Twenty Forty-Nine: An American Nightmare
A story about the geostrategic risks the United States faces after two decades of reckless foreign and domestic policies.
Bournbrook’s Collingwood writes here a story taking place in 2049. Focussed on the geopolitical position of the United States, it offers an unnerving account of what may lie ahead for our world.
It was a hot and humid day in June when the Doomsday Clock hit one minute to 24:00. We are undoubtedly even closer to midnight now, but the Institute of Atomic Energy in Beijing has not yet announced an update, and it is that day in June which sticks in the memory – when the Communist Party Central Committee released a statement that made it clear humanity was on the eve of destruction again, just 27 years since the terrifying near miss in Ukraine.
The media here in Britain have largely regurgitated the Beijing view that a revanchist United States is fomenting the crisis in an effort to recapture its lost empire. Perhaps so, but by removing all context and history from Washington’s actions, we are left with nothing but a story of a warmongering imperialist President leading a propagandised people toward war. Such morality tales are seldom good explanations for great power relations, and the best that can be said for this one is that it provides an incomplete view and that it is likely to preclude a negotiated settlement.
As is often the case, the seeds of the present crisis were sowed by the last – those stomach churning events in Winter 2022-23. With hindsight, it would have been wise to have listened to Henry Kissinger. On 24 May 2022, the former US Secretary of State told the Davos World Economic Forum that negotiations between the West and Russia over Ukraine needed "to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome.”
Yet nobody was close to accepting such concessions. In the end, the conflict, running as long as it did, cycling through numerous series of escalations, and culminating with an increasingly terrified world on the brink of a nuclear exchange, set a geopolitical table that is the root of the crisis we face now, almost 27 years later.
First, Russia had been driven into the arms of China. While previously the Kremlin had pursued a policy of cautious interaction with Beijing, it was now forced into a much closer relationship. Russia needed a large, reliable market for its gas (which was not as fungible as many of its other raw materials), and a place to procure some of the technology, machine tools, spare parts and financial services it could no longer get from the West.
Moscow therefore gave Beijing the deal of the century. In exchange for refusing to join the Western sanctions coalition and funding the new infrastructure Russia needed to shift its economic orientation eastward, Beijing locked in cheap energy and raw materials for decades, gained access to Russian military technology in areas such as jet engines, air defence and submarines, and extended its Belt and Road Initiative farther into the Eurasian heartland.
Perhaps as importantly, China now benefited from a Russia implacably opposed to the US-led Western Bloc. In the decade after the Ukraine Crisis, Moscow was hugely active in expanding and strengthening BRICS and the SCO into counterweights to the G7, currying favour with the Global South, and generally making mischief in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, the broader MENA region, Pakistan, Africa and Latin America, all of which tied down small parcels of US resources and focus that might have been directed at China.
Not that the US needed too many distractions. After a midterm defeat, the Democrat Party began the long run up to the 2024 Presidential Election with an economy well into its third quarter of contraction, and a dire European economic outlook that was starting to affect the US. Yet the reordering of global supply chains to cope with Russian sanctions had caused higher inflation, preventing the Federal Reserve from loosening policy too much, further hobbling the economy.
Europe, though, had been hit hardest. Russian counter-sanctions precipitated an economic contraction larger than during the Global Financial Crisis, bringing with it deindustrialisation, high inflation and unemployment. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean countries, which had never fully recovered from their debt crises almost fifteen years earlier, simply had no fiscal room to cushion the blow. Strikes, protests and rising support for ever more extremist parties in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia, Czechia and the Balkans destabilised European politics and further worsened the investment outlook. Even in Germany there was widespread popular discontent.
Into this maelstrom came the bill to rebuild Ukraine. With Europe on its economic knees, where was the money to come from? France pushed for the EU itself to issue debt; Germany resisted, fearing a fiscal union by the back door that would put stretched German taxpayers on the hook for the EU’s entire recovery. The US refused to contribute anywhere near as significantly as it had to the military fight, straining relations between Washington and Brussels, with the latter already frustrated that the US's lower energy costs were encouraging the relocation of European industry to North America. Concerns that a Smoot-Hawley type tariff war could erupt were real.
