What if America was German? | Alternate History

追加: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]A long time ago, I made a video about the Prussian scheme. A very interesting footnote in early American history when it was just barely possible that the United States might have acquired a German king, Prince Henry of the House of Hawen, the brother of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. You don't necessarily need to have seen that video in order to understand the broad strokes of this one, but in it we did explore a number of themes like the monarchical tendencies of some of the founding fathers, the Hamilton plan at the constitutional convention to make the presidency a king of sorts, and the failures of the Articles of Confederation. And from there we constructed a scenario in which Prince Henry was crowned king of America, leading the young nation through the suppression of revolts and rebellions, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the merchant class, and closer ties with Prussia, and even territorial acquisitions during the Napoleonic Wars.

[00:00:51]I'll admit though, it was a highly speculative and rather dramatic video.

[00:00:56]But I also promised that if it reached 100,000 views, I'd make a sequel. And so today, we're going to look at a world with a German or Prussian America and how such a state might realistically march through history. Before beginning today's alternate history scenario, be sure to leave a comment and subscribe.

[00:01:14]We're currently trying to reach our goal of 50,000 subscribers in 2026, and every little bit helps the channel out. If you want to help support our content, you can watch through our extensive catalog of videos, or consider supporting your Legion like our generous channel members. Thank you, and enjoy the video.

[00:01:29]So to get it out of the way, we assumed in the original scenario that the instability under the Articles of Confederation forced American elites to replace the failed Republican experiment with a monarchy under Prince Henry of Prussia. By securing George Washington's endorsement and framing Henry as a constitutional monarch, our new federalist kingdom managed to survive without internal conflict, which obviously isn't a granted, but we assumed that for the sake of our scenario, and established a powerful Prusso American alliance, combining Prussian military doctrine with American naval capabilities to build a transatlantic and decently powerful state capable of serving as a decent enough threat to the British mercantalist system. Of course, I wrote the initial video at a time when I didn't have the more thorough research process that I have built over time. And thus, there were plenty of liberties taken with the original video, like ignoring British economic hegemony, the war of 1812, really all of the implications on the French Revolution and a lot of the implications on the Napoleonic Wars and the SpanishAmerican Revolutions among other things. But where the scenario is lacking in depth, it does build an incredibly interesting world, which is why I think so many of you have been so vocal about me continuing it. It's a world where a transatlantic superpower of sorts emerges decades early, where we blended that oldworld Prussian militarism that they were known for with new world scale, resources, and merchant capital.

[00:02:55]So, let's work with it in spite of its flaws. We'll suspend our disbelief and hopefully not leave long comments about how unrealistic certain aspects of the assumptions we're making are and just have fun looking at this German America timeline. Prussia played a decisive role in bringing down Napoleon Bonapart. And thus at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Prussia was in many respects one of the greatest beneficiaries. The Prussians walked away with massive territorial gains, though not necessarily everything they had wanted. Prussia failed to annex the entirety of Saxony as the Austrians and British weren't about to let that happen. But they did receive the northern half of that kingdom, the Swedish ruled Rumstate of Western Pomerania and crucially a vast tract of Reish and Westfallian territory stretching to the French border. That last acquisition, the Rhineland and Westfailia, was actually a British initiative. Britain wanted Prussia positioned as a sentinel guarding France. They were using Prussia as a shield of sorts. But what the British did not fully appreciate, even in our own history, was what was underneath that shield. The Roar Valley became the single most consequential and valuable piece of real estate in the 19th century. Specifically for European industrialization, it was packed with huge coal deposits that would eventually fuel the engine of German industrialization. Now in our own history, it took Prussia decades to develop this prize properly. But of course, in our scenario, this is where the American connection would start to compound into benefits for Germany proper. It's also worth noting the peculiar geography this settlement produced. The Prussian state now stretched across northern Germany, but was sort of split in half with its eastern Prussian corps around Berlin and Brandenburg, separated from its new western territories by a 40 km gap filled by Hanover, Brunswick, and Hessa Castle. This was the great strategic headache of 19th century Prussian statecraft. Over time, of course, Prussia would find that the cure to this headache was economic coercion of these middle territories. But as investment in transportation infrastructure begins to trickle into this region of the Germanies, it will send a signal to Britain. Prussia and Britain had just fought Napoleon together. General Fields Marshal Gard von Blucer's arrival at the Battle of Waterlue had saved the Duke of Wellington's position and delivered the final knockout blow to the French Empire. So around 1815 in our own history, it did actually look as though a Protestant conservative partnership between Britain and Prussia might form after the Napoleonic Wars. But as we know, the Anglo-Russian alliance was always sort of a marriage of convenience. Britain only needed Prussia in so far as it lacked a highly effective continental military to keep France occupied. Prussia likewise needed British financial subsidies to sustain itself. Each was using the other for a specific purpose and both knew it as their relationship was perpetually haunted by the status of Hanover.

