I know this is long, but bear with me.
The year is 2035, and the United States is on the ropes like it's never been before. A long economic decline and deep internal rifts have weakened the country from inside, and it's flat broke after a two-decade Cold War with the Pacific Security Alliance, an organization of states in east Asia led by China.
The PSA's overwhelming military might, fueled by a juggernaut economy, is one that the U.S. simply can't compete with. We try. But eventually and inevitably, we realize that we're outgunned.
Finally, the U.S. accepts the inevitable. We can't maintain our hegemony even over our own sphere of influence. We disband the OAS, the Organization of American States, and we admit that our time as a global superpower is kaput.
We're a little worried, however, about Korea. As we contract, we can no longer maintain the South Korean client state. North Korea, still led by Kim Jong Un and backed by China's military and economic might, is pushing hard for reunification.
As a condition of Korean reunification, the United States and China hammer out a deal. We'll leave, but China agrees not to extend the PSA, into our traditional sphere of influence, and the U.S. leaves East Asia, likely for good.
A coup is launched in Washington. The president is deposed, and a China-friendly president assumes power. He's a coarse, uneducated opiate addict from the sticks who embarrasses the United States, but who is lauded internationally as a champion of democracy and the man who will lead America out of its dark past and into the new international order.
The collapse of the United States is devastating internally. What's left of our economy implodes, our standard of living plummets, and the United States, the existence of which seemed all but eternally assured, comes apart. Texas and California, which between them constitute the sixth largest economy in the world, spin off. and declare their independence.
Losing two huge chunks of the country is traumatic and a colossal blow to our national ego, but it's survivable. With strong linguistic, cultural and economic ties to the United States, they appear to remain, for now, within the United States' faded and shrunken orbit.
With a compliant puppet as head of state, the looting of the United States begins. There's some pro forma concern about America's still formidable nuclear arsenal, and some proposals floated to remove our warheads from our territory by force, but nothing really comes of them. The world is too busy ripping America off. Foreign venture capitalists, largely from Asia, working in tandem with a crop of shady American billionaires who have emerged from the rubble to rob their own country, buy up American farmland, American industry, American railroads, airlines and airports, mines, oilfields, refineries, refineries, truck fleets and pipelines. America's vast natural resources are systematically despoiled by international capitalists who take whatever they feel like with impunity.
The American economy continues to plunge. Overnight, people's 401ks disappear, and their savings dry up like vapor. There's mass starvation. Desperate women turn to prostitution in astounding numbers. American prostitutes become so ubiquitous in the brothels of Montreal, Havana, Kingstown and Mexico City that a new slang term for whore emerges: "Kellys." For many families, the income that the Kellys send home is their only source of revenue.
Less than five years after the PSA assured the United States that it would stay out of America's traditional sphere of influence, they renege. Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Canada all join the PSA to great fanfare. The United States is powerless to resist.
The American president, his body gross and corrupted by indulgence and smack, croaks. A new president takes his place. The world isn't sure what to make of him. He's a career CIA man, and sizable chapters of his pre-political life remain opaque. What is known of him is that he is an American patriot and he regards the collapse of the United States and its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere as, quote, "one of the greatest geopolitical disasters ever to befall humanity."
The new president immediately goes to work. He attacks the opioid epidemic by cutting off supply and lining up opioid dealers and shooting them. The world press (without noting that much of these opiates come from China) decries his dismissal of due process.
Not a believer himself, he makes an alliance with the churches, viewing them as potential allies and forces for morality and stability. Such open support for religion, after decades of derision from the cultural elite, comes as both a surprise and a comfort to the American people.
He begins rebuilding American armed forces. The international commentariat mutters darkly about "the Eagle sharpening its claws again," and Beijing begins to pay close attention.
Meanwhile, Mexican-American separatists in Arizona and New Mexico see America's weakness as opportunity to secede and rejoin themselves to Mexico. To show they mean business, they blow up some movie theatres and government buildings in Chicago, Detroit and Nevada. A bloody guerrilla war ensues.
The new American president grinds them down and stamps out the insurrection. It's brutal, but it works. He is excoriated in the international press as a monster, a human-rights violator on a grand scale, and bloodthirsty tyrant. Arguably, he is. But he's got a country to pacify, and public opinion, particularly after the Mexican-American attacks on civilian targets, won't be satisfied with anything less than complete victory.
