Okay. I had a mod-enforced vacation, and then I had a real vacation, so I wasn't able to respond to any of this. Now I am. Woop.
Even if the British were to lift the blockade in that sense, they would probably continue patrols there. What with the other local hazards, it's hard to imagine Germany getting much of a volume of trade with the outside world, and that's also assuming the Germans had anything to buy with. Remember, the British ran out of American money in late 1916, and London was the world's financial capital at the time. Germany can hardly be expected to seriously be able to purchase many American goods.
In my timeline - which people really ought to read
- the blockade's end did not permit Germany to magically increase the amount of matériel available from American sources; its chief utility was in permitting the Germans to better smuggle heavy arms to Ulster anti-Home Rule forces (a relevant thing, since ITTL Asquith's Home Rule compromise was pro-Irish instead of pro-Ulster).
Also, I don't believe that Germany has the ability to crack the Allied lines unless one of two things happens, neither of which has much to do with the blockade. Firstly, Falkenhayn's Verdun plan could be radically revised and cleared up, with the Germans committing a proper attacking force initially in order to successfully seize the relevant ground necessary for his Gorlicesque grinding tactics. This was plausible, but would require significant amounts of luck for the plan to both be outlined correctly and then implemented correctly.
Alternatively, the Germans could play things like they did initially: let the offensives of 1917 bleed out the Anglo-French armies and badly demoralize them, force a separate peace with Russia in the East, and then mount a massive offensive in the west to crush the French. For this to work, the Germans would have to refrain from unrestricted submarine warfare. They would benefit from the collapse of the Anglo-American trading arrangements in 1917 and the resulting resource starvation of the Entente armies, along with fairly serious fiscal consequences, but it is unlikely that the Western powers would have collapsed on their own account due to this or that the Germans would be able to exploit the concomitant disorder and weakness on the front with their own troops.
As far as the Austro-Prussian war goes, Napoleon was singularly unwilling to actually fight unless he felt pressed to do so after the events of 1859. In order for him to be that willing to go to war, he would have to suffer a humiliation, not a success. It was a humiliation, over the 1867 Luxemburg crisis, that made Napoleon believe that he had to force the issue of war with the Norddeutscher Bund eventually. (I have written a timeline about Napoleon III being more of a protagonist in Europe in the late 1860s and early 1870s, or rather, more of a threat, but it could use polishing. Worth a look if you're interested, though.)
Furthermore, the Hungarian Diet had planned for the 1917 Ausgleich negotiations a series of demands that would have effectively broken the association between Austria and Hungary: a fully independent Hungarian army, a fully independent Hungarian foreign ministry, and the release of what little economic planning controls Vienna had left in Transleithania. Had the war not intervened, the Hungarians would've dissolved the state or caused a civil war. ITTL, the war was 'quiet' enough until 1917 for the Diet to sunder the union (aided by the counterproposals of Kaiser Franz Ferdinand I) and force a civil war. The Austrians only reestablished control with the aid of massive German and Russian military assistance, military courts-martial, widespread executions, and, eventually, genocide. By 1931 the state had effectively become an authoritarian nightmare with a ramshackle political consensus, governed by imperial fiat from the Hofburg and resting on the corpses of over two million Hungarian soldiers and civilians.
You'd have to basically rewrite America's entire political history of the late 1850s if you were to want an Anglo-American war in addition to the Civil War, because you'd have to eliminate both Lincoln and Seward from the equation - both men were strongly against the idea of fighting the UK - and those were the only serious Republican front-runners. And then you run the risk of making the ACW itself unlikely, and creating approximately a zillion butterflies. I don't think it'll work.
The problem is that the British correctly calculated that no blockade would anger the Americans enough to cause a war, so there would be no reason to lift a blockade out of respect for American sensibilities. The only reason for the British to lift the blockade would be if the Grand Fleet suffered such losses that they could not keep their cruiser squadrons up north indefinitely.
Even if the British were to lift the blockade in that sense, they would probably continue patrols there. What with the other local hazards, it's hard to imagine Germany getting much of a volume of trade with the outside world, and that's also assuming the Germans had anything to buy with. Remember, the British ran out of American money in late 1916, and London was the world's financial capital at the time. Germany can hardly be expected to seriously be able to purchase many American goods.
In my timeline - which people really ought to read
- the blockade's end did not permit Germany to magically increase the amount of matériel available from American sources; its chief utility was in permitting the Germans to better smuggle heavy arms to Ulster anti-Home Rule forces (a relevant thing, since ITTL Asquith's Home Rule compromise was pro-Irish instead of pro-Ulster).Also, I don't believe that Germany has the ability to crack the Allied lines unless one of two things happens, neither of which has much to do with the blockade. Firstly, Falkenhayn's Verdun plan could be radically revised and cleared up, with the Germans committing a proper attacking force initially in order to successfully seize the relevant ground necessary for his Gorlicesque grinding tactics. This was plausible, but would require significant amounts of luck for the plan to both be outlined correctly and then implemented correctly.
