Anyway, it's a facinating question because on the one hand, the basic dynamics -- German arrogance, French resentment, Austrian nervousness, the frustrations of the subject peoples -- wouldn't have changed. On the other hand, everything would have changed if Europe hadn't been poisoned by a long brutal war. Germany was going to bring much of the arrogance and brutality of imperialism and colonialism into the heart of Europe, but it wouldn't have been comparable to what happened after a war that cost 20 million lives.
This question is also similar to Civil War debates in another way. Living in our world, we can't imagine slavery or imperialism lasting down to our day (save perhaps on the farthest margins of the the inhabitable world). But had things been different they might have persisted even longer than they did. The Russian empire was dissolved only recently -- if then.
I can imagine Germans, Austrians and carefully selected members of other nations, subject nationalities and minority groups building a strong, united Mitteleuropa. But given everything we know about the period and the region, I suspect German arrogance and the resentment of the subject peoples would have made this impossible.
Maybe Germany sought first military, and then economic domination of Europe, because it knew that it didn't have the skills necessary for political predominance. It could conquer and it could buy, but in Central, as in Eastern Europe, no state or alliance could rule the competing nationalities in the way that a national government can rule over its own people and territory.
Bonus question: if war harms liberty and encourages statism, and there is no long war, but the more statist side wins, is that a victory for liberty or for statism?
I'm not so convinced WWI was inevitable from purely political causes in a geopolitical or cultural sense. I see it more the result of bad ideas as much as by bad politics. Sure the alignments dragged one into the other, and the German inferiority complex led the Kaiser into this stupid proof of superiority. But discontent fueled the period as much as anything else, and as far as I can tell discontent sparked the war, or made it inevitable. Europe of 1913 was fraught with stupidities.
In Berlin in 1910, the socialists held the plurality. In France, it was one extreme to the other, and labor and anarchists held the nation to the floor. Even in Britain the PM's windows were knocked by raging suffragists, which could only mean that those of even greater discontent had even great means and ends. Anarchists struck the UK, too, especially Latvians and other eastern euros.
I don't believe the US was immune to it. I see Forgiven_Sinner disagrees that national socialism might have taken in the U.S. I'd recommend another read of Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech: it was all about business by, of, and for the government. Think it through and apply the logical conclusions to his arguments. It would have gone waay beyond the New Deal, or what we have today.
He failed because there was a concerted effort against him, as Forgiven_Sinner points out. Correction, though: it was 1912, not 1916, that 3-way contest. The 1916 contest was all about staying out of the war, the promise upon which Wilson squeaked by.
x, speaking of "what ifs," what would have happened had the U.S. been serious about defending the White Russians?
As for your bonus question:
if war harms liberty and encourages statism, and there is no long war, but the more statist side wins, is that a victory for liberty or for statism?You're just tryng to bring Abe Lincoln into it, aren't you? LOL!