Counterfactual: Confederacy Survival

Attention Conservation Notice: Only of interest if you like long and rambling posts on counterfactual history.

A staple of the counterfactual history genre is the possibility of the Confederacy succeeding in breaking away from the Union. Most people focus on what sorts of military tactics or strategy would be needed for that success to happen, or follow domestic politics for a few decades. I'm going to assume that the Confederacy could indeed have broken away had things gone only slightly different, and would have survived.

Now consider the impact on WWI, and WWII if that still happens. The Confederacy would have been strongly pro-Allied--given its long-standing trade links with France and Britain and their tacit support during the Civil War (which would have been greater if not for especially fortuitous harvests).

The North would have been more split. You have a larger German-American population. On a strategic level, the country would have been sandwiched between a British Canada and British-leaning Confederate states. Whatever the Anglophile inclinations of elites, the incentives would have been to balance against neighboring Allies and embrace the Axis. Britain, after all, did burn down the US capital.

That is; America, by virtue of being undivided and secure, had the luxury of idealism in foreign policy. America viewed itself as an exceptional empire, rather than a full participant within a system of competing equals--yet this was predicated on geographical unity at home. A rupture after the Civil War would have raised the potential of bringing Europe-style state divisions, and Europe-style realpolitik to the Americas. The plausible corollary is that a European-style system of entangling alliances is not out of the question.

By this point of course, the North would have left the South far behind on industry and manpower. It's hard to say what would happen. Perhaps the North could use global war to re-unite the country by force; or else the South could hold off the North through Boer-style guerrila tactics. Either way--the US would probably not be contributing troops to Europe on net, and trans-Atlantic trade in supplies and goods would be badly strained. Especially by 1917, when Germany made peace with Bolshevik Russia and redeployed troops west; American reinforcements were the crucial ingredient stemming that tide and turning the war around. Without those critical inputs, it's easy to imagine Germany coming out ahead in WWI.

And then all of that feeds into WWII, etc. etc. A Germany without resentment would probably not have gone towards the Nazis; the Russians would presumably still go Soviet. It's tough to guage what would happen to the defeated Western Allies. An early loss of the colonies seems likely, probably with no partition in India. Their eventual status of the Western democracies would depend on the coming fight between Germany and the USSR, and they would then either be drawn into a Germany-dominated European Community, or live as Soviet client states.

All of this is speculation, but I think there's some value to this type of counterfactual thinking. To the extent that we can plausibly connect small changes in the past to enormous changes today--that highlights the precariousness of history as dependent on contingent events. Things didn't have to turn out the way they did. This is Niall Furgeson's take on counterfactual history; it's an account which prizes the importance of particular people, happenstance events, and the like.

Alternately, we may find that things end up roughly where they are now. This would be the determinist take on history, which has a long lineage going back to the materialists and Marxists. This is the harder type of counterfactual history to model. It's a lot easier to change one event and extrapolate forward; it's a lot harder to think of what the counter-moves and responses would have been from other involved people.

In particular, what you get at in this scenario is the huge importance of extra-European and extra-Eurasian powers in maintaining a balance on the continent. Powers in Europe have a natural tendency to try to seize hegemonic power, which Rome alone managed to pull off. The Hapsburgs, Bourbon French, Napoleonic French, the Second Reich, the Third Reich, and then the Communists--all saw their only hope of security through continent-wide domination. In all cases, this tendency was checked and prevented through a shrewd pattern of alliances sewn up first by Britain, and then America acting in concert with Britain.

But that type of balancing was very contingent. It required a unified Britain, secure behind a navy, being an economic powerhouse an possessing a strategic interest in European events. And then it required an America which was unified and which identified with the British containment mission. The first counterweight is pretty much there by virtue of geography. It's the second, American, counter which was much more iffy, but was also essential for a European balance of power. Without these counterweights, land wars in Europe would probably have continued until either the logic of atomic warfare kicked in, or one state dominated the rest.

As long as I'm wildly speculating anyway, I'm going to go ahead and say that this balance of power was pretty crucial to Europe's success. Being divided into numerous, non-hegemonic states propelled the incentives for innovation and growth in ways more absent in the Middle East, India, and China--all of which were for significant periods dominated by one autocratic sovereign.

The McCain Health Plan, Again

I noticed about a year ago that McCain actually had a decent health plan. It called for taxing premiums for insurance to pay for coverage for those without. The idea is that the tax-exclusion privileges wage compensation that comes in the form of health benefits, encouraging a general rise in healthcare costs. At the same time, the fact that this benefit only applies to employer-provided insurance contributes to a world in which millions of people without employer-coverage can't get health insurance. I noticed how prominent Obama economists had in fact called for exactly such a plan to reign in out-of-control healthcare spending while expanding coverage.

