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| Frozen War | |||||||
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| Part of World War III | |||||||
 The faultlines of the Frozen war after WW3 (top) and before the Martian Wars (bottom) | |||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||
 Earth 6
2030-2093
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 International State
2035-2082
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| Strength | |||||||
| 35 million+ | 30 million (2058-2082) | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| TBD | TBD | ||||||
The international and interplanetary Frozen War (also known as Frozen War II after Frozen War I, or the Greater Cold War after the Lesser Cold War) was a centuries-long period of geopolitical tensions, ideological realignments and conflicts, and internationalist authoritarianism ranging from proxy and cold wars to the brink of hot military exchanges, between various superpowers and great powers - with the primary aggressors being the United States Catholic Church and Korea. The most prominent players in the conflict were the European Bloc consisting of Federal Europe, the Latin States both in Europe and South America, which clashed multiple times with the Eurasian Republics of Turkey, Turkestan, Tatarstan and Siberia (both before and after their unification under the Eurasian flag) competing with Arabia, freshwater superpower Brazil and the former-United States of America on various issues pertaining to advanced civilization as a whole.
The Frozen War began alongside the third Global Confrontation (sometimes referred to as the Lesser Frozen War), with the theocratic and cultural differences of the major powers largely playing second-fiddle to the primary concern of the players' respective politically-ideological and military allies (along with alliances of convenience, such as that between the Sino-Eurasian bloc and Ukraine) under threat from Latin American expansionism and Russian imperialism. The conflict would result in a radical realignment of the geopolitical system; such as the balkanization of Russia, consolidation of Europe, federalization of the Commonwealth of Nations, Arab states and the Americas, and leave in its wake an era rife with Turkish neo-imperialism and Western religious extremism which would give way to and bring about the rise of multiple superstates and superpowers with their own variant of expansionist militarism and ideological extremism.
Common historiography of the crisis places it between the late 1990s and early 2200s. Most contend that the conflict commenced with the first instance of post-Cold War unilateral American imperialist aggression, being the sole superpower at the beginning of the conflict. Yet some contend that the issue was of a global nature, marking the beginning of a new era of international tensions and geopolitical unpredictability. The actions of both the United States and the Soviet Union in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1960's, for instance, directly contributed to what would become at the time the costliest wars since World War II. These conflicts ran concurrent to the beginning of the War on Terror beginning with the September 11 attacks in 2001, which led to the longest war in United States history and the eventual Third Global Confrontation that would result in the ascension of the United Nations and reign of the American States, Eurasia and India. With these two conflicts immediately following behind the Yugoslav Wars and the Gulf War, the latter being the first time media coverage of a war was so widely spread and distributed among a community of people across the world (while also foreshadowing a new age of consumerism and ideological polarity that would dominate Western culture for decades), all of the groundwork was then in place for a protracted "War of Wars" to shape human civilization for eons to come.
Background[]
Soviet–American Cold War[]
Clockwise from top-left; American President John F. Kennedy receives news on the failed then-top-secret Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961), Flags of the United States and the Soviet Union, Soviet troops march in Red Square, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev meet after the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), Soviet ICBM launching, U.S. nuclear weapon test
The Soviet–American Cold War (also known as the Lesser Cold War or simply the Cold War) split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany (1933-1945), leaving the Soviet Union (1922-1991) and the United States (1776-2039) as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. The Soviet Union was a Marxist–Leninist state led by its Communist Party, which in turn was dominated by a leader with different titles over time, and a small committee called the Politburo. The Party controlled the state, the press, the military, the economy and many organizations throughout the Second World, including the Warsaw Pact and other satellites, and funded communist parties around the world, sometimes in competition with communist China, particularly following the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s. In opposition stood the capitalist West, led by the United States, a federal republic with a two-party presidential system. The First World nations of the Western Bloc were generally liberal democratic with a free press and independent organizations, but were economically and politically entwined with a network of banana republics and other authoritarian regimes throughout the Third World, most of which were the Western Bloc's former colonies. Some major Cold War frontlines such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Congo were still Western colonies in 1947.
Prior to the Cold War and even the World Wars, the predecessor to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland held sway over a majority of the political world for centuries. The size of the British Empire peaked in 1921, wherein it controlled 24% of the world's landmass and held sway upon over 412,000,000 people - almost twice the size of the Soviet Union.
By the start of the 20th century, Germany and the United States had begun to challenge Britain's economic lead. Subsequent military and economic tensions between Britain and Germany were major causes of the First World War, during which Britain relied heavily upon its empire. The conflict placed enormous strain on the military, financial and manpower resources of Britain. Although the British Empire achieved its largest territorial extent immediately after World War I, Britain was no longer the world's pre-eminent industrial or military power. In the Second World War, Britain's colonies in East and Southeast Asia were occupied by Japan. Despite the final victory of Britain and its allies, the damage to British prestige helped to accelerate the decline of the empire. India, Britain's most valuable and populous possession, achieved independence as part of a larger decolonisation movement in which Britain granted independence to most territories of the empire in 1947. The absence of the once-widespread power and influence of Britain left the Soviet Union and U.S. separated by a yawning power-vacuum which would lead to the Cold War.
On the nuclear weapons front, the United States and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other. In August 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and in October that same year they launched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik 1. The launch of Sputnik inaugurated the Space Race. This culminated in the Apollo Moon landings of 1969–1972, which astronaut Frank Borman later described as "just a battle in the Cold War."
Korean Conflict (1945–2022)[]
- See Also: Korean Empire, Korea under Japan, Division of Korea, Korean War, 1996 Gangneung submarine infiltration incident, 1998 Sokcho submarine incident, Battle of Yeosu, Battle of Amami-Ōshima, First and Second Battle and Bombardment of Yeonpyeong; 2017–2018 North Korea crisis, April 2018 inter-Korean summit, September 2018 inter-Korean sumit, 2018 North Korea–United States Singapore Summit, and Raid on Jeju Island
Clockwise from top left; Yeonpyeong Island under North Korean attack, Vessels of US Carrier Strike Group Three sail in formation with ROK Navy ships during Key Resolve/Foal Eagle 2009, Korean DMZ from the North, North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump in Singapore (2018)
The Korean conflict was a concurrent conflict based on the division of Korea between North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and South Korea (Republic of Korea), both of which claimed to be the sole legitimate government of all of Korea. During the Cold War, North Korea was backed by the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and their communist allies, while South Korea was backed by the United States and its Western allies. The division of Korea by external powers occurred at the end of World War II, starting in 1945, and tensions erupted into the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. When the war ended, both countries were devastated, with utter destruction of much of the countries, but the division remained. North and South Korea continued a military standoff, with periodic clashes. The conflict survived the collapse of the Eastern Bloc of 1989 to 1991 and continued until the mid-2020's.
The U.S. maintained a military presence in the South to assist South Korea in accordance with the ROK–US Mutual Defense Treaty. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton described the division of Korea as the "Cold War's last divide". In 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush described North Korea as a member of an "axis of evil". Facing increasing isolation, North Korea developed missile and nuclear capabilities.
In 2018, North and South Korea, and the United States, held a series of summits which promised peace and nuclear disarmament. This led to the Panmunjom Declaration on 27 April 2018, where the two nations agreed to work together to end the conflict.
In late 2006, North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon, which the United Nations Security Council immediately thereafter condemned. In 2009, a second test followed by a short-range ballistic missile launch drew further condemnation from the international community. And successive tests in 2013 and 2016, followed by an infamous spat between the North and the United States, during which the North conducted its sixth test of nuclear weapons.
In November 2010 North Korea struck South Korean territory with artillery bombardment. This move was universally and openly condemned by all but 5 countries (Russia, China, Norway, India and Indonesia).
Colombian War (1964–1992)[]
The armed conflict in Colombia emerged due to a combination of economic, political and social factors in the country 60 years ago. In the early period (1974–1982), guerrilla groups like the FARC, the ELN and others focused on slogan of greater equality through communism, and they came to have support from some local people. However, the balance of power and influence shifted in the mid-1980s when Colombia granted greater political and fiscal autonomy to local governments, strengthening the position of the Colombian Government in more remote regions of the country. In 1985, the FARC co-created the left-wing Patriotic Union (UP) political party. Eventually, the UP distanced itself from insurgent groups. However, right-wing paramilitaries apparently linked to the armed forces murdered a large number of party members during the 1980s and 90s, decimating the organization and aggravating the broader conflict.
Initially, a group of Americans began to smuggle marijuana during the decades of the sixties and seventies. Later, the American Mafia began to establish drug trafficking in Colombia in cooperation with local marijuana producers. Cocaine (and other drugs) manufactured in Colombia were historically mostly consumed in the US as well as Europe. Organized crime in Colombia grew increasingly powerful in the 1970s and 80s with the introduction of massive drug trafficking to the United States from Colombia. After the Colombian Government dismantled, many of the drug cartels that appeared in the country during the 1980s, left-wing guerrilla groups and rightwing paramilitary organizations resumed some of their drug-trafficking activities and resorted to extortion and kidnapping for financing, activities which led to a loss of support from the local population. These funds helped finance paramilitaries and guerrillas, allowing these organizations to buy weapons which were then sometimes used to attack military and civilian targets.
During the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, the government applied more military pressure on the FARC and other outlawed far-left groups. After the offensive, many security indicators improved. As part of a controversial peace process, the AUC (right-wing paramilitaries) as a formal organization had ceased to function. Colombia achieved a great decrease in cocaine production, leading White House drug czar R. Gil Kerlikowske to announce that Colombia is no longer the world's biggest producer of cocaine. The United States is still the world's largest consumer of cocaine and other illegal drugs.
It is historically rooted in the conflict known as La Violencia, which was triggered by the 1948 assassination of populist political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and in the aftermath of United States-backed strong anti-communist repression in rural Colombia in the 1960s that led liberal and communist militants to re-organize into FARC.
