Is the entire Mississippi River going to belong to the United States, and if so, is the state of Mississippi going to basically end up absorbed again because of any demographic shifts caused by the war thus far? I kinda can't remember how exactly everything went down or if the United States had occupied the state outside of the riverbank counties 0:
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
That’s been the predominant model of “catch-up” growth for a while now and makes sense in that specific context. The problem comes when that model has basically carved itself into the bedrock of institutions, politics, and beliefs about economics, just as it reaches the end of its useful life.
That’s Japan, which has been unable for 30 years running to really just provision good social insurance and devote money to increasing worker/consumer incomes, instead of taxing it from them to more or less give to manufacturers to hold down costs.
It’s what China risks becoming.
Fortunately, South Korea and Taiwan have genuinely democratic politics that allow people to demand the government spend money to fix problems in their standard of living, so they’re more effectively pivoting to the sort of consumption-driven, high value-added manufacturing and services economy that the US came to be. Not smoothly, but you can see structural changes and increased middle-class wellbeing in the data.
Japan is not, partly because of the LDP’s stranglehold on politics.
Why the fuck Germany has pushed itself into the same boat is beyond me. West Germany was richer relative to the United States in 1980 than today and has torched that, deeply fucked over Italy, Greece, and Spain in particular, and risked imploding the whole EU, for the sake of a small circle of capital-holders, FFS.
The US has occupied much of the Arkansas Delta and a good deal of Mississippi north of the Vicksburg-Jackson Line
Keep that analysis of "Germany as Japan" in the back of your head for this TL, is all I'll say...
What could possibly lead Germany to be far enough behind the curve that it would actually need to pull Japanese-style catch-up growth?
Or does it just engage in the sort of stupid-ass self harm as IOTL?
Nope, but the USA will be using it for free and at *best* for the CSA, the USA will be paying to maintain the river. And I expect a USA military presence in New Orleans for at least a decade.
Yes, the US is overstretched, but for the next two decades, the US will be able to re-invade fairly easily if things get really ugly in the CSA being unwilling to do what it agreed to (at gunpoint) in the peace treaty.
La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
"...increasing synthesis between the worldview of Paleologue and that of Castelnau, who by early 1917 had been War Minister for close to a decade and whose influence over the Army rivaled Boulanger's at the height of his powers; Poincaré, recalling how Boulanger had loomed over every Cabinet of the late 19th century for a decade and a half like a saber suspended by string, was uninterested in testing what could come of the endlessly ambitious vicomte being denied his due.
Ironically, Castelnau had few if any designs on the Premiership. He was already the bete noire of the opposition bloc, despised for his fervent Catholicism (even by the standards of Late Empire France) by the secularist radicals, denounced as an aristocratic reactionary by the socialists, and blamed for the imposition of the service term of three years for the French Army in order to keep the peacetime forces at par with those of Germany. [1] As such, due to both his age (he was in his late sixties when the Central European War broke out) and this strong unpopularity with the French public, Castelnau exercised his vanity not in the pursuit of grander office but the formation of a fiefdom around the extant office he already held, a pursuit of "le petit-royaume," as it came to be known in the years of the French State, where Cabinet officials and junior ministers served for years if not decades on end with few ambitions other than to leverage their portfolio into personal riches and create a motte-and-bailey over what they considered their prerogatives.
As 1917 dawned, it became abundantly clear to French policymakers that since the turn of the century, accelerated by the deaths of the Napoleon IV and Boulanger, French foreign affairs had been a dismal failure bordering on disastrous. While the Little Eagle had been mercurial, he had also been dynamic and hugely popular with both the French street (even begrudgingly respected by republicans) and foreign courts; for as indecisive as Boulanger had proven himself to be, he had nonetheless projected force and few had been willing to test whether his belligerency was merely bluster. Napoleon V and Poincaré were no such figures, and nobody seemed to be waiting in the wings who could act as such either; the rising personalities of the Late Empire were rather socialists such as Jaures or Blum, social-democrats such as Briand, or radicals such as Doumer and Doumerge. Politically, it seemed the National Bloc's time was closing in on its end, and if a political movement that prided itself on military strength was in decline, what did that bode for France when pacifist, internationalist and Marxist forces came to bear next?