Alternatively, the Germans could play things like they did initially: let the offensives of 1917 bleed out the Anglo-French armies and badly demoralize them, force a separate peace with Russia in the East, and then mount a massive offensive in the west to crush the French. For this to work, the Germans would have to refrain from unrestricted submarine warfare. They would benefit from the collapse of the Anglo-American trading arrangements in 1917 and the resulting resource starvation of the Entente armies, along with fairly serious fiscal consequences, but it is unlikely that the Western powers would have collapsed on their own account due to this or that the Germans would be able to exploit the concomitant disorder and weakness on the front with their own troops.
As far as the Austro-Prussian war goes, Napoleon was singularly unwilling to actually fight unless he felt pressed to do so after the events of 1859. In order for him to be that willing to go to war, he would have to suffer a humiliation, not a success. It was a humiliation, over the 1867 Luxemburg crisis, that made Napoleon believe that he had to force the issue of war with the Norddeutscher Bund eventually. (I have written a timeline about Napoleon III being more of a protagonist in Europe in the late 1860s and early 1870s, or rather, more of a threat, but it could use polishing. Worth a look if you're interested, though.)
I agree that the unrestricted submarine warfare was the tipping point, but the way to stop that isn't to get the Americans trading with Germany.
These are excellent objections and he should have paid more attention to them.
Not particularly limited. For one thing, the federal government's ability to punch through a blockade to get useful war matériel would be as good or better than the Confederacy's, and the South successfully evaded the Federal blockade for pretty much the entire war. And the Confederacy's problems were, fundamentally, not logistical ones. They lacked a coherent command structure, any capacity for collegiate nation-wide military decisions, and, worst of all, the merest idea of how to win the war. These things do not materially change if they are not gifted independence - and Washington - on a silver platter by the British and French. And the British and French were probably not capable of doing that, as we apparently agree.
I kind of sound like a broken record here, but the timeline I wrote - linked in my sig - really is useful for this sort of thing. The Habsburg Empire's plans for reform had no consensus behind them and probably wouldn't have solved anything anyway. The major suggestions were either federalizing the empire into a corporate association of nation-states (good luck defining the borders or figuring out anybody who actually supported that, along with creating an actual coherent federal policy when two governments blocked enough stuff as it was) or creating a third monarchy, of Slavs, to counterbalance the Magyars and, effectively, outvote them, a project that would've caused civil war with the Hungarians and probably would've ended up with the Slavic monarchy being equally as intractable as the Magyar monarchy was.
Furthermore, the Hungarian Diet had planned for the 1917 Ausgleich negotiations a series of demands that would have effectively broken the association between Austria and Hungary: a fully independent Hungarian army, a fully independent Hungarian foreign ministry, and the release of what little economic planning controls Vienna had left in Transleithania. Had the war not intervened, the Hungarians would've dissolved the state or caused a civil war. ITTL, the war was 'quiet' enough until 1917 for the Diet to sunder the union (aided by the counterproposals of Kaiser Franz Ferdinand I) and force a civil war. The Austrians only reestablished control with the aid of massive German and Russian military assistance, military courts-martial, widespread executions, and, eventually, genocide. By 1931 the state had effectively become an authoritarian nightmare with a ramshackle political consensus, governed by imperial fiat from the Hofburg and resting on the corpses of over two million Hungarian soldiers and civilians.
The problem with the specific Trent Affair is that the whole thing showed how unwilling the British and Americans were to go to war with each other. The UK had declared war over much less from other countries, but even Palmerston was loathe to consider fighting a war with the numberless American millions in which Canada was sure to be at serious risk. (That fundamental diplomatic calculus was why the British tended strongly towards good relations with the US in the postwar era - the settling of the Alabama claims, the Treaty of Washington, and so on.) And the Lincoln cabinet wasn't so insane to actually want one war, let alone two.
You'd have to basically rewrite America's entire political history of the late 1850s if you were to want an Anglo-American war in addition to the Civil War, because you'd have to eliminate both Lincoln and Seward from the equation - both men were strongly against the idea of fighting the UK - and those were the only serious Republican front-runners. And then you run the risk of making the ACW itself unlikely, and creating approximately a zillion butterflies. I don't think it'll work.
No, your objection is very legitimate, and I am somebody who has studied the time period extensively, for what it's worth.
The Zimmermann note contributed to the atmosphere of war, but it was very much secondary to the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. The Germans had sent about a zillion incriminating and impractical messages to various powers around the world during Wilhelm II's reign, and none of them did any more than annoy the powers that they were targeted at. By comparison, the resumption of unrestricted U-boat attacks and the sinking of specific American vessels directly fed into the timeline of the declaration of war and were employed in the Congressional debates in March and April 1917.
