The scenario stops short of carrying the protectorate through every later war and political crisis. The exercise draws on war studies and makes no claim to specialist expertise in Hawaiian history. Each plausible change creates further ripples, so distant outcomes require assumptions to be stacked until the exercise becomes fiction rather than historical estimation. Ship design and procurement sometimes permit firmer estimates because technical evidence constrains the possibilities. Foreign policy, international relations, and Hawaiian internal politics leave far more contingent choices open. These limits keep the proposed protectorate from becoming a detailed fictional timeline.
Notable Point · 32:12-33:09
Why the counterfactual stops before distant outcomes
Near-term causal reasoning gives way to increasingly fictional assumptions as the counterfactual moves farther from 1824.