Yet during a visit to Berlin, President Biden did nothing to assuage European concerns. Famously, when asked by a Der Spiegel journalist what the US had committed to the trillion euro, decade-long Ukrainian rebuild programme, he leaned forward and whispered into the microphone: “We already paid.”
He had a point: without the military and financial aid the US had given Ukraine during the war itself, the country would likely have fallen quickly. Furthermore, the US had since committed 50,000 additional servicemen to Europe, stationed in Poland, Finland and within the new permanent US Navy ‘Baltic Squadron’, which was designed to reassure Sweden and the beleaguered Baltic states, whose military budgets had been shattered by the extreme economic pain they had endured during the Ukraine Crisis, of American commitment. Thus, the US taxpayer continued to pick up the European defence bill.
In fact, there was no political room for President Biden to contribute more even if he had wanted to. The US economy, far from recovering, had sunk yet farther after deadlock between the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress on debt ceiling legislation had led to the longest ever Federal Government shutdown. Furthermore, the Biden Administration itself was put under siege by multiple congressional investigations, culminating in the impeachment hearings of summer 2024.
This political and economic crucible provided the backdrop for the 2024 presidential election, between Pete Buttigeig and Donald Trump, which was somehow even more fractious than the 2020 campaign.
The very basis of US foreign policy was an issue for the first time in a century. Buttigeig argued that the US had “Stood up to tyranny, strengthened our alliance with Europe, and returned the United States of America to its role as leader of the Free World, which is more unified than at any time since the Cold War.” Mr. Trump said: “Once again, the Democrats were taken for fools. Senile Joe handed his crackhead son’s corrupt friends in Ukraine billions of your dollars, picked up Europe’s defence bill, sent our industry and your jobs to China, and weakened America.”
More important than their stump speeches, however, were their teams of lawyers. The election did not finish on 5 November 2024; instead, it switched from vote gathering to lawfare, and thence to constitutional crisis.
First, the two teams attempted to disqualify the other side’s mail-in ballots, including efforts to have the US Postal Service disrupted to prevent them arriving on time. In the first sign that social order was breaking down, key individuals in various segments of the vote counting apparatus required police protection.
Secondly, on 8 December, both sides appointed their own rival Electoral College electors in key swing states, refusing to accept the legitimacy of the other side’s. On 14 December, the electoral college met without any sense of which set of electors could transmit the legitimate votes to Congress.
On 6 January, amid protests, counter protests, riots, looting and the presence of the National Guard, Kamala Harris, the President of the Senate, started the count of electoral college votes before a joint session of Congress. She quickly disqualified Arizona, where Mr. Trump had won by only a few thousand votes, on the basis that there was no agreement on which set of electors were valid. In a dramatic scene that is now one of the most viewed political events ever on WeChat, Speaker Kevin McCarthy immediately expelled all lawmakers from the House, preventing the count from proceeding. Without a declared winner, Speaker McCarthy himself would be inaugurated as President.
One week later, with protests swelling and becoming increasingly violent, President Biden, looking frail and unwell, addressed the nation to invoke the Insurrection Act in a shambling live announcement that inspired no unity and provided no sense that anybody was in control. As three people – Trump, Buttigeig and McCarthy – prepared to be inaugurated on 20 January, rumours swirled that the police, intelligence community and military had started taking sides. With civil order having broken down, the US stock markets, which had lost some 45% since the New Year, were closed.
Meanwhile, China quietly completed mobilisation. From late November 2024, Taiwan had started sharing reports of alarming activity on the mainland. Beijing had massively increased its satellite launches, often without notifying aviation authorities. The People’s Liberation Army Navy had surged its maritime activity, and the Chinese coast guard and its unofficial maritime militia of fishing vessels had sharply increased their harassment of Taiwanese shipping. Key parts of Taiwan's infrastructure came under cyber attack. Delays to trains in China were noted, while ferry and cruise ship schedules were altered to account for ‘maintenance’ of ro-ro ferries. Cell phone signals in Fujian Province were frequently blocked.