[00:05:58]Hanover sat in the middle of Germany like a splinter and it was a personal possession of the British crown. Of course, the fundamental question of what exactly constituted an acceptable European balance of power was a question that Britain and Prussia would increasingly answer differently as Prussian strength grew. In our own history, the breakdown between Britain and the Germans actually took decades.

[00:06:19]And the crack really widened after German unification and became unreparable in the era of Kaiser Vilhelm II, which led to the Great War, the First World War. But in our scenario, this view is probably much shorter because the variable that changes everything is again American capital.

[00:06:34]Following the Hamiltonian model of funded national debt, a transatlantic credit system would have been quietly extending its reach into the Prussian state's new western territories.

[00:06:43]American merchants and financiers from Philadelphia and following the construction of the Eerie Canal, increasingly out of New York City, would have been channeling investment directly into Prussian infrastructure in the new Prussian western territories.

[00:06:56]Additionally, the Dutch, who had been financial partners for the Prussians since the 18th century, when Dutch capital was essential to Prussian colonization ventures and shipping along the ruring investment into this region as well. So the result is that Prussia would have the ability to begin far earlier than in our own history, funding the development of its new renish territories without the traditional dependence on British banking houses and British finance capital and without the fiscal constraints of the Prussian state that hampered it in our own history. Of course, Britain will be watching.

[00:07:26]They'll be watching Prussian coal and Prussian iron start to move with American money behind them and would come to understand quite quickly that the pressure that Britain had cultivated as a continental tool was becoming something that could have the capacity to compete with them. American merchants would serve as what one might describe as the white bridge linking the output of the North American continent to the old commercial networks of the Hanziotic League that had dominated Baltic and North Sea commerce for centuries. The mechanism that makes us work with actually quite unprecedented efficiency would be the recently established packet chip system. In 1817, a group of Quaker merchants in New York completely changed the transatlantic trade by founding the black ball line. The black ball line was so important because it operated on an almost absurdly simple principle that ships left on a fixed schedule on a fixed date regardless of whether or not they were full. Before this, ships waited until they had enough cargo to make the voyage profitable. But the Black Bell line threw it away in exchange for reliable timets, which ended up counterintuitively becoming the more profitable model, one which lasted until the advent of the steamship. In our new scenario, this system would reach actually further than just Britain and into the mouth of the Elb, making Hamburg the terminus of the transatlantic black ball line and allowing American grain to flow into the German states along with timber, raw cotton from the southern states. Though again, of course, in our scenario, slavery has been abolished by royal degrees. So, southern agricultural production looks somewhat different. And all of these American raw materials would be dependably shipped on time. And to the west would flow highquality Prussian metallurgical and engineering products. And critically, British middlemen who in our own history profited handsomely from intermediating this sort of trade that happened between Germans and Americans would be systematically cut out. Both America and Prussia for the time being still will have to buy cheap British manufactured goods because they're simply hard to compete on with pricing and scale. But a new system would be building itself up over the course of this period parallel to the existing British trade networks as the value of commerce passing through Hamburg starts to rival that of London.

[00:09:36]This Atlantic Hanziatic block of sorts would have its own credit system financed by transatlantic banking networks and increasingly protected by shared tariff policies. Of course, again, all of this is a direct challenge to the architecture of British global commercial supremacy, the Pax Britannica of the concert era. And all of this is again manifesting decades before this kind of Anglo-German rivalry would appear in our own history. The Zulvverine or the German Customs Union established by Prussia in 1834 would accelerate this process considerably.

[00:10:07]The Zulvine incorporated the majority of the German states outside of Austria, creating a huge internal free trade zone with high external tariffs that sort of mirrored the historical American minimum principle for textiles. American theorists among them Henry C. Carrie, a chief economic adviser to Abraham Lincoln in her own history, argued that British free trade was the deliberate system designed to keep all other nations dependent on British manufacturing and banking. But all of this is going to create an urge in America and Prussia to build their own separate systems outside of the British one. And the British response to all of this would predictively come to become hostile. And it would probably take the form of tariff wars in the mid-9th century, which might even spill over to alter the Crimean War down the line.

[00:10:51]Anyway, British leaders had historically viewed American protectionism with alarm, even in our own history. William Huskinson warned that American tariffs in 1816 and 1828 were designed to strangle British manufacturers in the cradle. And thus, the tariff wars are going to really heat up. Britain might even try to strike preferential trading agreements with Latin American states or exert diplomatic pressure on smaller German principalities to stay outside the Zoline. and they also will probably engage in aggressive naval posturing in the North Sea. This last point is of course where things would get particularly tense because it raises the question of what the Prusso American naval balance actually looks like in this point. Of course, in the pre- steamship era and still prior to the mid-9th century transformation in naval technology, America and Prussia are not going to be able to build fleets capable of rivaling the Royal Navy. The British two-power standard, which was their policy of maintaining a navy equal to the two next largest navies combined, was centuries old and built on a lot of existing infrastructure. So again, this Prusso American block simply cannot match this in a single generation. But what they can do is build up navies and merchant fleets strong enough to make British coercion expensive enough that it's not worth going to war over right now. American ship building was rooted in the British tradition. Prussia also had the means to build ships in the Baltic away from the North Sea in regions where Britain had more control.

