I’m not sure about the “sleeping dragons”, though, since I can’t think of many cases where small groups created technologies that counterfactually wouldn’t have happened (or even would have happened in safer ways).
For technology this is possible; here we get into arguments about replacability and inventions that are “after their time” (that is, could feasibly have been built much earlier, but no one thought of them). Most such examples that I’m aware of involve particular disasters, where no one had really cared to solve problem X until problem X manifested in a way that hurt some inventor.
For policy / direct action, I think this is clearer; plausibly WWI wouldn’t have happened (or would have taken a different form) if the Black Hand hadn’t existed. There must have been many declarations of adversarial intent that turned out quite poorly for the speaker, since it put them on some enemy’s radar before they were ready.
For technology this is possible; here we get into arguments about replacability and inventions that are “after their time” (that is, could feasibly have been built much earlier, but no one thought of them). Most such examples that I’m aware of involve particular disasters, where no one had really cared to solve problem X until problem X manifested in a way that hurt some inventor.
For policy / direct action, I think this is clearer; plausibly WWI wouldn’t have happened (or would have taken a different form) if the Black Hand hadn’t existed. There must have been many declarations of adversarial intent that turned out quite poorly for the speaker, since it put them on some enemy’s radar before they were ready.