Such malaise for the long-dominant droite was perhaps inevitable though with the course of French policy. The Boxer War had seen France deepen her hold over Kwang-chou-wan and earn Chefou in Shandong, but German, American and British influence had rapidly spread out from their concessions in the Southeast and the Yangtze Valleys to keep French influence cabined in the far south, where their hold over Yunnan's local officials was rapidly fraying - and such restiveness now spread to Vietnam, particularly in the borderlands. Korea, once a pseudo-protectorate of France, had never formally left the French fold but the court in Seoul clearly favored Russian, Japanese and American influence and the French resident-general was a token figure largely confined to the Busan concession as "merchants" and "missionaries" covertly carved out their niches in Korean affairs under Paris' nose. [2] Africa had seen British designs on the Indian Ocean coast realized and Germany sandwiching holdings in the Congo and Dahomey with their possessions, while effectively from their camps in Kamerun projecting their claims deep into the Ubangi-Shari, essentially foreclosing on French hopes to penetrate the Great Lakes region and ending the dream of the Dakar-Djibouti rail line that would stitch French possessions in northwest and northeast Africa together across the lower Sahel and deep interior of the continent.
The colonial setbacks, so soon after the hugely prestigious winning of such prizes at the end of the century, paled in comparison to the two most critical projects of French foreign policy over the last half century, two of the few consistencies in the fluid geopolitics of the Belle Epoque. The first was France's maneuvers in the New World - its longstanding alliance with Mexico, its recognition and economic support of the Confederate States, and its encouragement of a Francophile line in the Imperial Brazilian elite, all an effort that created the blueprint upon which the Bloc Sud of the Great American War could be built. This grand though largely unofficial and informal project finally collapsed with the exit of Mexico from the war in autumn of 1915, the peace between Brazil and Argentina in February of 1916 and between Rio de Janeiro and Philadelphia eight months later, and then with the near-collapse of the Confederate States as a viable polity in November, concluding with the humiliations exerted upon Richmond at the Mount Vernon Congress in early 1917. The hegemony of the United States in the Americas, long checked by French underwriting of her smaller but collectively fearsome rivals, was now undeterred, and few in the incoming administration of President Elihu Root forgot that Paris had been the most consistent champion of the Bloc Sud for the duration of the Great American War.
In the same month that the American endeavor came crashing down, France's more important security policy started to appear to be unraveling as the November Crisis over the Hungarian government and electoral franchise brought Austria-Hungary to the brink of internal conflict just as Franz Josef I passed away. The death of the Austrian Emperor was the more crucial piece of the immediate crisis, as it took away a figure whom French diplomats had come to see as a safe harbor in any storm, a reliable figure who had reigned since the same year Napoleon III, 68 years prior, took power in the wake of the June Days, longer than most French policymakers had been alive. Though not as absolutist as his detractors claimed, the "Alte Herr" had nonetheless been a firm-handed autocrat who brooked no fools and was predictable in how be managed the fractious politics of his polyethnic empire, and the advice he had dispensed to Emperors and Prime Ministers alike had been invaluable. The Rock of Catholicism, as Napoleon V eulogized him in Vienna at his funeral, was gone - a steady hand upon whom France had depended a great deal.
In his place came a murkier figure. His nephew Ferdinand II was seen as highly capable and very intelligent, but was not particularly well-liked in Paris. His hunting habit was considered extreme and excessive even by the standards of the day, and his marital strife and long-running affair with a Czech noblewoman who had borne him as many children out of wedlock as his estranged Saxon-born wife had borne him within it. He was thought to be considerably more open-minded about Austrian security arrangements than his uncle and was keen on a rapprochement with Germany, and the Quai d'Orsay was concerned he was open to throwing France under the bus to accomplish it. Though he spent most of his time in Prague, he was not known to hold Slavic culture in particular high regard, but saved most of his contempt for Hungarians, loathing not only the nationalists who chafed against Habsburg rule but also the ostensibly pro-Vienna magnates whom he held responsible for the various political divisions that had badly reduced Austrian military readiness. That Franz Josef had died so shortly before the negotiations to renew the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise was an unmitigated disaster, and Hungary looked poised to erupt as an Emperor who despised half his realm looked to make his mark.
This confluence of events in the mid-1910s left French policy adrift and greatly empowered the militants such as Castelnau, though that oversimplified the situation greatly, as where Poincaré was there were never moderates close by. The use of French finance as a foreign policy tool now became a military tool as well, as the February 1917 budget dramatically raised military spending, nearly doubling the outlay on the Army by 1919 and expanding the Navy's budget, primarily on additional battlecruisers rather than dreadnoughts, by sixty percent; the allocation for air power, based on observations of its lethal effectiveness in the Great American War, was tripled. Socialists and radicals were appalled and voted in large numbers against the measure, but they narrowly passed, and the 1917 budget came in hindsight to be seen for what it was - a declaration of French belligerency to the rest of Europe and the world, that of a paranoid and insecure Paris wanting to aggressively show its strength.