[00:12:17]Both powers, particularly the Americans, would be capable of playing defense well enough to force Britain into a posture of political and economic respect that it would not have extended in other circumstances and thus war would not necessarily break out. But in Prussia, capital would not only be funding ships, it would also begin to fund rail.

[00:12:38]Railways in the 19th century were of critical importance. The Prussian military strategist Helmet von Molka the Elder wrote in 1843 that every new development in railways is a military advantage. Prussia was nervous to obtain that advantage particularly because of the headache of the gap between the western and eastern provinces of the kingdom. In our own history, Russian railway development was strangled in its early decades though by a piece of legislation called the state indebtedness law of 1820 planted by the reformer Carl August von Hardenberg which prohibited the government from raising new loans without the involvement and co-g guarantee of a future national assembly a national assembly that hadn't been created yet.

[00:13:20]So the state couldn't borrow to build railways without first summoning a body that it had no intention of summoning and no precedent to summon. Thus all of the early rail lines in Prussia were private undertakings and not necessarily well done. But in this timeline, that might not actually be so bad because American investment capital is private and can be structured as private foreign investment and not state debt, skirting the indebtedness law while achieving much of the same infrastructure outcome as if Prussia was directly investing on rail on a state scale. There is of course a clear demand for railway infrastructure linking the rhinland to east Prussia and thus solving the geographic problem of the divided kingdom and also connecting parts of the rivers that were too full of rapids to be traversible by boat and just generally economically developing the German states. So in this timeline all of these strategic ostbond lines will be built much earlier with wealthy American investors who want to profit off of new rail connections. There are incentives for both parties here. Meaning this sort of large investment is naturally going to occur. The rural and Baltic ports would be connected and the Prussian state's administrative coherence, its ability to move troops, move goods, collect taxes and govern its diverse populations and exert direct influence over the other minor German states would improve considerably because these smaller states will depend on Prussia for rail transportation. But here's the thing about this accelerated development. In our own history, it was the financing of the Ospawn that finally forced King Frederick William IV to summon the United Diet in 1847 to get the guarantee that the state could finance this rail. The United Deiet inadvertently became a political opportunity where Prussian liberals saw their chance to demand a constitutional government and thus it became one of the kindling sticks that lit the revolutions of 1848.

[00:15:19]And while some of that financial pressure to call the Diet is obviously relieved by American capital, not all of it is because the impetus to nationalize the railways will always still exist.

[00:15:30]And the social and economic vectors that caused these liberals to pounce on the Diet in the first place would also still exist. Early industrialization displaced the artisans and specialized craftsmen.

[00:15:41]There were demographic changes going on in Prussia. Nationalism was still a force as was liberalism. Both becoming quite popular among educated Germans who wanted a unified Germany and a modern constitution and better railway financing obviously doesn't change any of that. Actually, if anything, faster industrialization probably accelerates the social shift as we have more workers moving into cities, disrupting those traditional livelihoods, raising political expectations among a growing and educated middle class. And all of them would probably actually be looking incidentally at the constitutional monarchy in Philadelphia across the ocean and wondering why they couldn't emulate that in Prussia. This shifts 1848 or whenever it happens, this revolutionary coalition in a fundamental way. A new faction is going to form which we might call the Philadelphiaists who are intellectuals, merchants, and reform-minded bureaucrats who explicitly advocate for transplanting the American model onto the German states. In Philadelphia, there exists a strong monarch, a conservative monarch with sweeping prerogative powers, royal military command, and yet also a parliament, a bill of rights, and a meritocracy open to talent. The Junkers, who were the East Albian landowning nobility and the backbone of Prussian conservatism, would still be a powerful force, though, and they viewed any written constitution as an intolerable intrusion between the king and subject.

[00:17:09]They formed a reactionary court faction to roll back every concession the king made in the panic of 1848. But again, instability will likely lead to in due time political revolution of sorts. The thing is, it won't be as violent. The political dominance of this Philadelphiaist faction will cause 1848 in the Germans to be a controlled demolition, a political revolution rather than an explicitly violent one.

[00:17:37]The liberals will get their parliament and their bill of rights. The Junkers will get an upper noble chamber and their military prerogatives and the Hawen's legitimacy will remain intact and quite strong as enlightened constitutional monarchs. Additionally, there is one more stabilizing factor here that the Germans in 1848 lacked as well. That being food, and in this case, American grain. The transatlantic supply lines that had been built up over decades mean that food prices will rise because of harvest failures like they had in our own history, but would not reach the catastrophic levels that drove the hungry poor into the streets of Berlin and Vienna. So this revolutionary or again Philadelphiaist coalition in Germany would be dominated by the middle class, the more educated, the more specifically political and would correspondingly be less terrifying to the property and elite classes. So all of this means that we will see a political transformation of the German states between 1848 and the early 1860s.