The Mexican-American insurrection dealt with, the new president then goes to town on ending the rape of the country. Using anti-corruption as a platform, he arrests those American billionaires who aren't getting on board with his program. The more problematic ones he imprisons. He replaces them with his own long-time associates, people whose loyalty he can trust. He ends the wholesale looting of the country, and he nationalizes the megacompany "joint ventures", rerouting the revenue into the national coffers.
There's a lot of pearl-clutching from the international commentariat about "the stifling of free enterprise." The international papers call him:
- A domestic tyrant
- A murderer (because, truth be told, he has bumped off a number of his enemies both at home and abroad)
- Contemptuous of institutions (or at least the ones he's not a member of)
- A deliberate saboteur of the world order, gleefully throwing a monkey-wrench into the smoothly running Pax Sinaicana
But he's attracted negative attention. The U.S., say policymakers in Beijing, Seoul and Singapore, must not now and never in future be allowed to become a danger to world order again.
The PSA immediately sponsors a coup in Texas, forcing the U.S.-aligned president of Texas into exile ad replacing him with one more sympathetic to the PSA and the Chinese-led world economic order. They begin selling their produce, their oil and their beef not to the U.S., but to the partner states of the PSA.
The U.S. president isn't happy about that. He views it as a hostile act, as, in fact, it is. But there isn't much he can do about it.
What he can, and does do, is support those Texans who still consider themselves Americans they're concentrated in the panhandle). He supplies them with arms, money, and other material support in their ongoing low-boil insurrections against the Chinese-aligned government in Austin.
Things become a little more serious, however, when Texas begins making noises about repossessing Sheppard AFB in north Texas, along the Oklahoma border. For a long time, this base hasn't been a problem. Texas lets the U.S. use it in the interest of good relations. But the change in direction and the U.S.'s possible loss of it reconfigure the calculus significantly. This base is critical to the U.S.'s security. In desperation, the U.S. scrambles the personnel already there, and occupies the area along the Red River where the base is located. It's not tough to do--most of the people living there are U.S.-aligned anyhow, and glad to be back in the Union.
But it's regarded internationally as an act of lawlessness, an attack on a sovereign nation. Dark comparisons to Hitler and the Indian Wars are made.
The PSA kicks into high gear. At a summit in Tokyo (which is now part of the PSA), China announces that both California and Texas will become fully-fledged members of the PSA. Vietnam and Japan, both of which have tussled with the U.S. before, express some hesitation. It's also noted that Texas, as a sinkhole of corruption, may not meet the standards of transparency necessary for membership in the PSA, but their voices are dismissed. It's China who calls the shots, and China wants Texas and California in the PSA.
This is unacceptable to the American president. California and Texas are his country's largest trading-partners. Traditionally, they've always been part of the United States. And strategically, it could be disastrous. The panhandle cuts deep into the U.S. heartland, uncomfortably close to the national breadbasket of Kansas and to major U.S. military installations in New Mexico. Having a Chinese ally deep in the interior of your landmass is a dagger at your heart.
He objects strongly. He says, openly and publicly, that PSA membership for Texas is unacceptable. He points out, reasonably enough, that the PSA is already on his northern and southern borders--both Canada and Mexico are members. He says that the United States has no interest in either annexing Texas, nor any plans to threaten its independence, but, at the very most, he needs to keep Texas officially neutral.
(Privately, he'd like Texas back. But he knows he has no chance of that. Half the country likes its independence, and he has no desire to get bogged down in a war of occupation. So his demands remain well within the realm of both the possible, and, from his point of view, the reasonable.)
It's a bitter pill to swallow, having to settle for the neutrality of an area that used to be part of your country. But it's the most he can ask for and expect to get. Still, it doesn't work.
"The U.S. is on the march again," the world press shrieks. "The American president, a sinister tyrant at home, is once again threatening the peace and stability of the region. It's nothing but old-fashioned American Manifest Destiny raising its ugly head again. And after Texas, then what? Is he going to take back California, too? And then Mexico? And then the rest of Central America? The Eagle can never be satisfied. His appetite for conquest and bloodshed knows no bounds. He's an international rebel and he MUST BE STOPPED NOW."