Other powers noticed; both Germany and Italy responded later in the year with their own budget increases, with it becoming a major electoral issue in the latter as Italians went to the polls in the fall of 1917 under expanded suffrage. Belgium, too, dramatically increased its military budget and extended her terms of conscription, but also fully standardized its military kit to match those of France for "interoperability," taking advantage of the largesse of French loans to an already affluent Treasury in Brussels. An arms race on the continent was thus, thanks to a sharp decline in France's geostrategic position, underway, and unlike prior arms crises, this one would not have a peaceful conclusion..."
- La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
[1] It should be noted that despite all this, Castelnau was iOTL a staunch republican and a fierce opponent of Petain and the Vichy regime, correctly regarding them as opportunists and traitors.
[2] I realized I never really established how France's protectorate in Korea dwindled to being basically just a scrap of paper, and this is sort of how. The post-1872 and post-1885 treaties never went out of effect, it's just rather that France has struggled to enforce its position there, at all.
Ironically, Castelnau had few if any designs on the Premiership. He was already the bete noire of the opposition bloc, despised for his fervent Catholicism (even by the standards of Late Empire France) by the secularist radicals, denounced as an aristocratic reactionary by the socialists, and blamed for the imposition of the service term of three years for the French Army in order to keep the peacetime forces at par with those of Germany. [1] As such, due to both his age (he was in his late sixties when the Central European War broke out) and this strong unpopularity with the French public, Castelnau exercised his vanity not in the pursuit of grander office but the formation of a fiefdom around the extant office he already held, a pursuit of "le petit-royaume," as it came to be known in the years of the French State, where Cabinet officials and junior ministers served for years if not decades on end with few ambitions other than to leverage their portfolio into personal riches and create a motte-and-bailey over what they considered their prerogatives.
As 1917 dawned, it became abundantly clear to French policymakers that since the turn of the century, accelerated by the deaths of the Napoleon IV and Boulanger, French foreign affairs had been a dismal failure bordering on disastrous. While the Little Eagle had been mercurial, he had also been dynamic and hugely popular with both the French street (even begrudgingly respected by republicans) and foreign courts; for as indecisive as Boulanger had proven himself to be, he had nonetheless projected force and few had been willing to test whether his belligerency was merely bluster. Napoleon V and Poincaré were no such figures, and nobody seemed to be waiting in the wings who could act as such either; the rising personalities of the Late Empire were rather socialists such as Jaures or Blum, social-democrats such as Briand, or radicals such as Doumer and Doumerge. Politically, it seemed the National Bloc's time was closing in on its end, and if a political movement that prided itself on military strength was in decline, what did that bode for France when pacifist, internationalist and Marxist forces came to bear next?
Such malaise for the long-dominant droite was perhaps inevitable though with the course of French policy. The Boxer War had seen France deepen her hold over Kwang-chou-wan and earn Chefou in Shandong, but German, American and British influence had rapidly spread out from their concessions in the Southeast and the Yangtze Valleys to keep French influence cabined in the far south, where their hold over Yunnan's local officials was rapidly fraying - and such restiveness now spread to Vietnam, particularly in the borderlands. Korea, once a pseudo-protectorate of France, had never formally left the French fold but the court in Seoul clearly favored Russian, Japanese and American influence and the French resident-general was a token figure largely confined to the Busan concession as "merchants" and "missionaries" covertly carved out their niches in Korean affairs under Paris' nose. [2] Africa had seen British designs on the Indian Ocean coast realized and Germany sandwiching holdings in the Congo and Dahomey with their possessions, while effectively from their camps in Kamerun projecting their claims deep into the Ubangi-Shari, essentially foreclosing on French hopes to penetrate the Great Lakes region and ending the dream of the Dakar-Djibouti rail line that would stitch French possessions in northwest and northeast Africa together across the lower Sahel and deep interior of the continent.