[00:18:34]We're in the great political question of the age, whether Germany should be nationalist and liberal and should unify under Austria or Prussia and on what terms would be settled by economics and infrastructure and relatively peaceful means. In our own history, the question specifically of whether Germany should unify under Austria or Prussia remained an open one until Ottovon Bismar cut through it with a series of short decisive wars in the Danish war of 1864, the Austroprussian War of 1866 and finally the FrancoRussian War of 1870.

[00:19:05]Of course, leading to the unification of Germany out of Prussia and the Klein Deutsch Plan. It was a remarkable achievement, but actually in this timeline it is kind of unnecessary. It may sound strange, but over the next decade, the Zulvrine will do actually much of the work to unify Germany under Prussian leadership. The Zulvine had already by the 1840s in our own history incorporated the majority of the German states outside of Austria, but in our history just wasn't super powerful.

[00:19:33]States joined because access to northern markets was just economically necessary, but it wasn't out of some sort of grand plan to coalesce around Prussia and unify Germany. But here it is a deliberate instrument of Prussian industrial policy backed again by American capital and most importantly all physically integrated much earlier with an expanding railway and ship network. By the mid 1850s the smaller German states would be completely dependent on Prussia as all of their railways connect to Prussian lines and their manufacturers sell into Prussian markets. So political union, a question that was already being discussed constantly as early as the 1840s, would become more of a formality, catching up to an economic reality. The South German states, in particular, Bavaria, had always been the most resistant to Prussian leadership because they were culturally Catholic. Hence why it took the FrancoRussian War to manufacture a sense of German national emergency to draw them fully into the Prussian sphere. But in this timeline, they're in a similar economically dependent position as the North German states.

[00:20:38]Additionally, the constitutional model that this new Prussia would have adopted in theory could also offer something of a federal union model in which local autonomies are respected like Bavaria had sort of received in our own history, just more explicit and clear and directly marketed as such to the Bavarians. So by the early 1860s, Germany in a sense would be effectively unified and Austria would likely be forced to accept the reality that they were a Donubian Empire, not a German one anymore. And it would be into this world that Otto von Bismar steps. Bismar was summoned in 1862 in her own history as a political emergency. The Prussian king was at the point of abdication of the constitutional conflict which was a standoff between the crown and parliament over military funding. Bismar was willing to govern without parliamentary approval, collect taxes illegally, and simply ride over the Constitution in service of the crown.

[00:21:29]But in this alternate timeline, the constitutional conflict of 1862 probably just never occurs. The Philadelphiaist settlement of 1848 has already resolved, however imperfectly, the basic tension between Crown and Parliament over the military budget, among many, many other things. Bismar is thus something slightly different, a brilliant product of the meritocratic bureaucracy who rises to prominence as a foreign policy specialist because a Prussia entering the 1860s as the already undisputed master of northern Germany is a Prussia that frightens people. The coalition pressures against Prussia would thus be immense and constant. Bismar's role in this timeline would also thus be primarily to keep Russia from joining an anti-RPussian front, to keep Austria pacified enough not to seek Revanche, and to keep Britain and France from aligning or finding common cause against Germany before the Germans are strong enough to resist both simultaneously.

[00:22:23]The diplomatic problem that he faces is actually then in some ways a lot harder than what he saw in our own history. A Prussia in the making can be underestimated. But a Prussia that it's already decently industrialized with a capable defensive fleet and a very wealthy transatlantic partner absolutely cannot and everybody will be looking at the Prussian state attempting to decapitate it before it can strengthen and unify Germany. Now while the Austroprussian war might be avoided, it seems that confrontation with France cannot. The French had historically relied on German weakness as a guarantee of their position. the entire French security framework since Louis V1 14th had rested on the assumption that no single power would dominate the lands to France's east. So this new Germany is obviously an existential threat for France and here it's one that has arrived a generation early. Napoleon III by the late 1860s was a dictator facing some domestic difficulties. The Republicans were resurgent and his regime as a Bonapart required periodic military glories to maintain its legitimacy. And in her own history, he stumbled into the Francoressussian war over the absurdity of a Spanish secession dispute. In our timeline, even if that specific trigger is absent for whatever reason, the logic of French insecurity structurally and Napoleonic domestic politics makes some confrontation with the Germans essentially inevitable. So when war comes, it is from the French perspective a preventative war. And from the Prussian perspective, it is once again the final proof of German national solidarity. Of course, assuming that Britain does not intervene, Prussia still likely wins. The German Empire would then be proclaimed, and unlike in our own history, it would be proclaimed by a state that has been industrializing for decades longer. Bismar is of course now steering a ship that has already been pretty much built for him. French revancheism will perhaps be even more intense than our own history. And ravanchism was of course the desire in France to reclaim Alas the reign and avenge the humiliation of the FrancoRussian war. And here, because the defeat feels like the crushing weight of a superior German system, French prestige will be even more badly hurt and the Ravanche will naturally seek to do everything more possible. I don't know if that's actually a grammatically correct phrase, but to do everything possible to build a counterweight to Germany. Now, for a scenario whose impetus started in America, we've been talking a lot about Europe. So, let's take a look back west. Because through all of these European dramas, the American kingdom would have been conducting its own rather different kind of expansion. The ideology of manifest destiny in our own history was deeply republican and Protestant in character.

