We’re sleepwalking off a cliff when it comes to Ukraine. We need to imagine what defeat looks like if we’re going to snap out of it.
From: American Purpose by Jeffrey Gedmin
A1931 book of essays titled If It Had Happened Otherwise contains German-Swiss writer Emil Ludwig’s chapter, “If the Emperor Frederick Had Not Had Cancer.” Ludwig has the German ruler living past 1888 and, together with his wife Empress Victoria, leading a liberal German empire with a British-style cabinet. As a consequence, there’s no belligerent “New Course” from son Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wilhelm’s tactless statements, the erratic foreign policy, the naval build-up, the colonial expansion, and the posturing and brinkmanship that helped lead to World War I—all this gets deleted from history and 1914 becomes a year of peace.
Winston Churchill investigates in the same volume what might have happened had the Confederacy won the American Civil War. Churchill has an ironic twist: The South’s own abolition of slavery. Along similar lines, Abraham Lincoln had concluded, “If willing faithfully to cleanse this continent of slavery, and if they will dwell beside us in goodwill as an independent but friendly nation, it would not be right to prolong the slaughter on the question of sovereignty alone.” In Churchill’s counterfactual history, the two Americas and Britain form the “English Speaking Association” and prevent World War I.
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