"This generation's most fully realized alternative history"*

"We must be the great Arsenal of Democracy."

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt,

Fireside Chat, December 29, 1940

 

          The undersigned embarked many years ago on a project to chart the course of how a Southern victory in the American Civil War might have affected the course of world history.  Our effort was and remains rooted in the belief that thinking about how history might have happened otherwise affirms the democratic nature of history.  A Nation Sundered: A World Engulfed, published in 2013, and Bloodshed Universal: Slavery Triumphant, published in 2016, are the first two volumes of what will be a trilogy with the overarching title, “Democracy’s Missing Arsenal,” and which takes world history from the decisive Confederate victory at a battle of Gettysburg fought in September 1862 to the global nuclear calamity of a World War Four “fought” in October 1962.

          When we say we hold to a democratic view of history, we mean simply this. That history is not solely or even principally the product of immutable forces.  Individual human choices matter.  As citizens of a democracy, Americans have an ethical and moral obligation to study history to understand the points when choices by individual Americans have made a difference, for better or worse, for the country and for the world.  When we go about our duties as citizens of this republic, when we decide whether to cast a ballot or involve ourselves in public controversy and debate, we should understand that what we do can make a difference—perhaps a profound difference—in what our most liberal and liberating founding document, the Declaration of Independence, called “the course of human events.”

          In this regard, we believe that, in the course of the history of the United States of America, there has been no greater possibility for choices that more profoundly altered the course not just of American history, but of world history, than during the four terrible years of a struggle known by most today as “the American Civil War.”  We recognize, as students of history, that the Second World War and the Cold War of the 20th Century represent moments for possible choices that, because of the technological possibilities for destruction involved, were arguably “greater” than what could have been wrought by a different outcome of the American Civil War.  But it is our firm belief that those later moments would have been profoundly altered, and very much for the worse, had the North American Continent been left, after the mid-1860s, a cockpit of rivalry between two American Unions—one of which firmly dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal,  and that the (supposed) white “race” of men was instead God-ordained to exercise absolute dominion, through the institution of chattel slavery, over those of a darker hue.

          Three times during the last century America intervened decisively on the side of democracy.  First, we tipped the scales in the struggle with industrialized Prussian militarism.  Next, we formed the linchpin of the alliance that vanquished Nazism in Europe and Japanese militarism in East Asia and the Pacific.  Finally, we outwaited Soviet Communism in the twilight struggle of the Cold War (perhaps the most difficult of the three, because we also had to avoid the penalty for miscalculation of nuclear holocaust).  But what if there had been no United States of America at these crucial moments?  What if that country had been torn in two, by a Confederate victory in the American Civil War?  That is what our work explores: how the history of the twentieth century could have unfolded if the USA had not been able to serve, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, as "the great Arsenal of Democracy," because our factories and forces had to be dedicated, first and foremost, to an unending struggle with a well-armed and hostile neighbor lodged firmly in what had been, prior to 1861, the the southeastern quadrant of the USA.

          It is our thesis that, as things stood late in the summer of 1862, the chances were no better than even that a single American Union would survive.  Yes, there would have been a country called the United State of America.   But that country would have shared the North American continent with a second English-speaking union of states, the latter based on the principle that God had willed that white-skinned human beings should hold absolute dominion over black-skinned human beings. In the late summer of 1862, this other English-speaking union, a band of breakaway American states declaring itself the Confederate States of America, was just one battlefield victory away from prevailing in its struggle for independence.  Although President Abraham Lincoln had come to recognize that the abolition of slavery must be made a chief war aim of the North's fight to subdue the secessionist South, if the North were to prevail in that fight, he also recognized that he dared not announce emancipation without a Union victory.  And that victory had to be achieved against what had become——in the eyes of the world——the Confederacy's chief instrument of war: Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.  From the rebellion’s outset, the South had been counting on "King Cotton" to compel England and France to intervene and force the North to lift its blockade, which, as a practical matter, would also force Northern acquiescence in Southern secession.  And by September 1862, the principal instrument of that compulsion had become the victorious forces commanded by Lee.  Louis-Napoleon was champing at the bit to do just that, holding back only because England, the paramount power of the day, had not yet decided to take that step.  The government of Lord Palmerston, however, was poised to do so, awaiting only one more victory by "Bobbie" Lee to prove that the Confederacy was truly a nation worthy of recognition.