[00:24:58]It was a providential folk movement in which ordinary American citizens believed God had personally assigned them a continent. This American monarchy will be a bit more honest about what it actually is. Borrowing from the language of Prussian administrative culture, it is a policy of progressive seating. It's the gradual state-directed occupation of border regions, supported by federal infrastructure and a standing army trained in the Prussian tradition. The drive to the Pacific is exactly as relentless as in our own history, but it's simply more organized about it and and really more honest about the fact that it's just expansion for expansion's sake. We can look to the example of Texas to get an idea of what this looks like in this Prussian America. American settlers arrived in underpopulated Mexican territory which led to friction with the central Mexican authority, eventual independence, and an even more eventual annexation into America. These pressures exist in this timeline, just as they had in our own, but annexation of Texas and other similar territories would be handled as a straightforward European style diplomatic and territorial matter and treated actually quite like Bavaria in the German context. It will be given local autonomies recognized as a distinct territory with its own traditions but still firmly integrated into administration and the military structure. California and the broader west would be similarly pragmatic annexations. The historical Mexican War of 1846 was controversial in America because it looked like naked territorial aggression. But in this scenario, naked territorial aggression isn't controversial. Britain was already showing interest in the underpop populated Pacific coast of North America, which Mexico couldn't effectively govern or settle due to Comanche power, geographic distance from Mexico City, and political problems in Mexico itself, which had sort of existed since the inception of the Mexican state. So, if the American Kingdom doesn't act, Britain can establish a foothold on the Pacific coast that would threaten the monarchy and her economic aspirations. So, war with Mexico is a preventative measure against British encirclement. And by 1848, America would likely annex California. Right about now, it's also worth pausing to ask the question of what this alternate America actually feels like. Because culturally, the American Kingdom would be a profoundly different place from the republic we knew, though not necessarily unrecognizable. In our own history, Americans took particular pride in republican simplicity. It was a self-conscious rejection of European court culture. Foreign visitors in the early 19th century noticed it immediately, not always favorably. They remarked on what one writer called the awkward age of American culture which resented any unfavorable criticism from European polities. This resentment combined with a social abrasiveness that struck European observers as simultaneously boastful and insecure was the culture of a young nation that had defined itself in revolution against the old world and which had not quite figured out what to put in place of what it had rejected. In our scenario, that particular awkwardness never fully develops because the monarchy in Philadelphia provides a very different cultural center of gravity from the very beginning. It is of course not quite the elaborate decadence of, for example, the palace of Versailles of Louis the 14th, which a Prussian monarch would have regarded with distaste, but it is a formal ceremonial culture built around the rituals of the crown. American public life would reacquire an oldworld stateliness. For example, the holidays that in our own history were celebrated as populist folk movements like Washington's birthday, which we know as the folk holiday of President's Day, would become formal state ceremonies with uniforms, military music, and pageantry. The social question of aristocracy, which in our own history produced endless uncomfortable situations as Americans tried to reconcile their republican principles with their obvious desire for social classes, would be completely and quickly resolved here. Because rather than the historical natural aristocracy of talent struggling to assert itself against the Republican mob, this system produces something more deliberate through the Prussian meritocratic bureaucracy. A system in which status is earned through demonstrated competence and lifelong dedication to a professional service. It is openly hierarchical, but the hierarchy is justified on the grounds of merit rather than exclusively birth.

[00:29:05]Though with time, we can expect certain familial dynasties to develop. All of this gives it a different moral texture than the European aristocracies. The man who rises through the bureaucracy is neither the self-made man of American mythology nor the inherited nobleman of European tradition. He is something new.

[00:29:23]He is the servant of the crown who has proven his worth and wears his rank accordingly. Underneath all of this ceremonian hierarchy, though, something deeper would be happening in American culture over the course of the 19th century. The Prussian ethos of duty would be slowly encoding itself into the American character. In our own history, that character was again described as restless, oriented toward individualism and wealth and material accumulation.

