Marc
Donor
It is going to take a complete rebuild of the US for this to happen. (In no particular order)
You basically have to back and eliminate all the following issues
Racism/slavery.
Fear of outsiders (that pretty much ever country in the world had back then and most still have)
Religious bias
Fear of loosing power or at least getting it decreased by the politicians.
Language issues.
And don’t forget you need to find a way for these islands to belong to the US vs other countries.
And while you are doing all of that you need to keep the USA as basically the USA otherwise the whole conversation is irrelevant as they would not become US states they would become states in the Unified Governments of American or whatever takes the place of the US.
So basically you have to completely take the USA as we know it apart. Remove whole chunks of its collective “personality” and “culture”. And find a way to subvert thousands of years of human nature (fear of outsiders is extremely common the world over) and yet keep the US.
No it is not against the laws of physics but it is impossible with anything less then hundreds of major changes some of them going back hundreds if not thousands of years. So I think that is a pretty good description of ASB level changes.
A chronic occurrence is how challenging it is for folk to work out the notion that certain events are de facto ASB based on extremely low probabilities. By the way, this is one of the major reasons why professional historians are so reluctant to deal with counterfactuals as thought experiments - they rapidly becomes fantasy fiction rather than logical speculation.
Which by way is fine, as long as everyone is upfront about a thread being a piece of fiction - say as in various wanks.