Obama was very opposed to the idea at the time. He denounced it as a new tax, and spent millions on ads convincing people it was a bad idea. The wonkish liberal blogosphere joined in attacking the plan. Here is Matt Yglesias:

One issue that hasn’t gotten nearly the widespread attention it deserves is that in the context of John McCain’s overall policy for steep tax cuts for high-income Americans he’s also proposing a very significant tax increase on the broad group of people who receive health insurance through their employers

As a result of that kind of fear-mongering, Democrats have found it very hard to impose any kind of tax on health care plans in current bills. The bills they plan cement the link between employment and health insurance and do little to tackle the fundamental drivers of escalating health costs. Well, here's Yglesias now:

by artificially subsidizing health care consumption by the relatively prosperous, [the tax exclusion] drives prices up for everyone, including the not-so-prosperous. And because it’s a tax-side subsidy, the subsidy does little-to-nothing for the poor.So scrapping or curbing the subsidy makes sense in general. And it especially makes sense as a way of raising money to finance progressive policy like ensuring that health care is affordable for the poor and the lower-middle class.

You can argue about whether McCain's plan for redistributing the revenue from the tax--in the form of a refundable tax credit--was the best way to expand coverage. A lot of the criticism there said something like "poor people don't pay taxes, so they won't benefit." But a refundable tax credit will effectively act as a subsidy for people who don't pay much in taxes. In fact, Wikipedia tells me that some conservatives and libertarians oppose such credits exactly for this reason.

But instead of having a debate about the particulars, we effectively shelved one of the best tools for health reform off the table about a year ago. In a world in which the financial crisis hit a few months later--say the Bush team decided to save Lehman--McCain would probably have been elected President. It's intriguing to imagine if McCain could have teamed up with Wyden-Bennett to produce a bipartisan health plan by now. One suspects not, but everyone is entitled to their own counterfactuals.

Vietnam Revisionism, Iraq, and Afghanistan

Lexington reminds me to bring up a vastly under-discussed topic: Vietnam Revisionism.

Counterinsurgency broke the news after Petraeus and McChrystal, but it was actually very big in the popular and military imagination during the '60s as well. Mao's success in China sparked a huge discussion of how to conduct and defeat insurgency. For obvious reasons, the Vietnam War continued this trend.

Reading A Better War, a classic revisionist account of Vietnam, is like looking at Iraq all over again. The initial commanders in both wars--Westmoreland in Vietnam, Tommy Franks and others in Iraq--were basically clueless about how to tackle local insurgency. Westmoreland, for instance, focused on body counts and firepower. He threw artillery and air power at guerrillas, and focusing on winning battles. He exuded optimism and threw out made-up statistics during press conferences. As in Iraq, this led nowhere.

Then you had new generals in both wars. In Vietnam, General Abrams came in. He replaced "search-and-destroy" missions with ones focused on "clear-and-hold" to implement a policy of civilian defense. He focused more on training native Vietnamese units. This coincided with Nixon's "surge" strategy of escalating the conflict to leave on better terms. The dramatic change in policy as a result of following counterinsurgency doctrine and the dramatic change in the outcome of the war in America's are not in question. Needless to say, the surge under Petraeus and Odierno, and the shift in American doctrine towards COIN, was a similar story.

The disputed part about Vietnam Revisionism is whether Abrams' efforts were enough to win the war in the long run. North Vietnam enjoyed enormous support from Communist states, while Congress eventually killed all military aid to South Vietnam. In the Revisionist counterfactual, limited military aid would have allowed an insurgency-free South Vietnam to sustain direct attacks from North Vietnam.

I think a fairly convincing argument can be made for that scenario. But in any event; there are better and worse ways of fighting insurgencies, and it takes a while to develop the competency and leadership capable of fighting them.

The success of counterinsurgency in Vietnam and Iraq doesn't imply that it will work in Afghanistan, a very different country. Nor will it tell you if Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan were ultimately worth fighting. Just because a given tactic can win a war doesn't mean the war is worthwhile.

But from the point of view of South Vietnam, at any rate, it probably was. South Vietnam remained mired in poverty for twenty years after its war, while it enjoyed growth under a free market before the war, and would probably have enjoyed even greater success had it won the war--something like a North Korea/South Korea analogue (I might even go so far as to say that if you think the Korean war was worth fighting, than you should have supported South Vietnam in 1975, even if you opposed sending troops in during the 60s).