need for “clawback clauses” whenever audits revealed excessive profits. That would have helped us improve the efficiency of our future defense contracts.

Then, in our version of history, around this time Roosevelt, for his part, thought back to the history of occasional Congressional opposition to executive branch warmaking, beginning with the War of 1812, and about the honorable intent of the Neutrality Acts. Rather than seeing these as threats to his power, he realized that he had a rare historic opportunity to fashion an amendment that would, if imitated by other democracies, might lead us to a safer world. In other words, he had a small change of heart, and a major flash of long-term foresight, realizing he could guide a useful improvement to American constitution, a rare Presidentialexpanded self-defense case, which might, or might not, include a general defense of human dignity and democracy, to the public. The public could then be allowed to periodically validate, or not, the case the President made, for any war exceeding a certain size and duration.

In the new amendment, the President lost no warfighting powers, but was now required to morally justify the war in annual State of the Union addresses. Every four years—a duration chosen because it is a presidential term and the length of World War I–the public would be allowed a national vote on whether continuationof any war of that length seemed to be justified or not.

In our counterfactual, while this modified amendment was being considered, Germany invaded Poland, as it did in September 1939. In