America stays out of World War One

Its pop history. the internet version of a TV History Channel show.

Human history is marked by periods of intense, widespread, & catastrophic warfare. These periodic episodes have complex origins & seem to occur regularly. The period in Europe since the Napoleonic era had been about as utopian as possible in terms of reduced warfare. that could have extended a few decades, but it the record argues for the inevitability of such events since at least the earliest mergence of the industrial world. This view suggests it was equally possible the European order could have collapsed into catastrophic warfare one, two or three decades earlier just as easily as extending a few decades.

Post 1948 the world has slowly settled down into another extended period of local and limited wars. How long that might go on I can't say. It might collapse this afternoon, or go on another forty years or more.
 
Maybe the next period of intense, widespread and catastrophic warfare will be the last.
Forever...
 
Is this utopian . .
No, not all that much.

If WWI ends more in a draw, we avoid the rise of hard right in Germany. No Holocaust, no WWII with all its casualties.

We most probably still get Bolshevism in Russia, and maybe still even damn Stalin himself. The main issue might be how we handle continued colonies.

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For purposes of alternate history and exciting fiction to read, a clearly positive change needs an unexpected downside and crisis to resolve. That becomes the sweet spot of the story and the tension to resolve. And of course from there it can go in a number of different directions.
 
The Great Influenza by John Barry says there's some evidence the 1918 strain of flu originated in Haskell County, Kansas.

And usually there is selection pressure for a disease to moderate because people who are wiped out flat on their backs aren't very good vectors to spread the disease, but this isn't the case for crowded military barracks.
 
I think it is superficial and full of hyperbole, but it captures the disillusionment that Americans felt after the war, a war that did not end war but broke the peace Fast forward to our modern disillusionment at large and it fits how America might prefer to have left well enough alone and lived on in splendid isolation. Of course we adore discussing alternate outcomes to such sweeping events as the Great War. It is why many of us are here.

Better might be the subjective relativism that crashes this debate but I know it would be different, different enough to be a utopia, I fear not, but then I fear Thomas More's Utopia, I am in the camp that sees it as Dystopian satire. We will still have war, famine, deprivation and disaster, suffering simply does not eclipse by vanquishing Versailles. But i agree that a stalemated peace has more potential to discredit warfare than the Victor's Peace did. That is not an excuse for Nazi Germany but one sees its roots seeded in how badly the peace was built. Europe likely needed to totter along broken rather than affirm its notions that all was well, so did America spoil things? I think the article submits that we did. A kernel of truth lies in there, the USA today is at war with the world in a vain attempt to impose security, that appears to be how we believe we won, intervene and impose ourselves, redraw maps and change the names, then go home and wring our hands, wash and repeat. Is this the legacy the article thinks is avoided by simply letting Europe bleed itself to an ignoble end of war? I think the author's notion is going to sound more and more like the sentiment once this century ends.
 
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