I can't answer any of your questions unfortunately. I don't know what repercussions the UK winning the war of 1812 would bring but my uneducated knee-jerk opinion would be that I think North America would have been better off as individual colonies turned countries rather than massive states. I think an EU style system with much smaller countries would have prevented what the US became. But again, that's just my uneducated opinion and I haven't put a lot of thought into it

For the communism stuff: I am not nearly well read enough about it to recommend anything