[00:29:48]And that restlessness still exists here, of course, because the demographic and geographic pressures that produced it are still present, but it is channeled and disciplined by what we might call the Hala model of schooling. Developed by August Harmon Franka in Hala Prussia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the Hala system emphasized duty, obedience, and industry above individualism. American schools, especially as the monarchy's meritocratic bureaucracy expands, would thus begin producing graduates who see public service as a duty and not necessarily just a career. The standing army is, of course, probably the most transformative cultural institution of all. And in our own history, Americans maintained a deep historically rooted suspicion of professional soldiers rooted in English wigism and the experience of British military occupation before and during the revolutionary war. And because of those roots, we will still see that suspicion linger. But over time, after the revolutionary generation is gone, this will inevitably change. A standing army that is present in every city that provides employment, status, and social structure that fights the kingdom's frontier wars with the Indians and patrols its coast and marches and its state ceremonies that draw up patriotism over generations will morph the culture in such a way that they are perceived as an expression of it. By roughly the middle of the 19th century, not unlike Prussia, America will likely develop a marshall civic culture. Military service would become synonymous with manhood and citizenship. though unlike Prussia will likely have a bit more of a naval twist.

[00:31:16]And the result by the time we reach the era of westward and Pacific expansion is an American culture that speaks a more German English and probably German as well which is Protestant though shaped by both reformed English Puritanism and also likely Lutheranism, large numbers of German immigrants and a distinctly Prussian character with American undertones. This force will be moving out west and they will quickly encounter more and more tribal nations on the way.

[00:31:41]The Indian tribes of the interior would likely remain under a wardship or stewardship model. But even in this timeline, their distinct political and cultural status probably does not survive contact with the relentless demographic and economic pressure of westward expansion. There would be some explicit conflict, particularly with the Lakota, the Apache, and the Comanche whose territory and way of life were incompatible with agricultural settlement. For the rest of the Indian populations though, they would probably simply be economically coerced into the American system by force of pragmatism.

[00:32:11]Indian tribes will effectively have no other choice than to simply develop into subjects of the American crown. And by the time Germany formally unifies in the early 1870s, the American Kingdom would have already consolidated an empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The transcontinental railroad would have just been completed. Hawaii would be brought in under a protectorate relationship, and now the Pacific would become the western flank of this vast Atlantic power. Commodore Perry's unilateral opening of Japan in 1853 would favor Germany and America. America might attempt to block the British from signing the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty. A Japan whose modernization template is partly American German rather than purely British Western European would be one whose relationship with the emerging Pacific Order is correspondingly more complex. Actually, in our own history, Japan used the Prussian model as a template for their military and even a constitution. The Japanese constitutional drafters studied various Western governments, but favored the Prussian model over a more liberal British or American system. In this timeline, Japan might even view the Philadelphia model as the superior model. The Treaty of Kanagawa could include provisions for Japanese nationals to study at the Philadelphia Naval Academy, while the modern Japanese Navy would be built in American shipyards. Japan would thus likely develop as a favored nation partner of this American and German block. In China, the open door policy would become a block position enforced by the combined commercial and naval weight of Germany, America, and Japan, establishing shared treaty port access in competition with the British and French. Now, in our history, the Anglo-German naval race was a product of the 1890s. It began when Admiral Alfred von Turpitz persuaded Kaiser Vilhelm II that Germany needed a risk fleet, not one capable of defeating the Royal Navy outright, but one large enough that Britain cannot engage in it without leaving herself vulnerable everywhere else. This probably sounds familiar because it's already the situation that this American German block has developed. In our own history, Britain responded with the Dreadnaugh Revolution, which reset the baseline of naval competition and caused the arms race which helped drag both nations toward the Great War. Well, here that naval arms race is probably going to ramp up regardless throughout the era of the steamship. American naval policy would be based on the Hamiltonian Humphrey's doctrine, a heavy frigot doctrine of building fewer ships, but larger, heavier, and better ones than anything the enemy could construct in the equivalent class. By the time steam power begins transforming naval warfare, the Americans would have massive ship building infrastructure, trade, naval officers, and decades of a long tradition of technological development and ambition. The advent of the USS Princeton, which in our own history was the first crew propelled steam warship in any navy, would represent a new American naval standard that actually challenges for the first time since the Spanish Armada the British two power rule. This integration would happen at the Baltic end as well. Prussian and later German shipyards could build heavy warships not unlike in the Vilhiman era.

[00:34:59]The Danish control of the narrow straits giving access from the Baltic to the North Sea, also known as the sound, would have been solved with the Danish war, which in our own history was partly about Schles and Coloulstein, but in this timeline would now also be a naval conflict. By the turn of the century, Britain's two power standard would be much more expensive to maintain because the next two largest powers are no longer France and Russia, who were two powers with divergent strategic interests and no capacity for naval coordination. They are America and Germany, two powers of the formal alliance, shared ship building doctrines and the combined industrial output of the RU and the American Northeast, plus an ally in Japan. This is a long game naval race that has begun earlier and is more structurally threatening than anything in our own history's timeline.

