Without an independent Kurdistan, Turkey might be a much more stable place instead of the war-torn hellhole it is today. Without the power and prestige Saddam gave it, I'm pretty sure Iraq wouldn't be a leading member of the Muslim world right now.
in order to connect Philadelphia with the Great Lakes, you would have to figure out a way past the Appalachian mountain range that separates the two places. I am pretty sure that they didn't have shaped charges to build tunnels in the 1810s.