The president, with no other choice, begins massing American troops on the borders of Oklahoma and Louisiana. The Texas president, gambling on support from China and the PSA member states in the Western hemisphere, remains defiant. The international press shrieks loudly about Texas's right to national self-determination. They point to Texas's long history of resistance to oppression from Washington, like the late Governor Abbott's historic resistance against federal mask-mandates during the COVID-19 outbreak. And then someone dusts off Texas's ancient history.
"Did you know," the articles crow, "that Texas actually began as an independent Republic? That in 1835, Texas revolted against Mexico and declared itself the Republic of Texas in 1836? That the heroic Mirabeau Lamar advocated permanent independence, but the nefarious U.S. agent Sam Houston undercut him? And that Texas only became part of the United States in 1845? Yes, Texas has a LONG and GLORIOUS tradition of independence, and this is just the latest chapter in the story of the U.S. trying to absorb it."
(They don't mention that Texas's admission to the Union was delayed because it was a slave state, but no matter. That's a historical quibble, not worthy of mention. The point is, TEXAS HAS A LONG HISTORY OF INDEPENDENCE).
Preparations to admit Texas to the PSA continue unabated. The Chinese-led world order turns a deaf ear to the American president's demands. "We don't negotiate with terrorists," the world press proudly declares. "We will not heed the demands of the sinister tyrant in his spiderweb in Washington, who's been hacking us for years and trying to undermine the stable and peaceful world order established by the champion of peace and prosperity, Beijing. No negotiation. Accede to Texas's actions. Or else."
In such a situation, I ask you in all seriousness and sincerity: what should the American president do?
Hmmm...an interesting thought exercise, to be sure. (I would expect nothing less.)
ReplyDeleteMy immediate response is that it is hard to choose clear starting and stopping points in history. And, also, that in your scenario, the American president is (or seems to be) elected through something like a democratic process and isn't ensconced for life through manipulating the political system.
I do not have your deep grasp of Russian history, but my impression, from what I do know of it, is that Russia has always been hamstrung by autocrats so that it has never even come close to realizing something like its human potential. The U.S., for all its many faults and hypocrisies, can at least claim to have actualized its human capital and (somewhat) benefitted the larger world because of it.
I suspect much - if not all - of our antagonism towards Russia stems from a frustration with this massive and historical waste of human capital. What I will call our "bootstrap myth" here in the U.S. is at least founded in some small reality that, within the larger history of the world, a viable middle class was fleetingly established and allowed to some extent to flourish and influence its own course.
The Russian people, to my knowledge, never have been allowed this. In fact, China may be the only autocratic country of modern (i.e., post-19th Century) times of which it can be said a nascent middle class has emerged.
So, yeah, autocrats who leave an ever-increasing body count in their wake in order to satisfy primarily their own delusions-of-grandeur-that-never-really-was should be put down as swiftly and safely as possible, keeping in mind that they control nuclear warheads and may just be dumb and deperate enough to use them.
I have my doubts as to whether we care at all about the loss or waste of "human capital" (I actually don't like that phrase at all, seeming, as it does, to reduce us to the value of what we produce. I prefer human potential).
ReplyDeleteBut leaving that aside, two questions: one, do we have the right, ethically or morally, to interfere in the internal politics or dynamics of another country? I'd say we don't--I respect the concept of national sovereignty. There are some cases where, perhaps, we have the obligation to intervene (such as genocide, but man, is that ever an overused term which blurs when real genocide is happening. It happened in Rwanda... it's not happening in the Ukraine), but by and large, I don't believe we have the right to.
And in any case, setting aside the moral considerations, I can't think of one single case where U.S. intervention or regime change really worked out well. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt. Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua... all disasters.
I think we edge way too close to national chauvinism to say "Our way is better, and thus, we need to export it by gun barrel, if necessary."
As to the last point, about "delusions of grandeur that never really was," I think that's pap manufactured by the papers. I highly doubt Putin is doing anything like trying to rebuild the Russian empire. One, he simply doesn't have the capacity. Russia's a dying former superpower, and he knows it. This isn't about rebuilding empire, it's about a knife at his heart, which is what NATO expansion into the Ukraine is. Invasion was an absolutely insane reaction to what he perceives, I think correctly, as a mortal threat. You can't justify the invasion of another sovereign country, but we forced his hand.