          Of course, things turned out otherwise.  Lee's thrust into the North in September 1862, with the nominal aim of breaking the vital railroad bridge across the Susquehanna at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, was really designed to bring about a battle with the Army of the Potomac—a battle Lee felt confident he would win, and which Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis hoped would convince the British government to intervene.  Lee's confidence reflected his belief that he had the measure of his opposite number, George McClellan (who had recently been restored to command of the Army of the Potomac, after his successor made a hash of things at the Second Battle of Bull Run).  Hence, Lee's puzzlement when McClellan suddenly moved rapidly against Lee's temporarily divided forces, compelling Lee to pull back at the moment of his planned move into Pennsylvania and setting the stage for what we now know as the Battle of Antietam: still America's bloodiest single day of battle.  For while the invigorating effect of perhaps one of the greatest intelligence coups in history had substantially worn off by the morning of that struggle, not even McClellan could manage to throw away completely the advantages his army had that day.  McClellan knew Lee's plan.  And although managing to fight to a tactical draw, Lee was compelled by heavy losses and superior Union numbers to disengage and withdraw from Maryland, back across the Potomac into Virginia.  An emboldened Lincoln quickly followed up with an Emancipation Proclamation that, combined with Lee's battlefield reverse, caused Palmerston to shelve intervention. This—not Pickett's calamitous failed Charge or Vicksburg’s Fall or Sherman's March to the Sea—was the true turning point of the War.  The South had never been so close to victory before, and would never be so close again.

          The Battle of Antietam perfectly illustrates what we believe to be the highly contingent nature of history, often shaped by the actions of “ordinary” individuals who likely do not realize the potential consequences of the choices they are about to make.  "For want of a nail"—or, in this case, for want of a copy of Lee's General Order No. 191, wrapped around a clutch of fine cigars stuffed into an envelope that apparently slipped from the saddlebag of a Confederate messenger, later to be found by two Union soldiers in a field near Frederick, Maryland.  In point of fact, these two young men from Indiana acted promptly and appropriately and in fulfillment of their duty as soldiers.  As a result, the Lost Order made its way smartly up the chain of command to the Major General commanding.  Even though some elements of the Lost Order had already been overtaken by events, its discovery still galvanized McClellan in a way nothing—not even Lincoln, who all but personally kicked McClellan in the pants—had done before or would do again.

          But what if those Indiana boys had overlooked the packet, or, perhaps more plausibly, had smoked the cigars and thrown away the "wrapper," because they could not be bothered to bestir themselves to fulfill some vague notion of duty and get those papers into the hands of those who ought to be shown them?  (Somebody between the troopers and McClellan did smoke the cigars, as only the copy of Lee's order reached the general.)  No Lost Order recovered by Union troops…no sudden and wholly uncharacteristic quickening of the will of George McClellan; no quickening…no Antietam; no Antietam…and instead, a battle soon after somewhere to the north—and quite possibly with a far different outcome.  Yet another Lee triumph, and….

          We readily acknowledge that the "what if…" of the American Civil War is ground that has been plowed and re-plowed and re-re-plowed again. We have read many of these efforts, and our work has been inspired by a handful among the many.  Above all, we acknowledge Winston Churchill's great 1931 essay: "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg."  In that essay, the protean mind of Churchill wrote from the perspective of a 1931 in which a Lee victory at Gettysburg (on the traditional dates in July 1863) set in motion a series of events culminating decades later in a peaceful resolution of the differences of the European Great Powers, thereby avoiding the catastrophe of our World War One.  The importance of Churchill's essay to our work is two-fold.  First, he recognized that a Confederate victory would have affected the course of global—not just American—history.  Second, Churchill adopted the radically insightful point of view of writing from within the alternate history itself: his (never named) narrator is looking back from the 1931 in which the Confederacy did win its fight for independence and wondering how history might have turned out otherwise if the North had triumphed.  We have adopted this approach, and we believe it will significantly assist our readers in coming to understand the truly global consequences of a failure of the North's effort to suppress the South's rebellion to preserve the institution of chattel slavery.  (But as our readers will quickly appreciate, we do not share Churchill’s enthusiasm for the “merits” of the European Colonial System.)