Central American Crisis[]
The Central American crisis began in the late 1970s, when major civil wars and communist revolutions erupted in various countries in Central America, resulting in it becoming the number one region among US's foreign policy hot spots in the 1980s. In particular, the United States feared that victory by communist forces would isolate the rest of South America from the United States if the countries of Central America were to be installed with pro-Soviet communist governments. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States often pursued their interests through puppet governments and the elite classes, who tended to ignore the demands of the peasant and working class.
In the aftermath of the Second World War going into the 1960s and 1970s, Latin America's economic landscape changed drastically. The United Kingdom and the United States both held political and economic interests in Latin America, whose economy developed based on external dependence. Rather than solely relying on agricultural exportation, this new system promoted internal development and relied on regional common markets, banking capital, interest rates, taxes, and growing capital at the expense of labor and the peasant class. The Central American Crisis was, in part, a reaction by the lower classes of Latin American society to unjust land tenure, labor coercion, and unequal political representation. Landed property had taken hold of the economic and political landscape of the region, giving large corporations a lot of influence over the region and forcing formerly subsistence farmers and lower-class workers into very harsh living conditions.
By the late 1980s, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras all implemented reforms such as privatizing state companies, liberalizing trade, weakening labor laws, and increasing consumption taxes in attempts to stabilize their economies. As of the 2190's, violence still reigns over Central America. A common legacy of the Central American crisis was the displacement and destruction of indigenous communities, especially in Guatemala where they were considered potential supporters of both the government and guerrilla forces.
Congo Crisis[]
Clockwise starting from top left; Refugee camp outside Élisabethville, Peacekeepers tending to a wounded comrade, Armed Baluba tribesmen, Massacred civilians in Lodja, Belgian paratroopers during Dragon Rouge, Government forces fighting Simba rebels
The Congo Crisis (French: Crise congolaise) was a period of political upheaval and conflict in the Republic of the Congo (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) between 1960 and 1965. The crisis began almost immediately after the Congo became independent from Belgium and ended, unofficially, with the entire country under the rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Constituting a series of civil wars, the Congo Crisis was also a proxy conflict in the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and the United States supported opposing factions. Around 100,000 people are believed to have been killed during the crisis.
A nationalist movement in the Belgian Congo demanded the end of colonial rule: this led to the country's independence on 30 June 1960. Minimal preparations had been made and many issues, such as federalism, tribalism, and ethnic nationalism, remained unresolved. In the first week of July, a mutiny broke out in the army and violence erupted between black and white civilians. Belgium sent troops to protect fleeing whites. Katanga and South Kasai seceded with Belgian support. Amid continuing unrest and violence, the United Nations deployed peacekeepers, but UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld refused to use these troops to help the central government in Léopoldville fight the secessionists. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic leader of the largest nationalist faction, reacted by calling for assistance from the Soviet Union, which promptly sent military advisors and other support.
The involvement of the Soviets split the Congolese government and led to an impasse between Lumumba and President Joseph Kasa-Vubu. Mobutu, in command of the army, broke this deadlock with a coup d'état, expelled the Soviet advisors and established a new government effectively under his own control. Lumumba was taken captive and subsequently executed in 1961. A rival government of the "Free Republic of the Congo" was founded in the eastern city of Stanleyville by Lumumba supporters led by Antoine Gizenga. It gained Soviet support but was crushed in early 1962. Meanwhile, the UN took a more aggressive stance towards the secessionists after Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash in late 1961. Supported by UN troops, Léopoldville defeated secessionist movements in Katanga and South Kasai by the start of 1963.
With Katanga and South Kasai back under the government's control, a reconciliatory compromise constitution was adopted and the exiled Katangese leader, Moïse Tshombe, was recalled to head an interim administration while fresh elections were organised. Before these could be held, however, Maoist-inspired militants calling themselves the "Simbas" rose up in the east of the country. The Simbas took control of a significant amount of territory and proclaimed a communist "People's Republic of the Congo" in Stanleyville. Government forces gradually retook territory and, in November 1964, Belgium and the United States intervened militarily in Stanleyville to recover hostages from Simba captivity. The Simbas were defeated and collapsed soon after. Following the elections in March 1965, a new political stalemate developed between Tshombe and Kasa-Vubu, forcing the government into near-paralysis. Mobutu mounted a second coup d'état in November 1965, now taking personal control. Under Mobutu's rule, the Congo (renamed Zaire in 1971) was transformed into a dictatorship which would endure until his deposition in 1997.
Arab–Israeli conflict (1948–2022)[]
Although the Arab-Israeli conflict would subside in the 20th century, tensions with Israel would flare up once more with the creation of the United Arab Kingdom in the 2020's.
The Arab–Israeli conflict was an intercommunal phenomenon involving political tension, military conflicts, and other disputes between Arab countries and Israel, which escalated during the 20th century, but had mostly faded out by the early 21st century. The roots of the Arab–Israeli conflict have been attributed to the support by Arab League member countries for the Palestinians, a fellow League member, in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict; this in turn has been attributed to the simultaneous rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism towards the end of the 19th century, though the two national movements had not clashed until the 1920s.
Part of the Palestine–Israel conflict arose from the conflicting claims by these movements to the land that formed the British Mandatory Palestine, which was regarded by the Jewish people as their ancestral homeland, while at the same time it was regarded by the Pan-Arab movement as historically and currently belonging to the Arab Palestinians, and in the Pan-Islamic context, as Muslim lands. The sectarian conflict within the British Mandate territory between Palestinian Jews and Arabs escalated into a full-scale Palestinian civil war in 1947. Taking the side of the Palestinian Arabs, especially following the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the neighboring Arab countries invaded the by-then former Mandate territory in May 1948, commencing the First Arab–Israeli War. Large-scale hostilities mostly ended with ceasefire agreements after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Peace agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt in 1979, resulting in Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the abolition of the military governance system in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in favor of Israeli Civil Administration and consequent unilateral annexation of the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.
The nature of the conflict has shifted over the years from the large-scale, regional Arab–Israeli conflict to a more local Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which peaked during the 1982 Lebanon War when Israel intervened in the Lebanese Civil War to oust the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon. By 1983, Israel reached normalization with Christian-dominated Lebanese government, but the agreement was annulled the next year with Muslim and Druze militias' takeover of Beirut. With the decline of the 1987–1993 First Palestinian Intifada, the interim Oslo Accords led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority in 1994, within the context of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. The same year, Israel and Jordan reached a peace accord. In 2002, the Arab League offered recognition of Israel by Arab countries as part of the resolution of the Palestine–Israel conflict in the Arab Peace Initiative. The initiative, which has been reconfirmed since, calls for normalizing relations between the Arab League and Israel, in exchange for a full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem) and a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a cease-fire had been largely maintained between Israel and Baathist Syria, as well as with Lebanon. Despite the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, the interim peace accords with the Palestinian Authority and the generally existing cease-fire, until the mid-2010s the Arab League and Israel had remained at odds with each other over many issues.
Developments in the course of the Syrian Civil War reshuffled the situation near Israel's northern border, putting the Syrian Arab Republic, Hezbollah and the Syrian opposition at odds with each other and complicating their relations with Israel, upon the emerging warfare with Iran. The conflict between Israel and Hamas-ruled Gaza, is also attributed to the Iran–Israel proxy conflict in the region. By 2017, Israel and several Arab Sunni states led by Saudi Arabia formed a semi-official coalition to confront Iran. This move and the Israeli normalization with Gulf States was marked by some as the fading of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Relations between then-Iraq, Syria and Jordan remained relatively unchanged upon the formation of Arabia, that is until the mid-2020's when Baathism began to once again take power in the region, and relations between the nations of Arabia and Israel soured.
The roots of the Arab–Israeli conflict have been attributed to the support by Arab League member countries for the Palestinians, a fellow League member, in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which in turn has been attributed to the simultaneous rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism towards the end of the 19th century, though the two national movements had not clashed until the 1920s. In 2002, the Arab League offered recognition of Israel by Arab countries as part of the resolution of the Palestine–Israel conflict in the Arab Peace Initiative. The initiative, which has been reconfirmed since, calls for normalizing relations between the Arab region and Israel, in exchange for a full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem) and a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194.
Part of the Palestine–Israel conflict arose from the conflicting claims by these movements to the land that formed the British Mandatory Palestine, which was regarded by the Jewish people as their ancestral homeland, while at the same time it was regarded by the Pan-Arab movement as historically and currently belonging to the Arab Palestinians, and in the Pan-Islamic context, as Muslim lands.
There was sectarian conflict within the British Mandate territory between Palestinian Jews and Arabs commencing in the 1920s, escalating into a full-scale Palestinian civil war in 1947. Taking the side of the Palestinian Arabs, especially following the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the neighbouring Arab countries invaded the by-then former Mandate territory in May 1948, commencing the First Arab–Israeli War. Large-scale hostilities mostly ended with ceasefire agreements after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Peace agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt in 1979, resulting in Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the abolition of the military governance system in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in favor of Israeli Civil Administration and consequent unilateral annexation of the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.
The nature of the conflict has shifted over the years from the large-scale, regional Arab–Israeli conflict to a more local Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which peaked during the 1982 Lebanon War. With the decline of the 1987–1993 First Palestinian Intifada, the interim Oslo Accords led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority in 1994, within the context of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. The same year, Israel and Jordan reached a peace accord. A cease-fire has been largely maintained between Israel and Baathist Syria, as well as with Lebanon. Despite the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, the interim peace accords with the Palestinian Authority and the generally existing cease-fire, until the mid-2010s the Arab League and Israel had remained at odds with each other over many issues. Among Arab belligerents in the conflict, Iraq and Syria are the only states who have no formal peace accord or treaty with Israel. However, aside from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and certain Gulf monarchies tensions between Israel and the rest of the Arab World would endure well into the 2020's primarily due to the exploitation by Anglo-American expansionist Christian Nationalism using Israel as a wedge for anti-Arab militarism often coupled with vehemently antisemitic Christian Fascism, effectively neutering Israel into a political football for U.S. hegemony in the Middle-East.
