As of March 18, 1915, they basically had succeeded in forcing the straits, meaning the British capture of Constantinople and, probably, knocking the Ottoman Empire out of the war - they were literally one day's worth of naval advance away - and through a legitimately incredible degree of incompetent bungling at pretty much every level of command over the ensuing several days, they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, with all that entailed for the future of both the war itself and for the entire history of the 20th century
Obviously a counterfactual this huge raises up so much chaos that it's not really possible to parse in any specific way, but I feel like it's a reasonable general supposition that, if they had just pushed their ships forward that one more day and captured Constantinople/KO'd the Ottomans, the British are in a much, much stronger relative position at the end of the war (which maybe even gets moved up a couple years), certainly with regard to the Middle East in particular but probably even in general
To put a finer point on it: If the British didn't accidentally abandon their attack at literally the dumbest possible moment, there might still be a British Empire. I think it's not ridiculous to posit that the effects that radiated out of this single, incredibly profound fuckup may have been the thing that reduced the UK from the most powerful empire the world had ever seen to 1.2 increasingly mediocre islands in the North Atlantic
And like, OK, if you're Literally Winston Churchill, this is an unambiguously Terrible Thing, and it's like the seminal tragedy of the 20th century or whatever. But for everyone who isn't Literally Winston Churchill, and especially for Americans (who directly benefited geopolitically from British decline more than pretty much anyone else), and especially especially for liberal-minded Americans like myself (who are opposed to imperialism on principle), I feel like this can only be described, with the benefit of 110 years of hindsight, as some kind of historical miracle. It needn't have happened, it shouldn't have happened, but thank god it did, otherwise imperialism - real, capital-I, white-man's-burden, Cairo-to-Cape-Town-ass Imperialism - might very well be alive and well today
this just adds fuel to my haha-jk-unless conspiracy theory that wwi was done by time travelers
