Middle-earth What-ifs

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Belegorn

I think also he might have become less powerful with continued effort to dominate the people he became a tyrant over so maybe his sphere of influence grows less over the years. I think the Ring might have given him an endless reservior so that he did not have too much worry about wasting away his power like Melkor did.

I think this is a good point. We know Morgoth became diminished over thousands of years of spending his power on projects, as well as leeching himself into the earth. Sauron didn't need to go quite so far for the very reason that Morgoth had done it for him, but he still needed some way of taking full advantage of the Morgoth-element in nature as well as tethering himself and his greatest works to Middle-earth indefinitely. Otherwise, he would probably have spent his comparatively small amount of native power very quickly. He might have reached the point where, if defeated and probably executed by his enemies, he would have been incapable of embodying himself again.

So the Ring, or something like it, was probably necessary, and would have been quite clearly so to his intelligent if evil mind. Note that he started building Barad-dûr around 1000, but did not finish it until after he had forged the Ring around 1600. Presumably he knew he needed the Ring or something like it to complete these kinds of projects. It seems a little odd to imagine the foundations (which were the part bound to the Ring) being made after the rest of the structure, but there you go. Perhaps a scenario where he didn't make the Ring (at least by choice) isn't very likely.

As Corsair_Caruso has pointed out, a more likely scenario is a failure to collaborate with the Gwaith-i-Mírdain. This would probably have been the most realistic alternative to what actually happened, and the one with the best outcome. As Elrond states, "It would be better if the Three had never been." (Although he may specifically be referring to a scenario in which the One is regained by Sauron there; the phrasing is a little unclear in context).

It's been noted that Sauron was still defeated by the Last Alliance even while he had the Ring, which is a legitimate observation. I think on the other hand, however, the flaw with Sauron's plan was that he didn't have time to prepare properly for war with Gil-galad and Elendil. He had expected, I believe, that the Númenórean invasion of Valinor would simply force the Valar to wipe out the Númenóreans, not that Eru would intervene in a way which pushed the Faithful to Middle-earth and destroyed Sauron's body. That doesn't really relate to the rest of the issue, but I think it does remind that there were practical considerations to Sauron's policies as well. The Ring was not necessarily an "albatross" as Kuru put it but it certainly couldn't do everything on its own: it made Sauron's work easier, but not effortless.