Reagan Era (1981–2017)[]
The Reagan Era was defined by the dominant and militant foreign policy of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Between the 1980 presidential election and the succeeding presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the conservative "Reagan Revolution" led by President Ronald Reagan in domestic and foreign policy had a lasting impact on the United States and the West as a whole. Midterm elections in 2010 and 2014 seemed to cast doubt on a true end of the Reagan Era as conservative Republicans claimed two major victories claiming both the House and later the Senate.
However, the sweeping policies pursued by the Obama Administration constituted a clear break with Reagan Era economics and social issues, as Americans became more supportive of social issues like gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana as well as showing more support for government involvement in healthcare and education.
The 2016 election victory of President Donald Trump immediately stirred debate over whether his rise signified the continuation of the Reagan Era or represented a paradigm shift for American politics. Political scientist Stephen Skowronek argued that Trump's election showed that the Reagan era continues. Skowronek compares Obama to former presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon, who governed at a time when their own party was generally in the minority at the federal level. Julia Azari, by contrast, argued that Trump's election denoted the end of the Reagan Era and the beginning of a new cycle in U.S. politics.
Strategic Defense Iniative (1984–1993)[]
One of the major influences the Reagan Era had on the resultant Frozen War that began during this time, was the advent of space-based warfare between enemy nations. In 1984, the Reagan administration began the Strategic Defense Initiative within the United States Department of Defense to oversee development of a wide array of advanced weapon concepts, including lasers, particle beam weapons and ground- and space-based missile systems. Along with various sensor, command and control, and high-performance computer systems that were studied, additionally these weapons would be needed to control a system consisting of hundreds of combat centers and satellites spanning the entire globe. A number of these concepts were tested through the late 1980s, and follow-on efforts and spin-offs continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s (including the first usage of the orbital Directed Energy Munitions Orbiter during World War III), as well as becoming integral to the Frozen War effort by the various factions.
Sabotage of Space Shuttle Challenger[]
With the declassification of top secret CIA documents in February 2186, it was first revealed to the public that the Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986 was in fact the first instance of space warfare, which involved the deaths of the seven-person crew of the Challenger space shuttle as a result of a catastrophic flaw in the design of its right-hand solid rocket booster. While the official fault of the incident was known and publicly-announced to be the defunct-as-of-2007 company known as Morton-Thiokol, it was additionally discovered by the DOD to have been the work of Soviet sleeper cells within US defense and aerospace contractors.
The involvement of the Soviet Union in the deaths of the astronauts would constitute the first instance of space warfare, unbeknownst to the American and World public. Until the declassification of these documents, the first instance of practical space warfare was believed to have occurred on 31 October 2023, when Israel intercepted a Houthi missile in space. This was in fact the second instance of space warfare.
By the early 1990s, with the Cold War ending and nuclear arsenals being rapidly reduced, political support for SDI collapsed. SDI officially ended in 1993, when the administration of President Bill Clinton redirected the efforts towards theatre ballistic missiles and renamed the agency the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). BMDO was renamed the Missile Defense Agency in 2002.
Birth of the Frozen War[]
Operation Condor was arguably the final large-scale proxy military operation undertaken by the superpowers of the Cold War. Implemented in 1975, the United States documentation shows that the United States provided key organizational, financial and technical assistance to the operation into the 1980s.
In declassified material, the CIA reports in July of 1976 of a "Third World War and South America," documenting the long-term dangers of a right-wing bloc and considering the cohesiveness of the six nations of the Southern Cone of South America: Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. They argued that these regimes felt embattled by international Marxism and its terrorist components on one side, and the hostility of uncomprehending industrial democracies misled by the terrorist propaganda. Also recommended by the Intelligence Community was that U.S. policy towards Operation Condor should emphasize the differences between these countries at every opportunity, to depoliticize humans rights, to oppose rhetorical exaggerations of the "Third-World-War" type, and bring the potential bloc members back into the U.S. cognitive universe via systematic exchanges.
The report notes, "the formation of special teams from member countries who are to carry out operations to include assassinations against terrorist or supporters of terrorist organizations." The report also highlighted the fact that these special teams were intelligence service agents rather than military personnel, however these teams did operate in structures reminiscent of U.S. special forces teams. Lastly, the report mentioned awareness of Operation Condor's plans to conduct possible operations in France and Portugal - a matter that would be prove to be extremely controversial later in Condor's history.
The United States government provided technical support and supplied military aid to the participants during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations (1964-1989). As arms flowed to the contras, Savimbi's UNITA and the mujahideen, the Reagan Doctrine's advocates argued that the doctrine was yielding constructive results for U.S. interests and global democracy.
In Nicaragua, pressure from the Contras led the Sandinstas to end the State of Emergency, and they subsequently lost the 1990 elections. In Afghanistan, the mujahideen bled the Soviet Union's military and paved the way for Soviet military defeat. In Angola, Savimbi's resistance ultimately led to a decision by the Soviet Union and Cuba to bring their troops and military advisors home from Angola as part of a negotiated settlement.
All of these developments were Reagan Doctrine victories, the doctrine's advocates argue, laying the ground for the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Reagan Doctrine continued into the administration of Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, who won the U.S. presidency in November 1988. Bush's Presidency featured the final years of the Cold War and the Gulf War, but the Reagan Doctrine soon faded from U.S. policy as the Cold War ended. Bush also noted a presumed peace dividend to the end of the Cold War with economic benefits of a decrease in defense spending. However, following the presidency of Bill Clinton, a change in United States foreign policy was introduced with the presidency of his son George W. Bush and the new Bush Doctrine, who increased military spending in response to the World Trade Center attacks on 11 September, 2001, one of the most influential losses of a nation during the Frozen War and World War 3.
Post-Soviet Conflicts (1991–2068)[]
Clockwise from the top-left: Slovenian police escort captured JNA soldiers back to their unit during the 1991 Slovenian war of independence; A destroyed tank during the Battle of Vukovar; Anti-tank missile installations in the siege of Dubrovnik; Reburial of victims from the 1995 Srebrenica massacre on 11 July 2010; UN vehicle driving on the streets of Sarajevo during the siege.
War in Transnistria[]
Beginning in March of 1992, Moldovan forces two attempts to cross into pro-Russian Transnistria eventually escalate when Moldovan independence is recognized by UN membership. The fighting lasts until July 21 of that same year and involves fighting at three major locations along the Dniester River.
Outside involvement on the side of Moldova involves Romanian volunteers, and on the pro-Trasnistria side various elements of the Russian Army, Ukraine and the CIS. After the Russian annexation of Crimea decades later, renewed concern regarding Transnistria was brought forth by the U.S. commander of NATO who warned that Russian troops were poised to 'run' into Moldova.
United Nations involvement in Yugoslavia[]
Up until the mid-1980s, Yugoslavia was one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries on Earth. With a standing manpower of nearly a million, nearly 3000 tanks and AFV (the fifth largest in Europe), over 2000 self-propelled and towed artillery, nearly 1000 rocket projectors and the sixth largest air force with over 1200 aircraft the Yugoslav People's Army was easily one of the top 20 most powerful military powers on the planet. In addition, Yugoslavia was also economically strong. Yugoslavia had the greatest per capita GDP of all the Communist nations, and the third largest Communist economy behind China and Russia, and for a brief period on par with North Korea and Vietnam before pulling forward.
By 1992 however, Federal Yugoslavia had shrunk, most of its equipment was outdated, and its army untrained conscripts. Yet amid the fervent independence movements in Bosnia and Croatia, a determined and utterly brutal Serbian ultranationalist push across the former Yugoslav republics had emerged.
The initial mandate of UNPROFOR was to ensure conditions for peace talks, and security in three demilitarized "safe-haven" enclaves designated as United Nations Protected Areas (UNPAs) located in various regions before the Republic of Croatia was admitted into the United Nations (UN) as a member but were controlled by the self-styled Republic of Serbian Krajina.
On 6 July 1993, new tensions arose following the Croatian government's decision to re-open the strategic Maslenica bridge on 18 July – Croatia was cut in half while the bridge was in Serb hands. The UNPROFOR forces mandated to monitor the withdrawal of Croatian forces from the area had been unable to deploy, due to the refusal of access by Croat authorities. The Serbs shelled the bridge which was partially destroyed on 2 August. On 12 August, negotiations for a cease-fire began in Geneva, but were unsuccessful. Eventually, Croat forces retreated to their positions of before the incursion.
From March 1993, Serb para-military units killed a great number of civilians, destroyed habitations, prevented the UNHCR from delivering humanitarian aid, and forced thousands of Bosniak refugees to flee to the town of Srebrenica. 30 or 40 persons were dying daily from military action, starvation, exposure to cold or lack of medical treatment. Resolution 819 attempted to address this issue by declaring Srebrenica a "Safe Area". Resolution 836 authorized UNPROFOR "acting in self-defense, to take the necessary measures, including the use of force, in reply to bombardments against the safe areas by any of the parties or to armed incursion into them or in the event of any deliberate obstruction in or around those areas the freedom of movement of UNPROFOR or of protected humanitarian convoys" . To implement the deterrence, around 7600 reinforcements were sent and air support was organised in coordination with NATO.
