Board Thread:New on Turtledove/@comment-24402759-20150517212707/@comment-21519-20150519021737

Japan's more of a bantam fighter than a huge threat. It strained credibility how HT always let them escape any serious consequences of their reckless foreign policy, but if we're being given a free hand to speculate I refuse to imagine that they'll continue to do so indefinitely. And with all due respect, the assumption that they're on the verge of their own atom bomb is something you've pulled out of your ass.

No, the Confederacy is not going to follow a German reunification pattern, because the historical precedents are completely different. I'd imagine that the states will sooner or later be admitted to the Union. That will be greatly delayed and complicated by the bitter memory of all the grief caused by Freedomite Kentucky and Houston, but now that there's no Confederate government there's no source of discontent to import into those states. Resettling of the US's black allies, strict requirements for full citizenship that white ex-Confeds will have difficulty meeting, and some good old-fashioned gerrymandering should combine to make that a workable solution.

As for Anglophone Canada, it's disappointing that the US never did attempt a long-term solution up there, and I see no reason to believe they'll do so now. But at worst, Anglophone Canada is sparsely populated. Now that the US has continental hegemony (and it does), its troops can hold the cities and highways and the hicks in the stick will be limited in how much mischief they can make.

If I paint a grim picture, recall that, at its worst, it's still much better than having powerful and aggressive neighbors on the borders as the US did before. So whatever the cost of a continued occupation might be, Americans will happily keep paying it.