The colonial setbacks, so soon after the hugely prestigious winning of such prizes at the end of the century, paled in comparison to the two most critical projects of French foreign policy over the last half century, two of the few consistencies in the fluid geopolitics of the Belle Epoque. The first was France's maneuvers in the New World - its longstanding alliance with Mexico, its recognition and economic support of the Confederate States, and its encouragement of a Francophile line in the Imperial Brazilian elite, all an effort that created the blueprint upon which the Bloc Sud of the Great American War could be built. This grand though largely unofficial and informal project finally collapsed with the exit of Mexico from the war in autumn of 1915, the peace between Brazil and Argentina in February of 1916 and between Rio de Janeiro and Philadelphia eight months later, and then with the near-collapse of the Confederate States as a viable polity in November, concluding with the humiliations exerted upon Richmond at the Mount Vernon Congress in early 1917. The hegemony of the United States in the Americas, long checked by French underwriting of her smaller but collectively fearsome rivals, was now undeterred, and few in the incoming administration of President Elihu Root forgot that Paris had been the most consistent champion of the Bloc Sud for the duration of the Great American War.
In the same month that the American endeavor came crashing down, France's more important security policy started to appear to be unraveling as the November Crisis over the Hungarian government and electoral franchise brought Austria-Hungary to the brink of internal conflict just as Franz Josef I passed away. The death of the Austrian Emperor was the more crucial piece of the immediate crisis, as it took away a figure whom French diplomats had come to see as a safe harbor in any storm, a reliable figure who had reigned since the same year Napoleon III, 68 years prior, took power in the wake of the June Days, longer than most French policymakers had been alive. Though not as absolutist as his detractors claimed, the "Alte Herr" had nonetheless been a firm-handed autocrat who brooked no fools and was predictable in how be managed the fractious politics of his polyethnic empire, and the advice he had dispensed to Emperors and Prime Ministers alike had been invaluable. The Rock of Catholicism, as Napoleon V eulogized him in Vienna at his funeral, was gone - a steady hand upon whom France had depended a great deal.
In his place came a murkier figure. His nephew Ferdinand II was seen as highly capable and very intelligent, but was not particularly well-liked in Paris. His hunting habit was considered extreme and excessive even by the standards of the day, and his marital strife and long-running affair with a Czech noblewoman who had borne him as many children out of wedlock as his estranged Saxon-born wife had borne him within it. He was thought to be considerably more open-minded about Austrian security arrangements than his uncle and was keen on a rapprochement with Germany, and the Quai d'Orsay was concerned he was open to throwing France under the bus to accomplish it. Though he spent most of his time in Prague, he was not known to hold Slavic culture in particular high regard, but saved most of his contempt for Hungarians, loathing not only the nationalists who chafed against Habsburg rule but also the ostensibly pro-Vienna magnates whom he held responsible for the various political divisions that had badly reduced Austrian military readiness. That Franz Josef had died so shortly before the negotiations to renew the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise was an unmitigated disaster, and Hungary looked poised to erupt as an Emperor who despised half his realm looked to make his mark.
This confluence of events in the mid-1910s left French policy adrift and greatly empowered the militants such as Castelnau, though that oversimplified the situation greatly, as where Poincaré was there were never moderates close by. The use of French finance as a foreign policy tool now became a military tool as well, as the February 1917 budget dramatically raised military spending, nearly doubling the outlay on the Army by 1919 and expanding the Navy's budget, primarily on additional battlecruisers rather than dreadnoughts, by sixty percent; the allocation for air power, based on observations of its lethal effectiveness in the Great American War, was tripled. Socialists and radicals were appalled and voted in large numbers against the measure, but they narrowly passed, and the 1917 budget came in hindsight to be seen for what it was - a declaration of French belligerency to the rest of Europe and the world, that of a paranoid and insecure Paris wanting to aggressively show its strength.
Other powers noticed; both Germany and Italy responded later in the year with their own budget increases, with it becoming a major electoral issue in the latter as Italians went to the polls in the fall of 1917 under expanded suffrage. Belgium, too, dramatically increased its military budget and extended her terms of conscription, but also fully standardized its military kit to match those of France for "interoperability," taking advantage of the largesse of French loans to an already affluent Treasury in Brussels. An arms race on the continent was thus, thanks to a sharp decline in France's geostrategic position, underway, and unlike prior arms crises, this one would not have a peaceful conclusion..."
- La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
[1] It should be noted that despite all this, Castelnau was iOTL a staunch republican and a fierce opponent of Petain and the Vichy regime, correctly regarding them as opportunists and traitors.