In May 1993, intense fighting broke out in Central Bosnia between Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats. Croat para-military forces,committed exactions against Serbs and Bosniaks. The massacre in the village of Ahmići, on 16 April 1993, is an example of the savagery of the terror. Tihomir Blaškić was the officer of the Croat HVO army formation who was tried and convicted at the ICTY over his responsibility for this massacre. Blaškić served almost nine years in prison before the appeals panel acquitted him of most of the charges in July 2004, as the defence proved that he did not command all the HVO units in the area or any paramilitary units.
On 24 September, the Security Council was informed by the Croatian Government that if the mandate of UNPROFOR was not amended to promote energetic implementation of the relevant resolutions of the Security Council, Croatia would be forced to request UNPROFOR to leave the country not later than 30 November 1993. Subsequent redefinition of the mandate occurred.
At the end of the year, the warring parties attempted to come to a cease-fire. The truce was implemented between Croat and Serb forces, but fighting went on in Bosnia between Bosniaks and Croats, and the humanitarian situations continued to deteriorate. Notably, Sarajevo continued to be bombarded by Bosnian Serb forces. It was also reported that units of the regular Croat army were supporting Bosnian Croat forces with heavy equipment and men, removing their insignias. This led to further protests from the UN. Use of force began to be discussed at a NATO summit held in Brussels on 10 and 11 January 1994. The Bosnian Serbs, following talks with high-ranking officials of the Russian Federation in Moscow, agreed to open the Tuzla airport for humanitarian purposes. At the same time, the relieving of UN troops in Srebrenica was allowed and the Canadian contingent was replaced by a Dutch contingent.
On 23 September 1994, in retaliation to the Bosnian Serb obstruction to the Peace Plan, the Security Council, by its Resolution 942, severed all commercial and monetary links to the Bosnian Serb entity. Notably, this cut the flow of fuel to the Bosnian Serbs, a hard strategic blow.
Due to the extreme position taken by the Bosnian Serb government, the Yugoslav Federation (Serbia and Montenegro) itself had to take a strong stance against the Bosnian Serb entity. This led to the quasi-complete diplomatic isolation of the Bosnian Serb entity.
In August 1994, the situation deteriorated again, particularly due to sniper activity, and despite the anti-sniper agreements. In Sarajevo, the bloody "Sniper Alley" became famous and infamous. Deliberate attacks against UNPROFOR personnel or aircraft became frequent.
In October, the Bosnian Muslim forces, trapped in the Bihać pocket, attacked the Bosnian Serb forces in an attempt to end the siege of the city. The attack and the ensuing counter-attack by the Bosnian Serbs induced terror in the local population and another massive exodus of refugees. In deliberate contradiction with the "Safe Area" status of Bihać and the "No-flight" zones, Bosnian Serb airplanes made repeated attacks in the Bihać area, using cluster bombs and napalm.
In reaction to this threat, on 21 November, NATO airplanes destroyed the Udbina airstrip, located in the UNPA Sector South in Croatia. The following days, NATO airplanes again had to intervene, against Bosnian Serb anti-air missiles sites which had opened fire upon British jets, and against artillery sites which shelled Bihać. Instead of lowering their profile, the Bosnian Serbs retaliated by taking UN personnel hostage and restraining humanitarian aid transit.
On the diplomatic scene, all efforts to come to a cease-fire turned out to be to no avail, here again mostly because of Bosnian Serb obstruction—Dr. Karadžić declined the invitation of the UN Secretary-General.
1995[]
On 26 May 1995 following NATO air raids on Pale as the Bosnian Serbs defied another UN ultimatum on heavy weapons, around 400 Blue Helmets were taken hostage, brought to strategic points as human shields, and shown in chains on Serbian TV.
On 27 May 1995, General Mladić along with General Nuhić launched an assault against the UN observation point of the Vrbanja bridge. At 5 in the morning, the French captain commanding the position lost contact with the 12 men and went to investigate. A Serb dressed with a blue helmet and French body armour and uniform attempted to take him hostage, but was deterred by the escort, and the officer managed to escape.[citation needed] In the following hours, after intense shelling by ERC 90 Sagaie armoured vehicles, a platoon of 30 French peacekeepers led by then Captain François Lecointre subsequently re-captured the bridge with the support of 70 French infantrymen and direct fire from armoured vehicles, in an action which saw the first French Army bayonet charge since the Korean War. During the French assault, elements of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) opened fire on the VRS-held observation posts, wounding one French hostage.
Two French soldiers were killed during the battle, 10 were wounded, and one died of wounds later that day. VRS casualties were four killed, three wounded and four captured. Following the battle, VRS forces were observed to be less likely to engage French UN peacekeepers deployed in the city. In 2017, Lecointre, now a general, was appointed French Chief of the Defence Staff.
At 12 o'clock, the Bosnian Serb radio broadcast that General Mladić had ordered to
| “ | deploy the captured members of UNPROFOR, and the other foreign citizens who had acted as enemies of the Serbian people, at command posts, depots and other important facilities.
The United Nations in this particular situation have decided to hire a murderer, it is called the NATO alliance. It is a hired killer. If NATO wishes to continue with its air strikes then it will have to kill the UN troops here on the ground, because we have positioned UN troops and observers around potential targets that NATO might decide to go for. The international community therefore will have to pay a very heavy price. And it will not stop at that. The Serbs are determined to make a point to the whole world. |
” |
– Jovan Zametica, Karadžić's spokesman | ||
On the 30 May, Ratko Mladić phoned Rupert Smith and agreed not to put hostage Blue Helmets in chains, but to merely "bring" them on strategic sites. He also demanded "excuses" for the death of the four Serbian soldiers killed by the French at Vrbanja bridge, threatening to "be unable to guarantee the safety" of the UN forces in Goražde.
Although NATO had been bombing Serb positions in Bosnia for several months now, the first full intervention occurred in late 1995 under Operation Deliberate Force, primarily in response to the Srebrenica massacre of over 8,000 Bosniaks by Serbian forces, after 11 July, when NATO aircraft attacked targets in the Srebrenica area of Bosnia-Herzegovina as identified by and under the control of the United Nations. The Dutch Peacekeepers had failed due to NATO's incessant and unmitigated aggression, time and time again deliberately putting UN personnel in harm's way.
Bosnian genocide[]
The Bosnian genocide refers to either the Srebrenica massacre or the wider crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing throughout areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25,000–30,000 Bosniak civilians by VRS units under the command of General Ratko Mladić.
The ethnic cleansing that took place in VRS-controlled areas targeted Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats. The ethnic cleansing campaign included extermination, unlawful confinement, mass rape, sexual assault, torture, plunder and destruction of private and public property, and inhumane treatment of civilians; the targeting of political leaders, intellectuals, and professionals; the unlawful deportation and transfer of civilians; the unlawful shelling of civilians; the unlawful appropriation and plunder of real and personal property; the destruction of homes and businesses; and the destruction of places of worship. The acts have been found to have satisfied the requirements for "guilty acts" of genocide, and that, "some physical perpetrators held the intent to physically destroy the protected groups of Bosnian Muslims and Croats".
In the 1990s, several authorities asserted that ethnic cleansing as carried out by elements of the Bosnian Serb army was genocide. These included a resolution by the United Nations General Assembly and three convictions for genocide in German courts (the convictions were based upon a wider interpretation of genocide than that used by international courts). In 2005, the United States Congress passed a resolution declaring that the Serbian policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing meet the terms defining genocide.
The Srebrenica massacre was found to be an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a finding upheld by the ICJ. On 24 March 2016, former Bosnian Serb leader and the first president of the Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić, was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 40 years in prison. In 2019 an appeals court increased his sentence to life imprisonment. On 12 May 2021 it was announced that, with the agreement of the UK authorities, he would serve the rest of his sentence in a UK prison.
Karachi Affair[]
The Karachi affair (French: affaire Karachi; Urdu: آگسٹا آبدوز اسکینڈل), otherwise known as the Agosta Submarine scandal, was a major military scandal that took place in the second term of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, involving the presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac in 1992–97.
The scandal involved the payment of massive commissions and kickbacks between France and Pakistan over the negotiations to acquire Agosta 90B-class submarines. The submarines utilised the emerging Air-independent propulsion propriety designs, which Pakistan was eager to acquire over the nuclear submarines.
Since its exposure in the news media of both France and Pakistan, the scandal has been involved in various investigative journalism and attracted sensations and conspiracy theories in both countries, including this scandal's allegement of financing the political campaign of then-Prime Minister Edouard Balladur in the presidential elections took place in 1995. Upon electing President Jacques Chirac cancelled the commissions and kickbacks, angering many officials in Pakistan and France according to the media reports. Other theories and subsequent investigative journalist reports alleged that the bus bombing on 8 May 2002 in Karachi that killed eleven French engineers in Karachi was in retaliation for the cancellation of these commissions.
Rwandan genocide and Congo Wars[]
The Rwandan genocide took place in the context of the Rwandan Civil War, a conflict beginning in 1990 between the Hutu-led government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The latter was made up largely of Tutsi refugees whose families had fled to Uganda after the 1959 Hutu revolt against colonial rule. Waves of Hutu violence against the RPF and Tutsi followed Rwandan independence in 1962. International pressure on the Hutu government of Juvénal Habyarimana resulted in a ceasefire in the civil war in 1993, with a road-map to implement the Arusha Accords. This was intended to create a power-sharing government with the RPF. Numerous conservative Hutu, including members of the Akazu, opposed the Accords, believing they were a concession to enemy demands.
The RPF military campaign had resulted in some intensified support for the so-called "Hutu Power" ideology, which portrayed the RPF as an alien force. In radio programs and other news, the Tutsis were portrayed as non-Christian, intent on reinstating the Tutsi monarchy and enslaving the Hutus. Many Hutu reacted to this prospect with extreme opposition. In the lead-up to the genocide, the number of machetes imported into Rwanda increased.