Given the Biden administration had sought to tighten its alliance with Taiwan from almost the moment it entered office – with bipartisan support in Congress – why did Washington fail to respond to these ominous warning signs? It is easy to forget now, looking back, how the solipsism of the United States at the beginning of the 21st Century worked against the alarm being raised. Even important global events were often written, reported and viewed through the lens of the American political economy, which in this case led to a widespread belief among both Trump and Buttigeig supporters that the spectre of war with China was being used to undermine the other’s legitimate claim on the presidency. Insofar as the media covered the unfolding crisis across the strait of Taiwan, they asked which candidate war would benefit most.
We should note that the Pentagon did begin making preparations for emergency weapons shipments. This process, however, was hindered by the political backdrop and the fact the US industrial base had been insufficient to replace entirely the materiel sent to Ukraine two years earlier. Nevertheless, the Chinese noted the Pentagon’s efforts, and produced a blitz of statements and articles in friendly newspapers which variously claimed that the imperialist Americans were trying to create a crisis to distract from their chaotic and failing political system, or, that the American Deep State was planning to orchestrate a coup to return to power “hardline separatist elements of the Democratic Progressive Party,” which had lost the presidential election in May 2024.
In a speech on 10 January 2025, Xi Jinping said that China could not permit more weapons shipments to Taiwan. “If we tolerate this, the CIA would start arming Hong Kong next – and what then? Shanghai and Manchuria?” More ominously, he added: “Do not say that we did not warn you of this most bright of red lines.”
On 19 January, with the US domestic crisis at fever pitch, the Chief of the General Staff of the Taiwan Armed Forces was assassinated; the same day, Taiwan’s security services claimed to have discovered a huge cache of weapons and explosives, and pro-Beijing ‘peace protests’ erupted in Taipei.
With the first shipments of US materiel crossing the Pacific, the Chinese government announced that a “foreign backed” coup d’etat was underway in Taiwan, and that “revanchist, anti-Chinese secessionists” were trying to wrest control of Taipei to “Ukrainianize” the island. Xi Jinping gave an address in which he said that China would enforce an exclusion zone around Taiwan within 48 hours to “maintain the peace” in the Western Pacific: ordinary trade could continue, but US weapons would not be permitted to pass.
Thus, China took -- or, as we must now say if we are to keep our social media accounts, ‘reunited with’ -- Taiwan without a shot being fired.
Even if the United States had had a functioning executive branch, which it didn’t; even if public order had not broken down, which it had; and even if its citizenry wasn’t increasingly in favour of isolationism after three decades of foreign debacles, which it was, it is questionable that the US could have responded in the post-Ukraine geopolitical environment.
As we have seen, a tighter alliance with Russia had significantly improved Beijing’s energy, commodity and food security. Furthermore, Washington’s long-discussed efforts to ‘Pivot to Asia’ had not materialised. Economically, it had done nothing on the scale that would have offered a counterbalance to China in SE Asia. If anything, the US had pivoted away from Asia since the beginning of the Biden administration, with the status quo on the economic front combined with a major expansion of its military commitment to Europe.
Finally, during the Ukraine Crisis, it had badly overplayed its diplomatic hand with non-aligned nations, leaving it with less goodwill than it might have enjoyed. Although this is a factor our China-dominated academia, so keen to push the idea of US diplomatic high-handedness, might have exaggerated, it is likely true that there was little appetite outside the United States for another round of the extreme supply chain dislocation associated with the sort of sanctions needed to resist China -- and certainly there was none in Europe, where nominal GDP was still below its pre-Ukraine Crisis level.