[2] I realized I never really established how France's protectorate in Korea dwindled to being basically just a scrap of paper, and this is sort of how. The post-1872 and post-1885 treaties never went out of effect, it's just rather that France has struggled to enforce its position there, at all.
The latter, though British navel-gazing might be a better comparison
This is a good point - the US does have a considerable incentive in making sure the Mississippi is kept fully navigable
Destiny Beckons: Rise of the German Reich
"...youthful ennui. The young Germans of the 1910s had all grown up in the industrializing, booming Germany rather than the more restive Germany of their parents or the bucolic, rural and politically splintered Confederation of their grandparents. They were a generation of modern commercial conveniences, of well-paying factory jobs and dense cities teeming with people, and many of them rejected it. It is not uncommon for every generation to try to throw off the norms of their forebears, treating them as shackles, and in Germany in particular that took not the form of the freewheeling postwar debauchery and libertinism that was common in the Americas or the curiosity with radical politics as with elsewhere in Europe starting in 1912, but rather a uniquely German endeavor: the Wandervogel, or "Wandering Bird."
By the end of the 1910s and the eve of the Central European War, the Wandervogel movement sported over a hundred thousand adherents across four distinct organizations that often competed with each other over minutiae such as the involvement of adults or their perceived "social conformity." The movement urged its adherents to travel together in nature on hikes and camping trips, wandering through Alpine elements or deep forests to commune both with nature and each other. The rejection of adult direction was in part an effort to allow German youths to explore their own thoughts, ideas and passions, and create a contained space for them to share their insecurities and fears to sympathetic ears. Participants in Wandervogel learned folk songs, starting a revival of folk singing in Germany generally, and discussed and debated literature, politics, and history. The movement was tied deeply to a romanticized view of medieval, pre-industrial Germany that was seen as purer and less corrupted by money, commerce, and craven politics and businessmen; the Teutonic Knights and their crusades in the East were held as a particular inspiration and to many in the Wandervogel regarded as the final ideal of Germanhood.
This also made Wandervogel, for all its dabbling in artistic romanticism, rejection of formal structures (scouting organizations were deliberately excluded), and enjoyment of wildlife, a bubbling font of German nationalism and a fair deal of anti-Semitism; the participation of Jews was often left to individual groups and rejection was frequent. The participating youths, drawn from the generally more nationalistic Protestant middle class, saw themselves as the cutting edge of Germanic might; similar organizations in Austria-Hungary were viewed as a defense of German Austria against the Empire's competing ethnicities. And as with any prewar organization with strong undercurrents of nationalism and romanticism bordering on occultism, several organizations, particularly the chapters associated with the Jung-Wandervogel, gained a reputation for rampant homosexual activity, while other groups that did not enforce gender separation experienced the natural conclusion of sending excursions of hormonal teen-agers into the forests for entire weekends, often without supervision. [1]
By 1917, the Wandervogel movement was largely seen as having peaked, and was beginning to draw mockery from liberal, Catholic, and socialist journals, with much of the critique bearing uncomfortable parallels to the gay panic of the Harden Affair of a decade prior. But such disdain from those who saw the enterprise simply as silly diversions misunderstood its significance - there was a budding young generation drawn from the middle classes that rejected the modern paradigms and saw a more muscular, full-throated embrace of traditionalism and German nationalism under their definition of it as the solution to the perceived malaise of the age..."
- Destiny Beckons: Rise of the German Reich
[1] This is all largely true
By the end of the 1910s and the eve of the Central European War, the Wandervogel movement sported over a hundred thousand adherents across four distinct organizations that often competed with each other over minutiae such as the involvement of adults or their perceived "social conformity." The movement urged its adherents to travel together in nature on hikes and camping trips, wandering through Alpine elements or deep forests to commune both with nature and each other. The rejection of adult direction was in part an effort to allow German youths to explore their own thoughts, ideas and passions, and create a contained space for them to share their insecurities and fears to sympathetic ears. Participants in Wandervogel learned folk songs, starting a revival of folk singing in Germany generally, and discussed and debated literature, politics, and history. The movement was tied deeply to a romanticized view of medieval, pre-industrial Germany that was seen as purer and less corrupted by money, commerce, and craven politics and businessmen; the Teutonic Knights and their crusades in the East were held as a particular inspiration and to many in the Wandervogel regarded as the final ideal of Germanhood.
