American History

There is a legitimate line of thought that the rebellion by the south could have been handled differently by the north. I'm not a particular adherent, but folks not named Ron Paul are able to make very serious arguments on this topic. Most of them would have required YEARS, if not decades of basically economic conflict, possibly bordering on blockades. It's hard to see how that wouldn't have ultimately lead to an armed conflict anyway. But it might have panned out as a "divide and conquer" strategy with the Union raising conflicts with each state "separately". In the end, the problem was that the south wanted slavery and was going to continue to demand slavery through threats of violence.

And there weren't many places that had slavery like the US at the time, so comparisons to other countries are a bit false.