Yet, as has been well recorded, the United States was in a political and constitutional crisis; it did not have a strong and functioning executive branch; it had lost control of public order. Simply: the Chinese saw a window of opportunity. And ultimately, Taiwan, having had some 18 months to digest the fate of Ukraine, whose ‘victory’ looked anything but, had no desire to court the same fate. Taipei therefore swiftly accepted China’s offer of a security arrangement and an enhanced free trade zone, and some angry protests aside, life on the island continued for several years largely as before.
The US strategic position in the Western Pacific, however, was shattered. From our mid-century position, it is easy to see the Asian Economic and Security Union as an inevitability. Taiwan, however, was the key to it all. By breaking the so-called First Island Chain, China gained a semblance of geostrategic freedom. Its access to the deep Pacific was unhindered by US Navy controlled chokepoints for the first time. It now dominated the main shipping routes from the Strait of Malacca to Japan and Korea, and all the undersea communications cables in the same direction. The South China Sea was truly a Chinese lake.
The first nations to join the AESU were the Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia. The trade terms were generous and valuable, the defence arrangements, which involved the removal of US bases, came as baggage. The more nations joined, the more relative power China gained, and the more it made sense for the others to make the jump. By the mid-2030s, Laos, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Brunei had also acceded. Even Vietnam did in 2039. While Japan and South Korea both remain officially neutral today, their AESU Association Agreements are a tacit and perhaps even elegant recognition of the economic and military strategic realities they face.
It all made sense. Territorial disputes melted away in a giant free trade zone in which capital, goods, services and even, to a lesser degree, people, could by 2035 move freely, all backstopped by the Eurasian Trade and Currency Bank’s clearing services, liquidity provision and special reserve notes, as well as the People’s Liberation Army’s Pax Sinica.
In the First Quarter of 2049, this economic leviathan accounted for almost 50% of global GDP, despite India having recently become the world’s largest economy and the breakneck growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Although some dissident scholars in the United States disagree, China is essentially to the AESU what Germany was to the EU in the 2010s and the US was to NATO.
If that was that, perhaps we would not now be facing the horrifying prospect of nuclear war. The constitutional crisis of the second half of the 2020s permanently weakened the US. Many major trade surplus countries had already been alarmed by the US confiscation of Russia’s reserves and expulsion from SWIFT, but chronic trade and fiscal deficits and, importantly, such extreme political dysfunction, coming after successive debt ceiling impasses, finally punctured market confidence in the full faith and credit of the US Treasury, and accelerated the move away from the US financial system. Combined with China’s decision to end capital controls and make the Yuan fully convertible to facilitate the creation of the AESU, the dollar lost its status as the world’s only currency of exchange, plunging the US into yet more economic hardship.
When America began to emerge after the election of 2029, it faced an entirely different economic system: it had to balance its current and capital accounts over the long run, it could no longer set the terms of trade in SE Asia, the centre of global economic gravity, and it had to compete on even terms for commodities and markets with other great powers. Worse, Beijing’s solidified regional hegemony allowed it to turn its great economic, diplomatic and military power outward. Hungry for natural resources, the China entered South America in force.
Many South American nations welcomed China’s first steps into the vacuum left by the US in the early 2030s. Beijing did not demand what the South American nations often saw as the US’s hypocritical political and human rights standards. Nor did it attempt to force them to adhere to Washington Consensus neoliberal economic policies, to which many of the governments of the late 2020s, swept to power in the Second Pink Wave of Latin America, were fundamentally opposed. Instead, Chinese trade deals came with substantial baggage-free inward investment, which helped improve infrastructure and pay for social programmes (and, of course, enrich elites).
Yet there was another aspect. After the Cold War -- during which the US had ruthlessly enforced the Monroe Doctrine at the merest hint of a potential transgression -- US foreign policy in Central and South America had been an unattractive combination of neglect, pious hectoring and political meddling backed by overweening economic and military power. Latin American elites were keen to use the opportunity of US weakness to make sure it remained at arms length permanently.
If the construction of the Chinese naval base at Callao, near Lima, Peru, which moored its first PLAN aircraft carrier in 2031, was a problem for the US, Washington did not complain. However, the establishment of PLAN ports in Barranquilla in Colombia and Guayaquil in Ecuador, which between them controlled the sea lanes and entrance to and from the Panama Canal, raised great alarm.