          What we believe most fully sets our work apart from prior efforts is our focus on the effect of a Confederate victory on international Great Power politics—in short, on the course of world history, and not just American history.  Our narrative is designed to show that it is beyond American shores where a Southern victory would have had its most important, and—we will argue—most disastrous effect.  Two unions based on antithetical social systems, whose relationship arises out of the nation-state equivalent of a bitterly contested divorce—this is a formula for a dramatic acceleration and intensification of the international politics of rivalry that brought on the awful bloodletting of the twentieth century in our own history.  A divided America, fully integrated into the Great Power disputes of the last third of the nineteenth century, would have been a catalyst for war: war not only on the Western Front of our history, but also on the Potomac Front—and the Ohio, Red River, and Rio Grande Fronts.  Both American continents become battlefields instead of refuges, dooming any hope of the world breaking out of a cycle of Great Power violence, which we predict would have ended only when those Powers, including the United States and the Confederacy, annihilated themselves in a final, nuclear war.  We firmly believe that Abraham Lincoln was right when he called the United States of America, with all its faults, the last—as well as the best—hope of the world.  We also believe that this hope would likely have been extinguished in the Fall of 1862, if not for the fortuity of a copy of Lee's order of battle falling into Union hands.

          In Volume One—A Nation Sundered, A World Engulfed—we chronicle how a successful Southern secession immediately unleashes a contest for influence and advantage between the two American unions, which ineluctably draws in the Great Powers of Europe.  Alliance systems that in our world did not crystalize until the first decade of the twentieth century jell much earlier.  The CSA's seizure of Cuba—for decades the desideratum of Southern slave owners—pushes Spain and the United States together, not apart.  Although the Royal Navy effectively midwifed the birth of the Confederacy, England at first tries to maintain scrupulously correct neutrality toward the two English-speaking American Unions, and for a time this policy succeeds in sustaining a peaceful engagement with the USA.  But Northern popular support for Irish independence, and the increasing vulnerability of the Canadian maritime lifeline to the expanding power of the United States Navy locked in a naval arms race with its Southern rival, combine to push Great Britain to take the fateful step of abandoning "Splendid Isolation" for an alliance—an “understanding”—with the Confederacy.  Republican France, still a rival of England, chooses an alliance with the rising naval power of America over the entente with London of our history, and their forces are soon combined with Russia’s.  When Kaiser Wilhelm II, inspired by these unfolding events to announce earlier than in our timeline his plan to make Germany a great naval power, Great Britain cannot resist the Kaiser's offer to ally his new High Seas Fleet with the Royal Navy.

          Thus the insidious dynamic of the Great Power alliances of our own history, which climaxed with the catastrophic eruption of a century ago, is accelerated in the DMA timeline, producing a world war sixteen years earlier—the “First Alliance War” of 1898, sparked by a Fashoda Crisis whose outcome is anything but the opera bouffe of our time.  And this war is a world war even more than the First World War of our time: an invasion of Canada by the United States; the punitive bombardment and burning of New York City by Admiral Jackie Fisher (accompanied by Confederate cruisers and German battleships); fighting in Mexico and across the roof of the world between the Russian Empire and British India—these and much else are added to battles on Western and Eastern European Fronts.  The First Alliance War is cut short when the Chinese legations of the Great Powers, stranded by global war, are massacred by Boxers instead of rescued at the end of the legendary 55 days at Peking.  A joint “Suspension of Hostilities” is swiftly followed by the suppression of the Boxers, the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, and the carve-up of China between the Great Powers, who set aside their differences to rebuke the Chinese for their “Asiatic insolence.”  But the Peace of Rio de Janeiro that follows is far more in the nature of a truce than a genuine peace. The great issues dividing the two alliances are left fundamentally unresolved, effectively assuring a resumption of global war. The only truly open question is precisely what "damn fool thing" would be seized upon by one side as the excuse for a Second Alliance War to finish the job begun in the Fall of 1898, and left undone by the Suspension of Hostilities of August 1900.

