LogFAQs > #885062459

Honestly, there's no guarantee that the CSA would have remained its own country anyway in the long-term. There was always the possibility that they'd re-unite under new terms. Keep in mind that it's not quite the same thing as winning freedom from a nation far across the ocean where the existing ties had always been relatively weak because immigrants weren't solely coming from there. The North and South were neighbors with closely shared lineage, some shared economic concerns, etc.

Lokarin posted...

Realtalk: If the civil war never happened and the Confederacy was simply allowed to secede from the union, which one would be the ones to claim California?

The West US. Keep in mind that Canada, which had covertly provided funding to the CSA, had hoped to break the US into three parts.

darkknight109 posted...

KJ StErOiDs posted...

We'd all be speaking German today.

Russian is the more likely hypothetical, though even that is unrealistic.

The US did not win the war on behalf of the Allies, much as American media likes to portray it that way. They were late joining into the War and the other Allies had already largely blunted the momentum of Germany's attacks on the Western and African fronts.

America's participation moved up the Allied victory by several years, but they were not the ones on whom victory hung; for that award, look further East. Hitler was doomed the instant he decided to double cross the Soviets. Once again, the media doesn't portray it this way (The Cold War kind of made acknowledging Russian efforts a bit gauche in the aftermath), but the Eastern campaign was by far the biggest and most important part of the war. It was larger than the Western, Pacific, and African campaigns COMBINED and the USSR was fighting it with virtually no support from the other major allied powers. And not only did the Soviets win this campaign, despite suffering more casualties than America had soldiers, they had enough left in the tank to take over a huge swathe of Eastern Europe and become a world superpower in the aftermath.

The 40s-era USSR was an incredible power, one that Hitler had no hope of matching. I dislike the idea of saying that *one* country made the difference between victory and defeat (it was called a "World War" for a reason, after all), but the USSR is the closest thing there is to fitting that definition.

Actually, you're not looking at it the right way. Had the US not provided so much support to the Allies in WWI, there may not have been a WWII where a genocidal madman ruled Germany because the harsh terms imposed on Germany may have been greatly curtailed had the war ended in something closer to a truce than a defeat. Plus the existence of the CSA -- which may have instead favored the other side -- could have served to deter the initial conflict. Given that it's impossible to know what the CSA might have done differently, predicting a new course of history -- given changes at every step along the way -- is tenuous at best.
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