The early years of the De Santis presidency had been received well by the Chinese, and by the broader AESU and Western media. By necessity, his first term had been focussed on constitutional reform and economic recovery, the latter of which was progressing at breakneck speed: geopolitically weakened as it might have been, the United States still had awesome economic potential. A recovering US trading eagerly and peacefully with AESU was seen as a great positive for global economic prosperity, now booming after the Second Great Depression.
In the final year of his second term, President De Santis accepted an invitation to address the Eighth PacAm Trade and Security Conference, the first to have an official US presence. Although it is widely unknown by the broader global public, Whitehouseologists have examined and interpreted President De Santis's 'Brasilia Speech' as though it was the Emperor's stool. Some argued that it was typical of a post imperialist power struggling to adjust to a new reality. Others posited that it was written under the influence of Elbridge Colby, the present Secretary of State and bete noire of the Chinese media, who De Santis had appointed National Security Advisor at the beginning of his second term.
Whatever its basis, this little recognised speech is crucial to understanding our current crisis. In it, De Santis heavily criticised the Chinese occupation of Djibuti and its regular harassment of India in the Arunachal Pradesh region. "While the United States was in constitutional and economic crisis," De Santis said, "China constructed an economic and security bloc that gave it awesome geopolitical power. Yet a unipolar world with one master, one sovereign is pernicious for everybody in the system, and for the sovereign itself."
He continued to the crucial point: "We are starting to witness a nearly unconstrained use of economic, political and military power, resulting in a world where nobody feels safe, whether Africans in Djubuti or Indians in Itanagar. We also see this trend with the expansion of Chinese defence alliances on the Caribbean and Pacific shores of the South American continent. We in the United States have to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?"
De Santis suggested a new global security architecture to manage Trans-Pacific relations; however, the Chairman of the AESU Committee of National Representatives dismissed the entire episode as "Disappointing and unhelpful." What right did the US have, many commentators wondered, to decide the security arrangements of sovereign countries like Venezuela and Colombia -- especially when Washington must surely understand the suspicion in which it was held in Latin America? And why was it an issue anyway? China had no intention of invading the United States.
Beijing's response to the Brasilia Speech was to ignore it and continue expanding its reach in Latin America. A year later, it offered comprehensive defence and trade deals to Cuba and Mexico -- nations of almost neuralgic concern to the US.
China also continued with its policy of projecting soft power through funding NGOs, journalists and independent media organisations, and increasingly even in the Latin Diaspora in the US, who by the late 2030s were the most powerful political grouping in many of the southern states of America. Tens of thousands of student activists, community organisers, social media influencers and journalists from the Americas had benefited from training in China as part of the Confucian-Christian cultural exchange programme.
The crisis we now face is widely considered to have started in 2042. The events of that year have been debated to the point at which new revelations and interpretations do more to reignite furious partisan disagreements than they shed new light on the matter. Therefore, this outline is brief and deals with the broadest of known facts.
In March 2042, as the Mexican government closed on signing a trade agreement with the AESU, Secretary of State Colby flew to Mexico City to play hardball. The United States could not continue its current trading relations with Mexico if it signed this treaty, he said. Further, he pointed out that most AESU agreements had been swiftly followed by PLAN porting rights, and the United States would view any Chinese military presence so close to its borders as hostile. However, if Mexico rejected AESU, Washington was prepared to offer significant trade benefits, bilateral development loans and greater military-intelligence help to deal with the organised crime-big business nexus in Mexico.
Ultimately, whatever our 'official' version of history says, it made far more sense for Mexico to maintain friendly relations with the US, which was then still its largest trading partner (and still by far the most powerful military force on the continent). The Mexican government also had an incentive to gain additional US help dealing with organised crime, which, it was widely accepted, was funding the opposition. The Mexican president therefore agreed to Colby’s ‘Super NAFTA’ deal.