[00:35:42]The North Sea and the Atlantic are both thus by the 1880s and 1890s contested spaces. Britain cannot simply do as it pleases. And on that subject, let's talk briefly about colonialism. Because in our own history, Germany arrived late to the colonial scramble, grabbing what was left in the 1880s after Britain, France, and others had taken the prime real estate. German Southwest Africa, German East Africa, Ketawan, China, and a few islands in the Pacific were valuable enough, but were clearly the acquisitions of a latecomer. and German colonial administration in southwest Africa especially produced some of the most brutal episodes of the imperial era with the Herrero and Nama genocide serving as an early warning of what 20th century mass violence would look like.

[00:36:23]In this alternate timeline, the block including Japan's primary strategic focus is the Atlantic trade corridor and the Pacific, not Africa. The Pacific would be where ambition concentrates.

[00:36:34]Drawing on the precedents established as far back as Captain David Porter's claim with the Marcesus Islands in 1813 and extending through the joint German American opening of Japan, the block would have been able to build a string of coing stations and strategic waypoints from Hawaii to the Ryuku Islands. Part of this ambition would manifest in an earlier Spanishamean war.

[00:36:53]Of course, Spain's imperial decline probably still happens as it had in our own history, but here the American Kingdom wouldn't really wait for any incident to provide political cover to go to war. Cuba and the Philippines would be essential for securing the Atlantic Pacific transit that a Central American canal itself, a project that the monarchy would probably have been contemplating since the 1840s, will eventually require. The Spanish conflict would thus come earlier and as a result, Cuba would be brought in as a protectorate and the Philippines as a Pacific forward base. The Central American Canal would be the cornerstone of this entire Pacific strategy. In our own history, it took until 1914 to open the Panama Canal. The construction of such a canal probably wouldn't be completed much earlier in this timeline as the Panama Canal was just an incredibly difficult and monumental undertaking, but serious planning for such a canal would certainly have been happening for decades longer than in our own history. Now, to be fair, plans for a Central American canal actually exist as early as 1513, ironically enough, ordered by the Holy Roman Emperor, who was a German monarch, but the actual first steps weren't taken until 1880 in her own history. Anyway, if and when the canal opens, whether or not it's in Panama or Nicaragua or elsewhere, America would suddenly become a much more powerful two ocean force with the infrastructure to act decisively in both theaters and more importantly would now control a strategic choke point that the British did not. The British built their global position around this concept from Gibralar to Suez to the Cape of Good Hope and the Malaka Straits and they would not hold back their alarm at this development. And so here we arrive at the great structural drama of this alternate late 19th century. The formation of what I kind of have come to call the onant in reverse. In our own history, the alliance system that produced the first world war took decades to coalesce. Britain's splendid isolation ended only in 1904 with the ant cordial with France driven by shared alarm at German naval ambitions and the Moroccan crisis. Russia joined in 1907 as a direct response to German power but it formed late. But in this alternate timeline, it undoubtedly forms earlier and with more urgent motivation. French revantism, as we've explained, is more intense than our own history. And France, looking at the GermanAmerican block, sees Germany and also a behemoth of a transatlantic industrial machine with American capital, food surplus, and naval power behind it. The Anglo French reproachment that in our own history required the specific diplomatic circumstances of the early 20th century and the Moroccan crisis and whatnot would happen in this timeline, but much earlier and out of fear. Russian interests are a bit more complicated because Russia still does fear British competition in Central Asia and the Ottoman secession as much as it fears German power on its western frontier.

[00:39:35]But Germany was more of the explicit, obvious, and blatant enemy of Russia.

[00:39:40]And Germany also would be aligned with a certain rival of Russia in Japan. But this doesn't cause war quite yet. Russia still has to balance the Balkans and the strange position of Austria. Everyone understands that a broad general war would be destructive. The European powers are also probably a bit worried of the wild card of America as there would be no precedent yet for what direct American involvement in a European war actually means economically and strategically. Britain also has to be careful because America has one major card on Britain. A British naval blockade of American Atlantic ports or like in our own history's World War I of the North Sea could be feasible and could seriously harm the economic standing of either America or Germany and even strangle Germany out because Britain still undoubtedly commands the seas. But any naval coercion of the American Kingdom in particular comes with an immediate and credible counter threat in the professional American standing army supplied by the transcontinental railway which can move against British Canada faster than the Royal Navy can make a blockade effective. Canada is not adequately defended and it cannot be. It is too large, too thinly populated and too expensive to garrison against a neighbor with far superior overland logistics.