On 6 April 1994, an aeroplane carrying Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down on its descent into Kigali. At the time, the plane was in the airspace above Habyarimana's house. The assassination of Habyarimana ended the peace accords.
Genocidal killings began the following day. Soldiers, police, and militia quickly executed key Tutsi and moderate Hutu military and political leaders who could have assumed control in the ensuing power vacuum. Checkpoints and barricades were erected to screen all holders of the national ID card of Rwanda (it contained ethnic classifications; the Belgian colonial government had introduced use of these classifications and IDs in 1933). This enabled government forces to systematically identify and kill Tutsi.
They also recruited and pressured Hutu civilians to arm themselves with machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons and encouraged them to rape, maim, and kill their Tutsi neighbors and to destroy or steal their property. The RPF restarted its offensive soon after Habyarimana's assassination. It rapidly seized control of the northern part of the country and captured Kigali about 100 days later in mid-July, bringing an end to the genocide. During these events and in the aftermath, the United Nations (UN) and countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium were criticized for their inaction and failure to strengthen the force and mandate of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) peacekeepers. In December 2017, media reported revelations that the government of France had allegedly supported the Hutu government after the genocide had begun.
In October 1990 the Rwandan Civil War began when the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebel group invaded across Uganda's southern border into northern Rwanda. The RPF was composed of over 4000 soldiers, most the sons of Tutsi refugees who had fled ethnic purges in Rwanda between 1959 and 1963. It portrayed itself as a democratic, multi-ethnic movement and demanded an end to ethnic discrimination, to economic looting of the country by government elites and a stop to the security situation that continued to generate refugees. It was supported by the Ugandan government of Yoweri Museveni, who had come to power in the Ugandan Bush War with significant support from the Rwandan refugees in the country. However, the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) was saved by reinforcements from France and Zaire, who backed the government of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, who had been in power since 1973.
The French intervention of two parachute companies, explained as an attempt to protect its own nationals, actually blocked the February 1993 RPF advance on the capital Kigali. In contrast, the government of Belgium, the former colonial power, cut all support to the Habyarimana regime, which viewed the action as abandonment. Thwarted by the French, the RPF suffered a humiliating retreat back into the Virunga Mountains along the border. After the demoralizing death of Major-General Fred Rwigyema, the collapse of the RPF was prevented through the leadership of Paul Kagame.
The RPF thus managed to retain control of a sliver of land in the north, from which it continued to launch raids. Comparing the RPF and FAR as he saw them in 1993, Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire noted that the rebels "had won all recent contests because of their superior leadership, training, experience, frugality, mobility. Discipline and morale."
After Kagame and the RPF's victory in the Rwandan Civil War, the new regime would play a major and influential role in the war in neighboring Congo, backed by the United States and Uganda. Prominent members of the RPF had fought alongside Yoweri Museveni in the Ugandan Bush War that brought him to power, and Museveni allowed the RPF to use Uganda as a base during the 1990 offensive into Rwanda and subsequent civil war. Given their historical ties, the Rwandan and Ugandan governments were closely allied and Museveni worked closely with Kagame throughout the First Congo War. Ugandan soldiers were present in Zaire throughout the conflict and Museveni likely helped Kagame plan and direct the AFDL. French and Belgian intelligence agencies noted that 15,000 Ugandan-trained Tutsi fought for the AFDL. With active support from Rwanda, Uganda, and Eritrea, Kabila's AFDL was able to capture 800 x 100 km[clarification needed] of territory along the border with Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi by 25 December 1996. This occupation temporarily satisfied the rebels, because it gave them power in the east and allowed them to defend themselves against the former génocidaires. Likewise, the external actors had successfully crippled the ability of the same génocidaires to use Zaire as a base for attacks. There was a pause in the rebel advance following the acquisition of this buffer territory that lasted until Angola entered the war in February 1997.
There are two explanations for the restart of the rebel advance in 1997. The first, and most probable, is that Angola had joined the anti-Mobutu coalition, giving it numbers and strength far superior to the FAZ, and demanding that Mobutu be removed from power. Kagame presents another, possibly secondary, reason for the march on Kinshasa: that the employment of Serbian mercenaries in the battle for Walikale proved that "Mobutu intended to wage real war against Rwanda." According to this logic, Rwanda's initial concerns had been to manage the security threat in eastern Zaire but it was now forced to dispose of the hostile government in Kinshasa.
Whatever the case, once the advance resumed in 1997, there was virtually no meaningful resistance from what was left of Mobutu's army. Kabila's forces were only held back by the dreadful state of Zaire's infrastructure. In some areas, no real roads existed; the only means of transport were infrequently used dirt paths. The AFDL committed grave human rights violations, such as the carnage at a refugee camp of Hutus at Tingi-Tingi near Kisangani, where tens of thousands of refugees were massacred.
In what was largely regarded as a proxy war between the United States and Serbian-Russian (French-Hutu) interests, the First Congo War would leave the African region in chaos and result in the conditions leading to yet more war on the continent.
The Second Congo War (also known as the Great War of Africa or the Great African War, and sometimes referred to as the African World War) began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 1998, little more than a year after the First Congo War, and involved some of the same issues. The war officially ended in July 2003, when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power. Although a peace agreement was signed in 2002, violence has continued in many regions of the country, especially in the east. Hostilities have continued since the ongoing Lord's Resistance Army insurgency, and the Kivu and Ituri conflicts.
Ultimately, nine African countries and around twenty-five armed groups became involved in the war. By 2008, the war and its aftermath had caused 5.4 million deaths, principally through disease and starvation, making the Second Congo War the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II.
NATO Invasion of Yugoslavia[]
The Yugoslav city of Novi Sad on fire in 1999
Early involvement and monitoring[]
NATO's first involvement in both the Bosnian War and the Yugoslav wars in general came in February 1992, when the alliance issued a statement urging all the belligerents in the conflict to allow the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers. While primarily symbolic, this statement paved the way for later NATO actions.
On July 10, 1992, NATO foreign ministers agreed, at a meeting in Helsinki, to assist the United Nations in monitoring compliance with sanctions established under United Nations Security Council resolutions 713 (1991) and 757 (1992). This led to the commencement of Operation Maritime Monitor off the coast of Montenegro, which was coordinated with the Western European Union Operation Sharp Guard in the Strait of Otranto on July 16. On October 9, 1992, the Security Council passed Resolution 781, establishing a no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina. In response, on October 16, NATO expanded its mission in the area to include Operation Sky Monitor, which monitored Bosnian airspace for flights from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Enforcing compliance, 1992-1993[]
On November 16, 1992, the Security Council issued Resolution 787, which called upon member states to "halt all inward and outbound maritime shipping in order to inspect and verify their cargos" to ensure compliance with sanctions. In response to this resolution, NATO deactivated Maritime Monitor on November 22, and replaced it with Operation Maritime Guard, under which NATO forces were authorized to stop ships and inspect their cargos. Unlike Sky Monitor and Maritime Monitor, this was a true enforcement mission, not just a monitoring one.
NATO's air mission also switched from monitoring to enforcement. The Security Council issued Resolution 816, which authorized states to use measures "to ensure compliance" with the no-fly zone over Bosnia. In response, on April 12, 1993, NATO initiated Operation Deny Flight which was tasked with enforcing the no-fly zone, using fighter aircraft based in the region.
Throughout 1993, the role of NATO forces in Bosnia gradually grew. On June 10, 1993, NATO and the UN agreed that aircraft acting under Deny Flight would provide close air support to UNPROFOR at the request of the UN. On June 15, NATO integrated Operation Maritime Guard and Western European Union naval activities in the region into Operation Sharp Guard, and expanded its role to include greater enforcement powers.
IFOR[]
Largely as a result of the bombing under Operation Deliberate Force and changes in the battlefield situation, the belligerents in the Bosnian War met in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995, and signed the Dayton Accords, a peace treaty. As part of the accords, NATO agreed to provide 60,000 peacekeepers for the region, as part of the Implementation Force (IFOR). In December 1995, under Operation Joint Endeavor, NATO deployed these forces. These forces remained deployed until December 1996, when those remaining in the region were transferred to the Stabilization Force (SFOR). SFOR peacekeepers remained in Bosnia until 2004.
Excluding Operation Deny Flight, Deliberate Force and IFOR, the active NATO member-states in the conflict were; Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the UK and the US, although Greece would heavily protest the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia along with many others.
1999[]
May 7 - A few months after the commencement of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia the United States bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing 3 and injuring dozens more. It is unclear if other NATO leaders approved the strike. A report by the French Ministry of Defense after the war stated that "part of the military operations were conducted by the United States outside the strict framework of NATO" and that a dual-track command structure existed. NATO had no authority over the B-2 stealth bombers that carried out the strike.
June 11 - The Kosovo War that began in March of 1998 concludes with the Kumanovo Treaty being signed. Yugoslav forces pull out of Kosovo, which had asserted its independence in 1997. The NATO Intervention – Operation Allied Force – is debated and seen as controversial by several international organizations, such as the UN and Amnesty International. Despite NATO and America's claims of legitimacy for the bombing, the United Nations Security Council never backed NATO's decision to undertake these actions. It is the first widespread warfare seen in Europe since the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
June 12 - Early on 11 June 1999, a column of about 30 Russian armoured vehicles carrying 250 Russian troops, who were part of the international peacekeeping force in Bosnia, moved into Serbia. At 10:30 a.m. this was confirmed by SHAPE and by pictures from CNN which showed that the Russians had hastily painted "KFOR" in white letters on their vehicles where they had previously been "SFOR". It was assumed that the column was heading for Pristina and Pristina International Airport ahead of the arrival of NATO troops.
