War was inevitable, even if your approach were the way things had gone. And the South would still have lost, regardless, for the same reasons they lost in any case: they were not capable of sustaining a total, industrial war such as the Civil War became.
As for "striking first," it was dumb ... and also completely predictable.
The South ran it alone against an industrialized North. They were doomed to failure unless they had foreign alliances active in the war.
Did they really think that the secession would result in war; that a their brothers to the North would attack them? From what I’ve read in the past, some believed that they would secede and that would be that. They had threats from the Union, but dismissed them as saber rattling.