          Volume Two—Bloodshed Universal, Slavery Triumphant—chronicles DMA's First Interwar Period and its collapse into renewed global war in August 1914, carrying the story through that war's resolution four years later.  Whereas in Volume One, places distant in space and time were slowly but surely brought together by the ripple effects of a Southron victory in the American Civil War, Volume Two is a more focused affair, concentrating upon the years of renewed world war.  Adhering to our cardinal rule of alternate history—that nothing changes unless it would have been changed by our single “POD,” or point of divergence—we chronicle a global war that breaks out in the DMA 1914 for precisely the same immediate casus belli as the Great War of our history: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, who had he not loved his wife so deeply would not have taken that fateful trip to Sarajevo in June 1914. Opportunity is seized, the fatal shots are fired, and the world is sent hurtling down the path to, in the DMA timeline, a renewed Great Power war, a Second World War that will rage for four years, and on a scale that rivals the Second World War of our history.

          That conflict is both eerily familiar and strikingly different.  No BEF comes to the aid of France, but an AEF arrives in time to help repel the Germans from the gates of Paris, foiling a Schlieffen Plan that will be familiar to any student of our World War One.  In the DMA timeline, the greater depth and breadth of the Great Power Alliance System means that destruction is visited upon virtually every corner of the globe, including most of those spared the violence of DMA's World War One.  In the Southern Cone of South America, Chile's arrogant bid for primacy ends with her dismemberment at the hands of Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru, backed by the power of the United States, while east of the Andes, Argentina and Brazil tear at each other over the prostrate corpse of Uruguay, reducing Montevideo to a rubble-strewn wasteland.  In North America, the United States again seeks to conquer the Canadian Confederation, and this time, with the aid of a Quebecois rebellion, gallant Canada is overcome.  South of the Forty-Ninth Parallel, the American decision to send forces across the Atlantic in support of France while also launching a second invasion of Canada, as well as a Confederate decision to exploit political chaos in Mexico following the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz and attempt (for a second time) the conquest of the Trans-Rio Grande, initially produces a strange quiet along the American-Confederate border.  But that quiet will not endure to the end of the fighting, with terrible consequences for the Confederacy's capital city.  By the time of the Peace of Stockholm in 1918, Great Powers will have been brought low, alliances will be straining toward reversal, and the stage will be set for yet another global war.

          The scourge of DMA’s “Great War” is much more widespread, much more intense, and far more destructive of life and liberty, than the Great War of our timeline.  But the unavoidable focus in this second volume on military matters should not obscure the obscene human cost of Confederate independence even in areas spared direct invasion and bombardment.  The reader should always keep in mind, as we list enormous fleets of Dreadnought–class battleships (called "superships" here, in recognition of the United States in the DMA world beating out the British to build the first of the class), that every battleship built or bought represented a diversion of at least $10 million—likely worth a quarter billion today—away from civilian infrastructure, education, and health care, and (in the poorer countries drawn into the alliance system) away from food, shelter, and clean water.  Moreover, the militarization of the United States, always on guard against subversion and invasion from the South, eventually forces American society to strike a far more baleful balance between security and liberty.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes also looms large in DMA’s legal history, but not as the champion of free speech he became in our timeline.  

          Most importantly, we detail the consequences for human liberty of a worldwide Great Power conflict in which slavery plays an increasingly vital part: hence, Slavery Triumphant.  As set forth in Volume One, the victory of slaveholders on the battlefield in North America in their fight for independence emboldens slaveholders to the south, compelling Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil to abandon his plans for emancipation, as the Brazilian Empire becomes a close ally of the Confederacy.  The ensuing successful defiance by the CSA and Brazil of England's efforts to suppress the international slave trade revitalizes and re-legitimizes slavery and its analogs.  The survival of chattel slavery in the American South and Brazil leads to an alliance between these Western slave powers and Leopold of Belgium.  The terrible abuse of the Congo by Leopold and his henchmen that occurred in our history is expanded and reinforced by the transport of black Congolese to labor as slaves on the coffee plantations of Brazil, the sugar plantations of Cuba, the tobacco plantations of North Carolina, and the cotton plantations of Mississippi—as well as the slave-staffed factories of Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas.  Imperial Germany's ensuing political defense of Leopold is a devil's bargain.  In exchange for checkmating the political attack on Leopold’s Congo venture by the humanitarian reform movements of North America and Western Europe, Germany receives by secret agreement the right of free passage for German forces through Belgium at the outbreak of the next Great Power war—an agreement whose revelation in August 1914 outrages liberal English opinion, but still does not cause London to abandon its alliance with Berlin.  Realpolitik über alles is by now the grim order of the day.  