[00:40:52]This is America's equivalent of the nuclear deterrent because it raises the cost of using British power against the block to an unacceptable level. And it probably is the sole reason, well maybe not the sole one, but probably a major reason that Britain has not yet gone to war with Germany to try to decapitate it before it gets too strong. In the background of all of this geopolitical maneuvering, Germany is industrializing at a rate that threatens British manufacturing supremacy in steel, chemicals, electrical goods, and precision engineering. something that in our own history triggered the final breakdown of British tolerance. German goods could begin to undercut British goods in markets in Latin America and Asia leading to a resurgence in the tariff wars which in all honesty never really ended to begin with. So by the turn of the 20th century one flash point above all others would demonstrate how fundamentally this block has reshaped the global order. In our own history, the RussoJapanese war was one of the most consequential events of the early 20th century. An Asian power defeated a European great power in open combat for the first time in the modern era and Russia was exposed as an empire on the decline, shaping the way Russia moved politically and diplomatically through the buildup of World War I. If you want a deep dive into the subject, check out my recent really well done I must say video on if Russia won the RussoJapanese War. But for our purposes though, Japan's historic victory over Russia owed something to British support, something to American diplomatic backing through Theodore Roosevelt's mediation, and a great deal to Russian military incompetence and overextension. In this timeline, the confrontation over Manuria becomes one over the open door and German and American interests in the Pacific in addition to Japan's proving itself as a great power. From the greater block perspective, a Russia that controls Manuria can exclude competitors from Chinese markets, which is a similar kind of threat in the east that British commercial hijgemony represents in the west. And so it cannot be tolerated. So we'll likely see Germany and America back Japan. Their warships from Pacific bases could bottle up the Russian Far Eastern fleet before it can be effectively reinforced. and simultaneously, and this is the detail that makes it decisive, the German naval presence in the Baltic will prevent the Russian Baltic fleet from making its historic voyage around the world to the Pacific that in our own history ended so disastrously at the battle of Tsushima.

[00:43:09]Russia is thus contained at both ends simultaneously by a coordinated two ocean naval alliance and will thus be forced to accept an internationalized Manurian railway system, probably financed by merchants from New York, which they won't particularly like.

[00:43:23]Russian territorial ambitions in the Far East would be cut off and the open door would be preserved and codified.

[00:43:29]Interestingly, this may still delay Japan's moment in the sun, so to speak, considering Japanese victory here could just be blamed on the involvement of America and Germany. Either way, for now, Japan would remain in concert with the Americans and Germans. It's possible and perhaps likely that this might change with time, especially considering the opportunist and highly nationalistic history of Japan in our own world around this time. But that's besides the point.

[00:43:54]For Russia, this is humiliation without the cathartic release of actual battlefield defeat. Russia was stopped before it could even properly fight. And the regime has failed to assert Russian great power status with nothing to show for its specific ambitions. In the face of political crisis, the Zar's government would likely be forced to turn its attention to the one theater where it believes it can still act, the Balkans. And here in the Balkans, all of the accumulated tensions of the alternate 19th century we have created would begin to converge. On one side, we have the German Empire and the American Kingdom functioning in strategic terms as a pretty unified transatlantic entity with the Japanese in their court. They are an industrial superpower with combined steel production probably exceeding Britain's by this point. Their merchant marine connecting to Hamburg, New York, Panama, Honolulu, Yokohama, and Sing Tao. They control the newly important Panama Canal. However, despite all of this material power, they are two states who understand they are still encircled. They are watched constantly by a coalition of Britain, France, and Russia who fear, resent, and are actively working to contain them, even if right now both are decently protected from the potential of a genuinely crippling maneuver from this on tant. On the other side, the Anglo French Russian onaunt, maybe not even a formal treaty yet, would still contain the world's preeminent naval power, but one feeling the financial strain of maintaining that position against a rival with American resources behind it. Alongside them, of course, would be a France, whose government would have built an entire national identity around the mythos of the Franco-Russian War, and a Russia, humiliated in the Pacific, searching for an outlook for domestic political instability. Austria, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire would both kind of be stuck in the middle of this, both probably still in Germany's camp as in our own history, but both slowly stagnating. The difference between our own path 1914 and what is building here, is that in our history, the war that came was in some respects a war of miscalculation because the Great Wars believed it would be short, decisive, and manageable. The activated military plans they barely understood and then found themselves trapped by the machinery they had set in motion. In this timeline, everyone kind of knows what's going on. The industrial capacity of the Pruso American block has been demonstrated for decades and the economic strain it has put on Britain.

[00:46:16]This alone makes the potential scale of a general conflict visible to anyone who thinks seriously about it. The naval arms race has already also demonstrated what modern industrial competition looks like. But the pressures don't just go away. Again, this is a matter of survival for Russia, a matter of national myth for France, and a matter of imperial sustenance for Britain and a matter of survival and serious defense for Germany. The fuel has been accumulating for 50 years. The transatlantic colossus has reshaped the world, but in doing so, it has also reshaped the motivations, the fears, and the desperate calculations of every power that must share the world with it.

[00:46:55]And that's where I'll be leaving this scenario for today. As always, let me know what you think will happen next. If you enjoyed this video or have any critiques or notes, be sure to leave a comment for the algorithm, and subscribe if you want to see more content like this. You can support us by becoming a channel member with the join button below. Thanks for your time. This has been the USFZ signing out.