Yet as soon as the news broke, huge protests, under the banner of a hitherto unknown organisation called ‘New Pacific Future’, formed in Mexico City. A slick social media campaign broadcast the protests around the world: 'No to American Imperialism! Yes to a New Pacific Future!' In a shock to Americans, New Pacific Future banners started appearing in ‘pro-Mexico’ protests in Dallas, San Jose, Los Angeles. Global mainstream media, heavily funded by AESU corporates, swung behind the protesters.
The Mexican government's attempts to hold firm failed. A compromise agreement, whereby the AESU deal and Colby's Super NAFTA would be put to a referendum, broke down after a police response to armed protestors led to 34 deaths. Where these armed men came from is still unknown, but the deaths sparked a furious response that precipitated a vicious circle of increasing violence. Eventually, with police refusing to act further, the Mexican president had to flee to the United States as protest leaders installed an interim government, which was immediately supported by Beijing.
The fact the new Mexican administration included a young Secretary of Foreign Affairs who had been educated in China, a Secretary of the Treasury who had worked for a decade in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and a Secretary of the Interior with links to the cartels only worsened relations with the US, who suspected China had a far greater hand in the protests and putsch than publicly acknowledged.
Washington refused to recognise the new government, and imposed a series of tariffs on trade and remittances. It also said that it would view the stationing of any Chinese troops on Mexican land as a clear and present threat to the security of the United States. The final breach between the two nations came in 2043 with the US Army incursion into Mexican territory in settlements and towns to the west of Juarez to destroy what Washington called "the bases and infrastructure for cartel militias".
The world, as we know, was outraged by the violation of Mexican sovereignty -- and it is probably true that Washington hoped to humiliate the new government. Yet the Americans had a point. Drug abuse had become a serious issue during the depression of the mid and late 2020s, and all efforts to engage with the new Mexican government to find a solution to the vast quantities of narcotics flowing across the border had failed.
Indeed, the Mexican government's links with the cartels and their increasingly well organised and equipped militias fuelled Washington's suspicions that the drug trade was being tacitly endorsed by Mexico City. In fact, there is some evidence -- dismissed as conspiracy theories by the mainstream media outside the US -- that the Chinese themselves were providing military training and intelligence to the cartel militias.
The negotiation of the Ottawa Agreements, brokered by Japan and the Kingdom of England, raised hopes of reconciliation. Yet in the years since, Mexico -- its government beholden to a small group of hard line nationalists and kept in check by cartel militias, some of which even integrated into the regular Mexican Army -- has done little to fulfill its end of the bargain. Meanwhile, world opinion has been firmly against the US; China, the preeminent economic power, has done nothing to calm its effort to bring Mexico into its economic and military sphere: in fact, it started openly training Mexican soldiers. And, of course, Japan and England have been impotent to enforce the Agreement they themselves facilitated.
Although this version of events goes against the received narrative, we should not forget that in 2044 a prominent Chinese foreign affairs academic suddenly disappeared from public life after saying that China was, "to quote an American phrase, leading Mexico up the Yellow Brick Road. The United States will never, no matter what we think, accept Mexico as part of our sphere of influence, and if we continue our current policies, Washington is going to wreck that country, and we will see a full breakdown of our relations with Washington that might take decades to repair."
How do you go bankrupt? Slowly, and then all at once. We are entering the all at once stage. China slowly increased its military partnership with Mexico, but last year -- perhaps as a response to the United States' successful effort to prop up the government in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was fighting a brutal civil war against Chinese backed insurgents -- China signed the Sino-Mexican Strategic and Security Partnership, and undertook two joint military exercises: Eastern Gale with the army, and Righteous Squall with the navy.
