Niall Ferguson, in his contribution to his own collection
Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, (London, Picador, 1997) - the essay called "The Kaiser's European Union: What if Britain had 'stood aside' in August 1914?" (pp. 228-280) - talks about WW1 Germany’s expressed war aims becoming more grandiose as the conflict went on - including wishes expressed for a land corridor from Germany to China. The map below offers one view of what the achievement of WW1 Germany's aims would have meant - source:
https://www.quora.com/How-powerful-would-Germany-have-been-today-if-it-had-not-suffered-the-losses-of-the-first-two-world-wars
Sorry to go along with the off-threadery (and at such length) but I found poor old Harry Harrison’s
Stars and Stripes books well-nigh unreadable ... and silly with it. So the RMS ‘Trent’ affair makes the Union and Confederacy sink their differences to gang up on Blighty … and win? 'Aye, that’ll be right' (as we say in Scotland). As opposed to the ‘Trent’ affair leading to a
de facto British / Confederacy alliance, with Britain fighting the Union on the seas, while deploying troops southward from Nova Scotia? If it had been the United States (pre-1861) versus Britain, my money would be firmly on the U.S. However, pitting the Union against the Confederacy
and Britain simultaneously might be a different kettle of fish. Few points of detail: "Ireland freed"? Well, decide which bits and define "freed" while you're at it. Be they right or be they wrong, many Irish people have elected to remain in the U.K. to this very day - hence the difference between 'Northern Ireland' and 'Eire'. (See map below of Ireland's traditional counties from Wikipedia.) "Better all-round"? Well, you gotta wonder ... maybe if Harrison's counterfactual Confederates freed all their slaves, but would they do that?
Pardon this observation if you can but maybe if the US as a whole - as opposed to individual states like Ohio - had followed Britain’s lead and abolished slavery within its territories in 1807, and/or made slave trading a felony as the British Empire did in 1811, then the whole nasty ‘War Between the States’ business might have been skipped altogether. Oh, and before someone jumps down my throat with "Why, sir, it wasn’t at all about slavery but States' rights", it is funny that Jefferson Davis never signed off on an emancipation proclamation of his own – I wonder why?