This also made Wandervogel, for all its dabbling in artistic romanticism, rejection of formal structures (scouting organizations were deliberately excluded), and enjoyment of wildlife, a bubbling font of German nationalism and a fair deal of anti-Semitism; the participation of Jews was often left to individual groups and rejection was frequent. The participating youths, drawn from the generally more nationalistic Protestant middle class, saw themselves as the cutting edge of Germanic might; similar organizations in Austria-Hungary were viewed as a defense of German Austria against the Empire's competing ethnicities. And as with any prewar organization with strong undercurrents of nationalism and romanticism bordering on occultism, several organizations, particularly the chapters associated with the Jung-Wandervogel, gained a reputation for rampant homosexual activity, while other groups that did not enforce gender separation experienced the natural conclusion of sending excursions of hormonal teen-agers into the forests for entire weekends, often without supervision. [1]
By 1917, the Wandervogel movement was largely seen as having peaked, and was beginning to draw mockery from liberal, Catholic, and socialist journals, with much of the critique bearing uncomfortable parallels to the gay panic of the Harden Affair of a decade prior. But such disdain from those who saw the enterprise simply as silly diversions misunderstood its significance - there was a budding young generation drawn from the middle classes that rejected the modern paradigms and saw a more muscular, full-throated embrace of traditionalism and German nationalism under their definition of it as the solution to the perceived malaise of the age..."
- Destiny Beckons: Rise of the German Reich
[1] This is all largely true
At this point I'd be surprised if Germany doesn't take control of Suez when they beat the French.
Some sort of German-Italian co-dominion?
And is it just me or is this turning into a Hungary Wank?
Perhaps, though London would surely have quite a bit to say about that
How so?
So what? This isn't OTL - where the world had to obey everything Britain did between Napoleon and Versailles no questions asked. We've already seen the Americans politely tell the Brits to fuck off in 1915, time for the Germans to follow suit.
Arguably? What part of "doesn't have the canal" is arguable?
Because blockading Germany is much easier than blockading the US, and Germany has a lot less bandwidth than even a South-less USA. War with the UK is much dicier for Germany than for the US, so it's a risk the latter can take that the former cannot. Berlin certainly has more leeway to operate than OTL, given the relative lack of UK presence in the Mediterranean, but they can't ignore them (I'd imagine that ITTL Britain would likely accept being bribed in order to let Germany and/or Italy take Suez, rather than the OTL's "absolutely not").
Plus, given Germany's interest in the Nicaragua Canal maybe this is the sort of thing that makes Britain think of a need for an interest in a Central American canal, IDK...
Stop it I can only get so aroused
Britain would probably be fine with a Suez that they have unfettered access to by way of treaty under Italian “control” but that they can interdict at leisure from Malta, to be fairArguably? What part of "doesn't have the canal" is arguable?
Because blockading Germany is much easier than blockading the US, and Germany has a lot less bandwidth than even a South-less USA. War with the UK is much dicier for Germany than for the US, so it's a risk the latter can take that the former cannot. Berlin certainly has more leeway to operate than OTL, given the relative lack of UK presence in the Mediterranean, but they can't ignore them (I'd imagine that ITTL Britain would likely accept being bribed in order to let Germany and/or Italy take Suez, rather than the OTL's "absolutely not").
Plus, given Germany's interest in the Nicaragua Canal maybe this is the sort of thing that makes Britain think of a need for an interest in a Central American canal, IDK...
Panama also doesn’t have the United States forcibly annexing the Canal Zone. So there’s that.
The Canal Zone not being a thing isn't invalid, but the lower economic growth from a lack of the canal, the likely lower use of the US-owned Transisthmic Railway post-completion of the Nicaragua Canal, and spending our existence as either an ignored backwater department of Colombia or the pawn of a great power anyway (the only way Panama could muster sufficient firepower to actually back an independence attempt) is enough weight on the other end of scale that I think Panama will definitely be worse off than OTL. And in any case I think the Canal Zone is less the root cause of what screwed Panama IOTL and moreso a symptom.
Which actually makes me think of a question - did the cession to de Lesseps' company ITTL have an expiry date? IOTL it was due to expire in 1904 (a major reason why Colombia slow-walked the Hay-Herran Treaty talks - there was a chunk of money that was going to the company's desiccated corpse that would have gone to the Colombian government if they let the cession expire).
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I would not regard changing places with Nicaragua as an improvement for Panama relative to OTL.
I can’t imagine it wouldn’t, which redounds to Colombia’s benefit (though French influence in Bogota would still probably redound - perhaps that’s why they intervened in 1901?)
Who’s the Somoza figure of Panama, I wonder?