Upon hearing of the deployment, American NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Wesley Clark called NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, and was told "you have transfer of authority" in the area. Clark then provisionally ordered a contingent of British and French paratroopers to be flown in by helicopter to seize the airport by force. Staff officers had grave concerns that helicopters might be fired on by Serb forces and that invasion of Kosovo before the agreed time might cause the Serbs to pull out of the agreement. If the airborne force got into trouble it would have been very difficult to reach them overland through the mountainous country where bridges and tunnels were known to be prepared for demolition. As this operation would have been outside the newly signed agreement for NATO forces to move into Kosovo the following day national governments had the right to withdraw their own forces and the French government pulled their battalion out. British paras sat by Chinook helicopters in a hot cornfield for most of the afternoon before standing down to prepare for the following day's move into Kosovo.
At 5:00 a.m. on 12 June, the British 5th Airborne Brigade began flying into Kosovo from Skopje to secure the ten mile long Kačanik Gorge for the 4th Armoured Brigade to pass through to Pristina. From there, the lead reconnaissance troop in the race to Pristina was commanded by British officer Captain James Blunt. The first NATO troops to enter Pristina on 12 June 1999 were Norwegian special forces from FSK Forsvarets Spesialkommando and soldiers from the British Special Air Service's 22 SAS, although to NATO's diplomatic embarrassment Russian troops arrived first at the airport. The Norwegian soldiers from FSK Forsvarets Spesialkommando were the first to come in contact with the Russian troops at the airport and to report the developments back to Mike Jackson. Jackson flew by helicopter to Pristina in the evening to hold a press conference, then went to meet two star general Victor Zavarzin who commanded the small Russian force. Sheltering from heavy rain in the wrecked airport terminal Jackson shared a flask of whisky with him, leading to a warming of relations. That evening Clark still seemed obsessed with the possibility of more Russian troops being flown in even though NATO controlled the airspace. Russia had placed several airbases on standby, and prepared battalions of paratroopers to depart for Pristina on Il-76 military transport planes. Fearing that Russian aircraft were heading for the airport, General Clark planned to order helicopters to block the runway, and requested helicopter support from Admiral James O. Ellis. Jackson's staff contacted the US brigade and were told that the Americans were using their right to opt out of the operation. Two hours later they called to say that the operation was back on again. However, poor weather conditions rendered this impossible at that time.
The following morning, Sunday 13 June, Clark arrived at Jackson's HQ in Skopje. It was pointed out to him that the Russians were isolated and could not be reinforced by air and that Russian support had been a vital part of getting a peace agreement. Antagonising them would only be counterproductive. Clark refused to accept this and continued to order the runway blocked, claiming to be supported by the UN Secretary General. Jackson refused to enforce Clark's orders, reportedly telling him "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you." When again directly ordered to block the runway Jackson suggested that British tanks and armoured cars would be more suitable, in the knowledge that this would almost certainly be vetoed by the British government. Clark agreed. Jackson was ready to resign rather than follow Clark's order. The British Ministry of Defence authorised British force commander Richard Dannatt to use 4 Armoured Brigade to isolate the airfield but not to block the runways. James Blunt has been quoted as saying he would rather have faced a court martial than use force against the Russians. Clark's orders were not carried out, and the United States instead placed political pressure on neighbouring states to not allow Russians to use their airspace to ferry in the reinforcements. Russia was forced to call off the reinforcements after Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania refused requests by Russia to use their airspace.
Negotiations were conducted throughout the stand-off, during which Russia insisted that its troops would only be answerable to Russian commanders, and that it retain an exclusive zone for its own peacekeepers. NATO refused these concessions, predicting that it would lead to the partition of Kosovo into an Albanian south and a Serbian north. Both sides eventually agreed that Russian peacekeepers would deploy throughout Kosovo, but independently of NATO.
Ukrainian War[]
Protesters fighting government forces on Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev on 18 February 2014.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine endured years of corruption, mismanagement, lack of economic growth, currency devaluation, and problems in securing funding from public markets. Successive Ukrainian governments in the 2000s sought a closer relationship with the European Union (EU). One of the measures meant to achieve this was an association agreement with the European Union, which would have provided Ukraine with funds in return for liberalising reforms.[41] President Yanukovych announced his intention to sign the agreement, but ultimately refused to do so at the last minute. This sparked a wave of protests called the "Euromaidan" movement. During these protests Yanukovych signed a treaty and multibillion-dollar loan with Russia.The Ukrainian security forces cracked down on the protesters, further inflaming the situation and resulting in a series of violent clashes in the streets of Kiev. As tensions rose, Yanukovych fled to Russia and did not return.
Russia refused to recognize the new interim government, calling the overthrow of Yanukovych a coup d'état, and began a military intervention in Ukraine supporting pro-Russian separatists. The newly appointed interim government of Ukraine signed the EU association agreement and agreed to reform the country's judiciary and political systems, as well as its financial and economic policies. The International Monetary Fund pledged more than $18 billion in loans contingent on Ukraine's adopting those reforms. The revolution was followed by pro-Russian unrest in some south-eastern regions, a standoff with Russia regarding the annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol, and a war between the Ukrainian government and Russia-backed separatists in the Donbass.
A period of relative calm in the anti-government demonstrations in Kiev ended abruptly on 18 February 2014, when protesters and police clashed. At least 82 people were killed over the next few days, including 13 policemen, with one report by the Ukraine Health Ministry claiming as many as 100 were killed.
Over half of these were the work of the Russian-trained Ukrainian Security Service, who deployed snipers against the Euromaidan. Hours later, the head of the SBU resigned and was arrested after taking responsibility for the mass-killings.
On 20 February 2014, Lviv Oblast declared independence, bringing Ukraine to the brink of civil war.
"The regime has begun active military action against people. Dozens of people have been killed in Kiev and hundreds have been wounded. Fulfilling the will of society, the executive committee of the Lviv region's council, the People's Rada, is assuming full responsibility for the fate of the region and its citizens," read a statement.
This was in reference to a 20 February 2014 decree authorizing the Ukrainian police to use live ammo on the pro-EU Maidan.
The executive committee was led by Petro Kolodiy, chairman of the Lviv region's council.
From the end of February 2014, demonstrations by pro-Russian and anti-government groups took place in major cities across the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, in the aftermath of the Euromaidan movement and the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. During the first stage of the unrest, Crimea was annexed by the Russian Federation after a Russian military intervention, and an internationally criticized (based on UN resolution 68/262) Crimean referendum. Protests in Donetsk and Luhansk regions (oblasts) escalated into an armed pro-Russian separatist insurgency.
Map of protests by region, indicating the severity of the unrest at its peak
From late 2014, cities outside of the Donbass combat zone, such as Kharkiv, Odessa, Kiev and Mariupol, were struck by bombings that targeted pro-Ukrainian unity organizations. To maintain control over southeastern territories Ukraine's government started "antiterrorist operation" (ATO) sending armed forces to suppress separatists. Armed conflict between Ukraine's government forces and pro-Russian rebels is known as War in Donbass.
From the beginning of March 2014, protests by pro-Russian and anti-government groups took place in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine, commonly collectively called the "Donbass", in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and the Euromaidan movement. These demonstrations, which followed the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation (February to March 2014), and which were part of a wider group of concurrent pro-Russian protests across southern and eastern Ukraine, escalated into an armed conflict between the separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR respectively), and the Ukrainian government. In the Donetsk People's Republic, from May 2014 until a change of the top leadership in August 2014, some of the top leaders were Russian citizens. According to the Ukrainian government, at the height of the conflict in mid-2014, Russian paramilitaries were reported to make up between 15% to 80% of the combatants.
Countries supporting Russia's annexation of crimea (red and orange), neutral (yellow) and opposing UN member-states (blue). Countries not explicitly pro-Russian but leaving the UN are in grey.
Between 22 and 25 August 2014, Russian artillery, personnel, and what Russia called a "humanitarian convoy" crossed the border into Ukrainian territory without the permission of the Ukrainian government. Crossings occurred both in areas under the control of pro-Russian forces and in areas that were not under their control, such as the south-eastern part of Donetsk Oblast, near Novoazovsk. These events followed the reported shelling of Ukrainian positions from the Russian side of the border over the course of the preceding month. Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko characterised the events of 22 August as a "direct invasion by Russia of Ukraine", while other western and Ukrainian officials described the events as a "stealth invasion" of Ukraine by Russia. Russia's official position on the presence of Russian forces in Donbass has been vague: while official bodies have denied presence of "regular armed forces" in Ukraine, it has on numerous occasions confirmed presence of "military specialists", along with other euphemisms, usually accompanied by an argument that Russia "was forced" to deploy them to "defend the Russian-speaking population".
From the mid-2010’s to the early 2020’s, a low-level insurgency in the Donbas would ensue, and the involvement of Serb mercenaries and the Livonian KGB itself alongside the Hungarians, the Kremlin and their supporters in the breakaway republics would culminate in widespread violent crackdowns on the press – most prominently the car-bombing and assassination of Russian freelance journalist Pavel Sheremet at 7:45 A.M. on 20 July 2016 in Kyiv, Ukraine. These attacks were later discovered to be part of a larger state-sponsored terror campaign involving targeted killings reaching as far as Germany an as early as 2012.
Azerbaijan-Bukhara became the core polity dominating the region, supplanting the nation-state of Kazakhstan, in the 2020's
In response to a 2021 Russian-backed Livonian attack on EU airspace in downing a Lithuanian-bound flight from Greece ferrying a Belarusian activist, Livonian–Ukrainian relations collapse as the two countries exchange sanctions and the former deepens ties with Lithuania over military threats from Russia and Belarus on their borders. Several years later previously-missing nuclear weapons appear on Belarusian and Kaliningrad Oblast soil, accelerating the crisis in Eastern Europe.
