unfortunate events.
I suspect that had we remained out of World War I, the world would likely have turned out better than it did. In fact, it is difficult to see how things could have turned out worse, what with 20 million Ukrainians starved to death, 80 million Chinese killed, the millions in Cambodia and all the lives lost to World War II.
So America's entry into WW I seems a juncture in history where the world went down the wrong path.
Would America have entered into World War I, if it were split into a USA and a CSA? Certainly the taxation would have been less, and therefore our ability to project military force would likely have been less.
Would the two sides have cooperated to furnish men to fight in Europe for that war?
It begins to look less likely that America would have gotten involved, or would have been as effective if it had.
So would balkanization have been a bad thing if it avoided all the horrors after WW I?
So much suffering might have been averted.
The capture of the fort was a huge success, but Allen took the credit for it, leaving Arnold bitter and disgruntled. This action put Benedict Arnold on the pathway of becoming America's most infamous traitor, while Ethan Allen is still selling over-priced furniture to this day.
-PJ
Really? Winston Churchill had a similar idea. He thought that if America hadn't entered the war, Britain, France, and Germany would have made peace and Europe would have gone back to normal. It was an obscene idea coming from him: the First World War had been a European production and Churchill and the governments he served in had been doing all they could to drag the US into it.
Churchill believed that if the US hadn't entered the war the Allies and Germany would have made peace in 1917. Not at all. There had been peace attempts in 1915 and 1916. They failed. The French wanted Germany to give up the territory they occupied and the Germans wanted to keep it. Both sides still believed they could win, and even if the US didn't enter the war in the spring of 1917, the British still had hope that America would eventually join in.
Would they have been able to agree in 1917? 1918? 1919? 1920? Soldiers in the trenches thought the war might still be going on forty years later. That was unrealistic, but two years, three years, four years wasn't. And if the war was still going on in 1917, the Russian Revolution and the rise of communism would have happened.
As it happened, one reason the war ended when it did because the German spring 1918 offensive failed. The Germans mounted the offensive because Russia had given up on the war and German troops could be moved to the Western front, and because the Germans wanted to win the war before the US troops arrived in large numbers. If the US hadn't enter the war, perhaps the offensive wouldn't have been launched and wouldn't have failed, or maybe without the morale boost to the allies that American involvement would bring, the offensive would have succeeded.
Other reasons the war ended when it did were the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the hunger on the German home front, and the mutiny of German sailors. Maybe these things would have happened as they did. Germany would be forced to surrender. The allies would have imposed a harsh peace on them. It's likely that the Kaiser could have kept his throne, but Germany would still feel cheated out of its victory and oppressed by the victors. In the event that Germany won, they certainly would have imposed a harsh peace on France. A negotiated settlement would leave no one happy. Whatever happened, the seeds would be planted for another war. Europe hadn't given up its warlike ways yet. And this time Soviet Russia would be poised to pick up the pieces afterwards.
It's probable that there would have been no Hitler and likely that there would have been no Holocaust, but 1) nobody forsaw that happening in the 1910s, and 2) the rise of Hitler wasn't inevitable. It wasn't an unavoidable result of America's entering the war. Wiser and cooler heads and the avoidance of a global depression might have prevented the rise of Nazism. Third world independence movements and communist revolutions likely would have come at some point, and they can't be blamed on the US either.