What if no German Unrestricted Sub Warfare, Zimmerman Note intercept, US DoW on Germany in 1917?

What I'm purposing is literally the initial German offer in the East IOTL; at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans first purposed Poland, Lithuania and Courland (plus Riga, IIRC). When the Bolsheviks refused to deal, it expanded into the greater demands they achieved later.



Except they have no means of doing that in the long run. Germany and her allies lasted until October of 1918, the Allies can't last through the Winter of 1917-1918 at the absolute latest.


Not at all, there was actually a bad harvest in 1917 and the U.S. was only able to keep exporting to the Entente because of the institution of war-time rationing at home. With no war and no rationing, the U.S. will be consuming it's own harvest, so U.S. farmers won't be unduly harmed.


Except France has no oil for mechanization, to disband its soldiers would leave it exposed to German attacks, and much of their cropland remains under German occupation.




Except they don't, as I've already shown via numerous other goods, such as oil and finance. According to U.S. officials in the UK at the time of their entry into the war, the food supply on hand was only sufficient for six weeks.

I suggested those terms within the scenario of the Entente as a whole cutting a deal in early to mid 1917 before things get progressively worse for them, so there would be no "last gasp offensive" because the Germans have already won. If the Entente doesn't cut a deal, then the Germans will face increasingly weaker opponents as time goes on.



Except every department of the British Government said they were going to collapse without access to American finance and purchasing, and the French President is on record saying the loss of American oil alone would be enough to collapse the French Army.



Nothing? Farmers have control over how much they plant and can prepare accordingly if they expect lower demand in 1918.



Without access to American oil, things like mechanized agriculture are not possible which would necessity mass releases of manpower and horses to make up for that, which is not possible.

By many lights, in fact, it was already doing so. By the middle of the war, the French had become heavily dependent on American food, and they ultimately received more aid than any ally. 15 The British were not far behind, and by 1918 they depended on U.S. and Canadian imports for almost two-thirds of their total food. 16 British dependence on imported food was not new, and even before the war imports had accounted for more than half of their food supply. 17 But the situation was quite different in France, which had been almost self-sufficient in the years before the war broke out, with French farmers producing upwards of 90 percent of the food eaten within their borders. 18 French agricultural production declined precipitously during the war, due both to fighting on French soil and to the fact that millions of French farmers and workers had been sent to the trenches. Importing and doling out adequate food quickly became a priority of the French government. 19 Plummeting French wheat production was an especially keen source of worry because French people in this era relied inordinately on bread, with contemporaries estimating that bread made up a staggering 70 percent of average French diets. 20 The government subsidized bread heavily during the war and set a price above which the cost of bread could not legally rise, because officials believed that a sharp rise in the price of the national staple would corrode morale and physically weaken those least able to afford it. 21 Yet there were problems with this strategy, and some argued that the low price ceiling for farmers' grain discouraged production. 22 Because of a combination of factors, by 1917 French farmers were producing less than half of the wheat demanded by French consumers. 23​


Steve, we have already been over this; there are no alternative suppliers nor any viable path to reducing consumption via cuts. The Royal Navy had already reduced as much as it could as I've shown, so what other cuts are you proposing? Likewise as I've already shown, Germany survived because it had access to Rumania and Galician oil while also having lower consumption because it doesn't have a fleet as large as the UK nor is it as mechanized as their opponents.

Without access to American finance and purchasing, the universal conclusion among the Entente was their armies would collapse and the Germans would have decisive success. The weight of historical evidence and research shows this was the correct conclusion.

... what 'exceptional' dishonesty you refer to here? ... the 'scrap of paper' statement assigned to Bethmann-Hollweg? ... which given i.e. the attitude of the british foreign policy regarding Luxembourg (VEERY similar treaty as for Belgium).