          Regardless of which Power is triumphant at the end of DMA's World War Two, slavery is the triumphant social system at war's end.  The economic success of the integrated slave systems of the CSA and Brazil, the expansion by the CSA and Brazil of slavery to the Philippines (seized by the Confederacy in league with Japan in 1898), Leopold's successful defiance of the antislavery powers and the effective revival of the Middle Passage itself—all set the stage for the decision of Germany and Austria-Hungary to reinstitute full-blown serfdom in the vast territories seized from Russia under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1917. And in nonslave societies, slavery's triumph encourages a concerted assault on the rights of organized labor by a capitalist management class that has wearied of yielding to labor's demands.  The contest between capital and labor explodes into open violence and bloody suppression, and labor is the decisive loser.  And all because McClellan could not stop Lee in 1862.

          Democracy's Missing Arsenal is not a novel.  It is not a work in which the reader follows fictional characters and through their lives is introduced to a world that might have been.  Those we name are figures from our history, transported to a time in which their lives are changed by the different course of that history.  And that history is narrated by an unnamed former President of the United States, who survived the nuclear holocaust of 1962 and whose life mission has become to chronicle how modern world civilization came to such a catastrophic end.  Our narrator was barely a teenager at the time of the outbreak of the Second Alliance War; his descriptions are necessarily affected by the fact that he lived these events when still driven by the blood-rushing imperatives of a highly provincial youth.  An American of the Midwest, he had never been to Europe, so cultural catastrophes such as the destruction of the Hermitage or the ruin of Paris are things that could have been at best emotionally distant and intellectually remote.  But as a grown man charged with leading the United States later in the century, our narrator has come to a more complete appreciation of the consequences of the world's descent into a nihilistic cycle of destruction, which by the end of a third Alliance War appears doomed to end in the annihilation of civilization itself.  He will tell us about that third world war, and how both Alliances eventually are obliterated in a nuclear holocaust, in the third and final volume of Democracy's Missing Arsenal, on which we are laboring now.

          The blunt truth is that the American Civil War remains unfinished business in America.  The first volume of Democracy's Missing Arsenal was published coincident with the Sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg.  And as the opening of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War so sadly confirmed, Americans were still divided over the moral and political lessons of our Civil War.  It is literally astonishing to us to contemplate that the "leading" (white) citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, would hold in December 2010 a festive period costume ball on the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's vote to secede from the Union.  What did these contemporary ball attendees think was the reason for South Carolina's vote to nullify the Union 150 years ago—to vindicate "states' rights"?  If so, what state right do they think that vote vindicated, other than the claimed right of white-skinned human beings to hold as property their black-skinned fellows?

          We reject emphatically both the Lost Cause vision of the Civil War exemplified by Gone with the Wind as well as the "Reconciliationism" that came to define the historical understanding of the Civil War for the overwhelming majority of white Americans—North and South—from the end of Reconstruction until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.  We believe, with Abraham Lincoln, that America could not permanently endure half slave and half free.  We believe that the tolerance of slavery embodied by our Constitution was a betrayal, however expedient, of the promise of equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and that the success of the American experiment in democracy required that, at some point, slavery had to be abolished in every state of the Union.  We believe that a Southern triumph in its war for independence would have meant a re-empowerment of the idea that slavery was a morally acceptable form of social and economic organization at the very moment when the survival of slavery internationally was teetering in the balance.  And we believe, most emphatically, that the only state "right" for which the leaders of the would-be Confederacy pitched the peoples of their states into bloody battle was the right to hold another human being in bondage.  The seven hundred thousand or more who died in the Civil War did not give their lives in a dispute over tariff reform.

          The authors are both children of the Cold War and the aftermath of American victory in World War Two.  One of us grew up in the Bronx: the eldest son of a German-American New York City cop and his second-generation Czech-American bride; his neighborhood resounded with spoken Italian and other dialects, and not a few of his older neighbors bore numbers tattooed on their arms.  The other author grew up on the other side of our continent-spanning country: a child of parents whose people—Quaker, Moravian, Huguenot, Scots-Irish—came centuries before to the land that would become the United States of America, all seeking refuge from the tyranny of what used to be familiarly called the "Old World."  Both of our lives exemplify the great, traditional vision of the American Dream in which the sons and daughters achieve success: the opportunity for which their parents worked hard to make possible.  But we also realize that, for persons of color in our country, and particularly for the descendants of those held in bondage until 1865, that American Dream has been all too often a Dream Denied, and by the continuing force of a White Supremacy that has managed to exert its cruel and crushing power even without the absolute power that comes with the right of one person to hold another as their chattel property.  When we say the Civil War remains unfinished business, we mean that this country has yet to fulfill the promise of liberation to the descendants of those who should never have been held in bondage in the first place.

