But one can say that a victorious Germany, imposing peace on the defeated allies at the treaty of Potsdam, would not have had the reparations and grievances that were actually inflicted upon it by France at Versailles. As a consequence, the rise of Hitler would have been much less likely. In that case, neither the Holocaust nor the second world war would necessarily have followed. If Germany’s Jews had survived, Zionism might not have had the international moral force that it rightly claimed after Hitler’s defeat. The modern history of the Middle East would therefore be very different – partly also because Turkey would have been among the victors in 1918.
In the kaiser’s Europe, defeated France would be the more likely seedbed for fascism, not Germany. But with its steel and coal still in German-controlled Alsace-Lorraine, France’s military and naval potential would have been contained. Meanwhile, defeated Britain would have seen its navy sunk in the Heligoland Bight, have been forced to cede its oil interests in the Middle East and the Gulf to Germany, and have been unable to contain Indian nationalism. In practice, the British empire would have been unsustainable. Today’s Britain might have ended up as a modest north European social democratic republic – like Denmark without a prince.
Meanwhile America, whose entry into the war would have been successfully pre-empted by Germany’s victory, would have become a firmly isolationist power and not the enforcer of international order. Franklin Roosevelt would solve America’s postwar economic problems in the 1930s, but he would never fight a war in Europe – though he might have to fight one against Japan. The Soviet Union, with a wary but powerful neighbour in victorious Germany, would have been the great destabilising factor but it might not have been invaded as it was in 1941. And with no second world war there might never have been a cold war either.
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