How a South American debt crisis might realign great powers

Could a South American crisis have changed the alliance structure before World War I?

Yes; debt-enforcement interventions might have aligned Britain and the United States against France and Germany, with major consequences for a later global war.

The counterfactual begins with real German and French efforts to compel South American debt repayment. Britain could oppose those actions when they threatened British commercial interests. The United States had an additional reason to resist European intervention through the Monroe Doctrine. A crisis that grouped Britain and America on one side and France and Germany on the other could therefore reshape alliance structures and make a subsequent world war more globally distributed from the outset.