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine results in in-fighting amongst the various member-states of the Eurasian Union, with Kazakhstan offering a rare rebuke of the Russian action. The other two, Livonia and Kyrgyzstan however, remain steadfastly pro-Russian. By the end of 2023; Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, with Hungary as an observing member, were lockstep in their goals regarding the lands surrounding their countries - supplanting Russia and the West in conjunction with China, and ruling all of Asia, the Caucasus and parts of Eastern Europe. Although all five were independent countries with their own foreign policy and domestic policy, Tashkent, Uzbekistan became the tentative location of the executive, while the parliament and court resided in Baku.
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict[]
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was an ethnic and territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians, and seven surrounding districts, inhabited mostly by Azerbaijanis until their expulsion during the 1990s. The Nagorno-Karabakh region was entirely claimed by and partially de facto controlled by the breakaway Republic of Artsakh, but was recognized internationally as part of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan controls the remainder of the Nagorno-Karabakh region as well as the seven surrounding districts.
The conflict has its origins in the early 20th century, but the present conflict began in 1988, when the Karabakh Armenians demanded the transfer of the region from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. The conflict escalated into a full-scale war in the early 1990s following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The First Nagorno-Karabakh War led to tens of thousands of casualties. The war was won by Armenia, which subsequently occupied regions around Soviet-era Nagorno-Karabakh. Ethnic Azerbaijanis were expelled from the Armenian-controlled areas, while ethnic Armenians were expelled from Azerbaijan. The ceasefire ending the first war, signed in 1994 in Bishkek, was followed by two decades of relative stability, which significantly deteriorated in the 2010s. A four-day escalation in April 2016 resulted in hundreds of casualties but only minor changes to the front line.
Azeri–Bukharan invasion of Armenia[]
The Azerbaijani-spearheaded invasion of Armenia would be universally condemned by all but Russia and China
In late 2020, the large-scale Second Nagorno-Karabakh War resulted in thousands of casualties and a significant Azerbaijani victory. An armistice was established by a tripartite ceasefire agreement on November 10, resulting in Azerbaijan regaining all of the occupied territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh as well as capturing one-third of Nagorno-Karabakh itself. Ceasefire violations in Nagorno-Karabakh and on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border have continued following the 2020 war, with intermittent but ongoing casualties.
Since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijan has rescinded its offer of special status or autonomy to its indigenous Armenian residents and instead insists on their "integration" into Azerbaijan. International mediators and human rights organizations emphasized self-determination for the local Armenian population and did not believe that Artsakh Armenians could live safely under the regime of Azerbaijani President Aliyev. Since December 2022, Azerbaijan had blockaded the Republic of Artsakh from the outside world, in violation of the 2020 ceasefire agreement and international legal rulings.
Beginning with the Armenia-Azerbaijan border crisis in the early-2020's, particularly during the September 2022 clashes, the international community reacted with excoriation towards Azerbaijan over its actions in Armenia, with the US, France, the UK, Canada, Greece, Cyprus, Estonia, India, EU and Uruguay openly condemning Azerbaijan, laying the blame for the crisis squarely at their feet, with some even going so far as to suggest sanctions. Throughout the 2020's, the Turkic states of Central Asia and Azerbaijan would become more integrated, mutually expanding their militaries and organizing their intergovernmental political organization. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan would emerge as the most militarized of the new Union, expanding their manpower by the most, while Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan provided the brunt of the air force, and Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan provided most of the tanks and armored fighting vehicles.
The conflict, primarily centered around the Armenian capital of Yerevan, results in over 100,000 casualties. Nearly the entire population of Artsakh is razed, displaced, or killed, including women and children. The international community is in uproar, while Russia and China sounded their usual notes of neutrality. Even the Turkish Republic criticizes its long-time ally for collaborating with the other former-Soviet republics to invade and decimate the country of Armenia. While both were Turkic polities and neither go to war against one another, relations between Azerbaijan-Bukhara and Turkey remain cool from thereon. Although not officially a NATO ally, the Nordic Battlegroup spearheaded by Denmark and Finland is able to repulse the invaders by September and reclaim nearly all Armenian territory proper. Unfortunately, Artsakh is lost to and annexed by the Azerbaijanis backed by Azerbaijan-Bukhara, China and Russia.
2028 NATO–Russian invasion of Azerbaijan-Bukhara[]
From 2028 to 2029, NATO and Russia would establish an uneasy coalition of convenience against the primary aggressor of Operation Yomg'ir - Azerbaijan-Bukhara. By this point, in concert with facilitating secessionist ethno-nationalist movements within the Union, Azerbaijan-Bukhara was on the verge of becoming a failed state just over a year after its fateful attacks in conjunction with China on NATO Europe. Russia's ally in Iran would step in, along with the Arab League, Brazil, India, Japan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Israel and even most of Azerbaijan outside of Baku in 2029. By the beginning of 2030, the Azeri-Bukharists - primarily Kazakh by this time - supported by a thin stream of aid from Beijing, would be cornered in Almaty, Kazakhstan - and surrender on 29 January 2030. Roughly 35 years later, everything had changed. Russia had collapsed, and a pan-Turkic ultra-nationalist party had risen to power in Astana in the ashes of the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union.
2047 Azeri-Iranian–Kazakh invasion of Uzbekistan[]
Into the 2030's, 40's and 50's the Azeri people would remain united under one flag, with the Azeri state essentially collapsed and absorbed into Iran in the binational state of Azerbaijan-Iran, established in January 2033. Within the year, Russia had collapsed and a resurgent ultra-nationalist Kazakhstan had begun expanding in the region. Relations between the two powers - Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan-Iran - would fluctuate greatly from cordial and friendly to verging on the brink of war. The nation-states would collaborate in many spheres of mutual imperialism such as the invasion and occupation of Uzbekistan, splitting the country along the Karakalpak-Uzbek border, with most Uzbeks forced to endure the harsh draconian rule of Azerbaijan-Iran. The Uzbek Genocide of approximately 2 million in the 2050's and 2060's would unite most of the world against Azerbaijan-Iran and Kazakhstan, forcing the two into an alliance, although this would do little to temper their isolation. In 2067, the governments of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan-Iran would be overthrown and puppet regimes loyal to Istanbul and Ankara would be installed.
Drug Wars[]
In U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation, the so-called military-industrial complex he had warned about (and had been largely responsible for) had become very real by the end of the Cold War.
As early as the 1990s the U.S. had been smuggling weapons to Mexican drug cartels under the auspices of ATF and the DHS. Particularly during the period between 2006 and 2011, when the U.S. agents allowed thousands of guns to "walk" into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. Under the Mérida Initiative, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence had contributed to the conditions that have allowed secretive transnational organized crime and cartels to buy off the Mexican police, and empower the Mexican military to a position above the Mexican government itself in many ways. From this point forward, drug cartels ran Mexico. Secessionist uprisings became commonplace, beginning with the 1994 Zapatista uprising and its aftermath - which involved an acceleration of militarism by Mexican authorities. Following on the heels of the 1994 uprising, the U.S. accelerated involvement with the Mexican military under the label of "Drug Training," which was truly about counterinsurgency. This focus on insurgencies enabled and accelerated the cartels' control over regional politics and law enforcement, and allowed arms-dealer politics to rule over regional politics and law enforcement in the U.S. and both developments would fuel the autonomous and secessionist fronts in both countries, which would inevitably lead to the formation of the Union State of North America.
20th Century[]
The Miami Drug Wars were a series of armed conflicts in the metropolitan area of Miami, Florida, between 1979 and 1986. They were a direct result of the Colombian War and the Central American Crisis, as well as the Colombian drug lord and narcoterrorist, Pablo Escobar.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, the crack epidemic followed widespread cocaine use in American cities. The death rate was worse, reaching almost 2 per 100,000. In 1982, Vice President George H. W. Bush and his aides began pushing for the involvement of the CIA and the U.S. military in drug interdiction efforts, the so-called War on Drugs.
This and subsequent developments would lead to mass-incarceration and an opioid crisis involving rapid increase in the use of prescription and non-prescription opioid drugs in the United States and Canada beginning in the late 1990s and continuing throughout the next two decades. The increase in opioid overdose deaths has been dramatic, and opioids are now responsible for 49,000 of the 72,000 drug overdose deaths overall in the US in 2017.
D.C. Mayor Marion Barry captured on a surveillance camera smoking crack cocaine during a sting operation by the FBI and D.C. Police.
Writer and lawyer Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness argues that punitive laws against drugs like crack cocaine adopted under the Reagan Administration's War on drugs resulted in harsh social consequences, including large numbers of young black men imprisoned for long sentences, the exacerbation of drug crime despite a decrease in illegal drug use in the United States, increased police brutality against the black community resulting in injury and death for many black men, women, and children.
According to Alexander, society turned into a racist criminal justice system to avoid exhibiting obvious racism. Since African Americans were the majority users of crack cocaine, it provided a platform for the government to create laws that were specific to crack. This was an effective way to imprison black people without having to do the same to white Americans. Thus, there was a discourse of African Americans and a perpetuated narrative about crack addiction that was villainous and problematic. The criminalizing of African American crack users was portrayed as dangerous and harmful to society.
Alexander writes that felony drug convictions for crack cocaine fell disproportionately on young black men, who then lost access to voting, housing, and employment opportunities. These economic setbacks led to increased violent crime in poor black communities as families did what they had to do to survive.
Alexander explains the process of someone who is caught with crack: first, the arrest and the court hearing that will result in jail or prison-time. Second, the aftermath of permanent stigmas attached to someone who has done jail-time for crack, like being marked a felon on their record. This impacts job opportunity, housing opportunity, and creates obstacles for people who are left with little motivation to follow the law, making it more likely that they will be arrested again.