          Having said all this, we must also say that we emphatically reject the suggestion made, even as this website was in the process of being completed, that the South did not lose the Civil War.  As terrible as were the decades of abuses of Jim Crow that followed in the wake of the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, and the crushing out of the hope of a South rebuilt on a foundation of equality between blacks and whites, this system of suppression did not reestablish the total terror and degradation that was chattel slavery.  The Second American Reconstruction of the Civil Rights movement would not have been possible had that been so.  American could not have served as the inspiration for freedom movements around the world that it did, had the Jim Crow South truly constituted a Southern victory in the Civil War.  The South of chattel slavery, of the vast slave labor camps prettified by the title “plantation,” where millions labored with no more rights than any other living property owned by their masters, had by 1861 metastasized to the point that it could not be ended by any means save war.  That South’s leaders chose war to protect that system, and in doing so created the opportunity for the country to end that system, the only way it could be ended.  Jim Crow was a terrible, unjust system, but the fact that it has been dismantled (at least in substantial part) by peaceful means constitutes the ultimate, decisive refutation of the suggestion, that through Jim Crow, the White Supremacist South “won” the Civil War.  The Civil War is unfinished business, but it is business that America can still complete peacefully and democratically because the South of chattel slavery was crushed on the battlefields of the Civil War itself.  That completion, moreover, will be achieved because millions of individual Americans will recognize that they can make a difference in working to achieve it. And when they do so they will vindicate by their efforts that history is still democratic—despite the best efforts of some "graced" with overweening power and privilege to make it otherwise.

          Much work remains to be done.  The promise of the Declaration of Independence remains one still not fulfilled for many descendants of those held in bondage.  The fact that the American landscape was dotted during the last century with monuments honoring those who plunged our country into a bloody civil war decades before, so their children and grandchildren could be assured of the right to hold other children and grand-children in bondage, combined with the fact that the belated effort in our day to remove those monuments to bloody treason is resisted in the name of “heritage,” is all too striking a confirmation that all too many white Americans have not and still do not get the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence.  But the fact those monument are coming down confirms, as did the Civil Rights breakthroughs of fifty years ago, that, however terrible the back-sliding by White America on the promise of the Liberation of 1865 has been in the years since that Liberation, the core fact that the South—the Slave-owning South—was defeated on the battlefield, and those held in bondage were liberated, and the moral legitimacy of bondage was repudiated, has constituted ever since a powerful rallying point against those who would, by hook and crook, restore as nearly as possible systems of White Supremacy.  And it could have come out otherwise on that battlefield, and all of humanity would have paid a terrible price if it had.

          We began crafting our narrative of this alternate—and grim—future in the fall of 1995, soon after returning from a college alumni tour of European sites recalling the fiftieth anniversary of the Allied victory in World War Two.  It was a time when Americans still basked in the afterglow of the end of the Cold War and, looking back as the twentieth century began to wind down, felt great pride in the role our country had played in the tumultuous events of that century.  We recognize that events since the tragedy of 9/11 have raised questions in many minds about whether the United States continues to be a force for progress in world affairs.  But while we share many of the concerns about the choices the United States has made in the wake of 9/11, we certainly do not agree that Guantanamo or the invasion of Iraq somehow retrospectively prove that the United States pre-9/11 was nothing more than just another amoral Great Power.  We have declined, and continue to decline, to ascribe moral equivalence to Dachau and drones.  Moreover, whatever the international wrongs of the United States in the years preceding 9/11—and we admit there were such wrongs—we believe emphatically that those wrongs pale when considered against the likely course of global events had the Confederate States of America won its independence in the fall of 1862: such that a United States of America could not have served, at the moment of crisis for human freedom, as the “Arsenal of Democracy.”

John M. Bredehoft & Michael B. King