An alternate history is perfectly conceivable. Of course, you can argue in support of anything but there were a couple of things that were bothering me about mine.
One was, what was the real likelihood that the Confederate States of America could have received enough support to bring the Union to a stalemate and that the USA could look so different. I had in my mind that this version of the USA might pursue a little more of the old "yankee trader" policy and swallow up islands and small states rather conveniently while taking advantage of wars between the old powers.
Also, I didn't want a USA that was quite as dominant. The techonology lead and ability to prepare a fighting force that could win in the east and west in the 1940s would unbalance the campaign. But was there a realistic scenario in which things didn't go so well and that Mexico was such a force to be reckoned with?
The other that was probably stretching the imagination even further was the idea that the Papacy continued to choose warlike, military minded popes after Julius II and Leo X. It would mean that Adrian VI was never pope and instead, the Papacy had found ways to replace funds used by Leo X and to continue building alliances and increasing the Papal States. Clement VII would certainly not have been selected nor any surrender of Rome and the Castel D'Angelo have occurred. He lost most of the Papal States in just the one Papacy. Had they been retained and built upon, could Italy have become an almost entirely singular Papal State?
In this history, after Garibaldi's sack of Gualeguaychu during the taking of Uruguay , the French tried to employ him in Brazil for a period but he proved too difficult to control. He was betrayed to the Haspburgs by his own employers and killed. Italian nationalism never rose above a murmur whereas the unification under Papal rule continued until just Lombardy and Naples remained, the former under French rule, the latter part of the Hapsburg Empire.
It does require quite a lot of belief that key events being changed, a different history would result.
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