The flames of war had finally been lit, yet Ferdinand could not bring himself to rejoice. After paying such a staggering price, Bulgaria would still suffer a major loss when the spoils were divided in the end!
There was no helping it. The United States had people of British, French, and Spanish descent—but where was he supposed to find Bulgarians?
Through ties of blood, Britain and France could both establish puppet states to safeguard their interests in the Americas. If they managed them carefully, they might even merge them directly with the homeland in the future!
As for Bulgarians? There were certainly ten or twenty thousand of them. With a thorough search and somewhat looser standards, they could probably scrape together a hundred thousand or so. Any more than that was impossible!
That number was not even one-thousandth of the United States' population. With that population, Ferdinand estimated that Bulgaria could control, at most, some third-rate American city. No more.
This was awkward. The greatest prize had originally been the partition of the United States, but Bulgaria had no people! They could hardly emigrate to the Americas—the homeland itself did not have enough population to spare!
Without that layer of connection, Ferdinand seriously doubted how many years Bulgaria could hold its territory after it was divided up.
Direct rule would be enough to drive one to collapse with all the ethnic independence movements alone. Indirect rule would be even worse; within less than ten years, they would truly become independent, while Bulgaria's whip could not reach that far!
They could not possibly just settle for carving up a few American colonies, could they? That would be far too great a loss. What colonies did the Americans even have in this era?
There were only those few scraps of land. Most