Washington appears to have viewed this as beyond the pale, and seems to have now jettisoned any hopes that the Ottawa Agreements would be fulfilled or of rapprochement with Beijing. Presently, eight full US divisions sit across the border of the Rio Grande, and the entirety of the 82nd Airborne and US Army Rangers are on a heightened state of alert in Fort Bragg. Somewhere in the Gulf, within easy striking distance of Veracruz, we know there is a US Navy/Marine corps strike group, centered on one of the old Gerald Ford Class carriers and three of the new US Marine Corps flat tops, with semi-submersible frigates, refitted Zumwalt laser and railgun destroyers, and scores of ASW/AA artificial intelligence missile drone outriders arranged around them.
Some argue that Washington is bluffing. The ASEU is, after all, united in its condemnation of the buildup and has promised "unprecedented economic punishment" if the US attacks. For several weeks, China has been funneling advanced weaponry and drones to Mexico. The Communist Party Central Committee's recent statement that it "would not negotiate with imperialistic powers who threaten the sovereignty of peaceful neighbours..." and that it would "'...provide that assistance which our friend and ally Mexico needs to defend against Washington's cowboy diplomacy" might have almost willfully ignored how the United States views having an anti-American government in Mexico City, but it surely raises the cost of invasion for Washington.
Furthermore, the US is trying to contend with huge protests and civil disobedience in its southern states, where the majority Hispanic populations are outraged. The more extremist leaders have in turn infuriated hawks in Washington by raising the US annexation of Mexican territories in 1848, stirring up long forgotten resentments. Even as the technocratic liberals in Washington see the potential destruction of all their work to rebuild the US economy after the Depression, the hawks see China trying to permanently hobble US strategic freedom and even foment the breakup of the nation itself. Whatever our views, these are real fears within the US.
Others say that even if the US is not bluffing, Mexico would be unable stand for long against the awesome firepower the US has deployed. Chinese military tech or not, the US will simply overwhelm defences, they argue: if it is to be war, it will be a short one.
Some of us, though, are more focused on that cold shiver we feel remembering the crisis in Ukraine, and how the world avoided Armageddon by the skin of its teeth. Somebody had to make this argument, and explain this history, even if it means losing my access to social media and perhaps my job. It would be better for the world if we had negotiations now: before the Doomsday Clock hits midnight.
Author's note: This fiction was not written to suggest the most likely course of events over the next quarter century. In fact, it represents a highly unlikely outcome. Instead, this story was meant to cast light on some of the fat-tail geostrategic risks the United States faces after two decades of reckless foreign and domestic policies. Those of us old enough to remember the world at the end of the Cold War know the almost impregnable strength of the US geopolitical position in the early 90s -- probably unrivalled for any great power in history -- with the most powerful military in the history of the world in relative terms, huge amounts of international good will and soft power, and a strong and stable economy and political system. It stood astride the world as the unrivalled hyperpower. Yet over the last 30 years it has:
(i) spent trillions of dollars and immeasurable political capital on a monstrously hubristic foreign policy that has slaughtered millions and left an archipelago of failed or chronically destabilised states in a vast arc from Tripoli to the Hindu Kush, facilitated the rise of China, and antagonised Russia to the extent it has been driven into the arms of America's main geostrategic rival;
(ii) pursued an economic policy that rapidly enriched a small sliver of society while immiserating the middle class and hollowing out America's once mighty industrial base; and
(iii) engaged in hyper-partisan politics that, in combination with (ii), has polarised the nation politically.
While this essay offers a glimpse of what might happen should all those chickens come home to roost at once, it must be noted that even the results of one of these issues could significantly weaken the US position in the world. And, given we now face the very real prospect of general war between the world's two major nuclear powers, the above future history does not even represent the worst case outcome. Ultimately, the United States of America still possesses awesome power: it is the world's only regional hegemon and is thus uniquely able to turn its might out into the world; it has an unrivalled strategic depth of human, industrial, and natural resources; its demographics are the best of any developed nation; and it has open access to two of the world's oceans, and the mightiest navy in human history to protect them. Nevertheless, it is in the process of squandering these natural gifts at exactly the moment it faces its most powerful ever challenge.
ADM Collingwood writes and edits BritanniQ, a newsletter for intelligent Britons. To find out more, and subscribe free of charge, click here.