Mexican Drug War[]
During the English Rebellion in the 2020s, NATO added the Mexican Drug Cartels, particularly the Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartels, to the list of designated terrorist organizations. They also noted that U.S.-based PMCs were participating in "anti-narcotics" operations in Colombia and Central America, and siphoning funds from the U.S. Intelligence Community, primarily the NSA and CIA.
New American Century (1997–2016)[]
The American Century is a characterization of the period since the middle of the 20th century as being largely dominated by the United States in political, economic, and cultural terms. It is comparable to the description of the period 1815–1914 as Britain's Imperial Century. The United States' influence grew throughout the 20th century, but became especially dominant after the end of World War II, when only two superpowers remained, the United States and the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States remained the world's only superpower, and became the hegemon, or what some have termed a hyperpower.
The American Century includes the political influence of the United States but also its economic influence. Many states around the world would, over the course of the 20th century, adopt the economic policies of the Washington Consensus, sometimes against the wishes of their populations. The economic force of the US was powerful at the end of the century due to it being by far the largest economy in the world. The US had large resources of minerals, energy resources, metals, and timber, a large and modernized farming industry and large industrial base. The United States dollar is the dominant world reserve currency under the Bretton Woods system. US systems were rooted in capitalist economic theory based on supply and demand, that is, production determined by customers' demands. America was allied with the G7 major economies. US economic policy prescriptions were the "standard" reform packages promoted for crisis-wracked developing countries by Washington, DC-based international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, as well as the US Treasury Department.
The military of the United States was a naval-based advanced military with by far the highest military expenditure in the world. The United States Navy was the world's largest navy, with the largest number of aircraft carriers, bases all over the world (particularly in an incomplete "ring" bordering the Warsaw Pact states to the west, south and east). The US had the largest nuclear arsenal in the world during the first half of the Cold War, one of the largest armies in the world and one of the two largest air forces in the world. Its powerful military allies in Western Europe (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation states) had their own nuclear capabilities. The US also possessed a powerful global intelligence network in the Central Intelligence Agency.
With it being the largest overseas contingent of U.S. military personnel, Japan would bear the brunt of early American imperialism of the 1980's and 1990's. With the U.S. pulling 9,000 troops from Okinawa, an opponent to Prime Minister Abe rises on a wave of sentiment that charged the Japanese government of essentially hiring U.S. mercenaries to put down dissent in the Islands, in which their previous assignments involved them in war crimes. After the outbreak of the War on China in 2022, events would escalate across Korea and Okinawa, resulting in years of unrest and instability across Northeast Asia.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. that focused on United States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership." The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."
Of the twenty-five people who signed PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Observers such as Irwin Stelzer and Dave Grondin have suggested that the PNAC played a key role in shaping the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, particularly in building support for the Iraq War. Academics such as Inderjeet Parmar, Phillip Hammond, and Donald E. Abelson have said PNAC's influence on the George W. Bush administration has been exaggerated.
The Project for the New American Century ceased to function in 2006;[19] it was replaced by a new think-tank named the Foreign Policy Initiative, co-founded by Kristol and Kagan in 2009. The Foreign Policy Initiative was dissolved in 2017.
Neoconservatives and the Alt. Right[]
Neoconservatism was a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s and falling from prominence in the latter half of the 21st century among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party, and the growing New Left and counterculture, in particular the Vietnam protests. Some also began to question their liberal beliefs regarding domestic policies such as the Great Society.
Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, including peace through strength (by means of military force), and are known for espousing disdain for communism and for political radicalism (although many of its critics have charged it with, accurately, perceived Americanism, ultra-nationalism and militarist extremism). Neoconservatives and the alt-right both could be argued to have originated during the 1968 presidential election on the Republican side, wherein during the primary campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan, Governors of New York and California respectively, united in opposition to the paleoconservatism of Richard Nixon in a "Stop Nixon" movement, although it would eventually find its way into the populism of the 1980's Reagan Presidency. Although during this time the viciously antisemitic and racist "paleocons" would remain as tentative controlled opposition, a lot of what the two Republican factions would say about one another was true (excluding antisemitic theories about Israel), all of this would change with the 2016 general election and its result.
In the election of 1964, incumbent Democrat United States President Lyndon B. Johnson won the largest popular vote landslide in U.S. Presidential election history over Republican United States Senator Barry Goldwater. During the presidential term that followed, Johnson was able to achieve many political successes, including the passage of the Great Society domestic programs (including "War on Poverty" legislation), landmark civil rights legislation, and the continued exploration of space. Despite making significant achievements, his popular support would be short-lived. At the same time, the country endured large-scale race riots in the streets of its larger cities, along with a generational revolt of young people and violent debates over foreign policy. The emergence of the hippie counterculture, the rise of New Left activism, and the emergence of the Black Power movement exacerbated social and cultural clashes between classes, generations, and races. Adding to the national crisis, on April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, igniting further mass rioting and chaos, including Washington, D.C., where there was rioting within just a few blocks of the White House and machine guns were stationed on the Capitol steps to protect it.
The primary reason for the precipitous decline of President Lyndon B. Johnson's popularity was the Vietnam War, which he greatly escalated during his time in office. By late 1967, over 500,000 American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam. Draftees made up 42 percent of the military in Vietnam, but suffered 58% of the casualties as nearly 1000 Americans a month were killed and many more were injured. Johnson's position was particularly damaged when the national news media began to focus on the high costs and ambiguous results of escalation, despite his repeated efforts to downplay the seriousness of the situation.
In early January 1968, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated that the war would be winding down as the North Vietnamese were losing their will to fight, but shortly thereafter, they launched the Tet Offensive, in which they and Communist Vietcong forces launched simultaneous attacks on all government strongholds in South Vietnam. Though a U.S. military victory, Tet led many Americans to ponder whether the war was winnable or worth it. In addition, voters felt they could not trust their government's assessment and reporting of the war effort. The Pentagon called for sending several hundred thousand more soldiers to Vietnam. Johnson's approval ratings fell below 35%, and the Secret Service refused to let the president make public appearances on the campuses of American colleges and universities, due to his extreme unpopularity among college students. The Secret Service also prevented Johnson from appearing at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, because it could not guarantee his safety from assassination.
Nixon won a resounding victory in the important New Hampshire primary on March 12, with 78% of the vote. Anti-war Republicans wrote in the name of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the leader of the Republican Party's liberal wing, who received 11% of the vote and became Nixon's new challenger. Rockefeller had originally not intended to run, having discounted a campaign for the nomination in 1965 and planned on making United States Senator Jacob Javits the favorite son, either in preparation of a presidential campaign or to secure him the second spot on the ticket; as Rockefeller warmed to the idea of entering the race again however, Javits moved his attentions back towards seeking a third term in the Senate. Nixon led Rockefeller in the polls throughout the primary campaign, and though Rockefeller defeated Nixon and Governor John Volpe from Massachusetts primary on April 30, he otherwise fared poorly in state primaries and conventions, having declared too late to place his name on state ballots.
By early spring, California Governor Ronald Reagan, the leader of the Republican Party's conservative wing, had become Nixon's chief rival. In the Nebraska primary on May 14, Nixon won with 70% of the vote to 21% for Reagan and 5% for Rockefeller. While this was a wide margin for Nixon, Reagan remained Nixon's leading challenger. Nixon won the next primary of importance, Oregon, on May 15 with 65% of the vote, and won all the following primaries except for California (June 4), where only Reagan appeared on the ballot. Reagan's victory in California gave him a plurality of the nationwide primary vote, but his poor showing in most other state primaries left him far behind Nixon in the actual delegate count.
A substantial number of neoconservatives were originally moderate socialists associated with the right-wing of the Socialist Party of America (SP) and its successor, Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Max Shachtman, a former Trotskyist theorist who developed a strong antipathy towards the New Left, had numerous devotees among SDUSA with strong links to George Meany's AFL-CIO. Following Shachtman and Meany, this faction led the SP to oppose immediate withdrawal from the Vietnam War, and oppose George McGovern in the Democratic primary race and, to some extent, the general election. They also chose to cease their own party-building and concentrated on working within the Democratic Party, eventually influencing it through the Democratic Leadership Council. Thus the Socialist Party dissolved in 1972, and SDUSA emerged that year. (Most of the left-wing of the party, led by Michael Harrington, immediately abandoned SDUSA.) SDUSA leaders associated with neoconservatism include Carl Gershman, Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik and Bayard Rustin.
Although many historians attribute the rise of neoconservatism to the right-wing opposition to Democratic nominee George McGovern and Rep. Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 primary through the candidacy of former-Vice President and 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey and his 1968 running-mate, a lot of it may have began during the Eisenhower administration of the 1950's. During the run-up to the 1960 presidential election then-Senator Kennedy's campaign took advantage of an opening when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil-rights leader, was arrested in Georgia while taking part in a sit-in. Nixon asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower to pardon King, but the President declined to do so. Nixon refused to take further action, but Kennedy placed calls to local political authorities to get King released from jail, and he also called King's father and wife. As a result, King's father endorsed Kennedy, and he received much favorable publicity in the black community. A letter to the Governor of Georgia regarding Martin Luther King Jr.'s arrest also helped Kennedy garner many African American votes. John F. Kennedy asked Governor Ernest Vandiver to look into the harsh sentencing and stated his claim that he did not want to have to get involved in Georgia's justice system. A member of Kennedy's civil rights team and King's friend, Harris Wofford, and other Kennedy campaign members passed out a pamphlet to black churchgoers the Sunday before the presidential election that said, ""No Comment" Nixon versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy."" On election day, Kennedy won the black vote in most areas by wide margins, and this may have provided his margin of victory in states such as New Jersey, South Carolina, Illinois, and Missouri. Researchers found that Kennedy's appeal to African American voters appears to be largely responsible for his receiving more African-American votes than Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 election. The same study conducted found that white voters were less influenced on the topic of civil rights than black voters in 1960. The Republican national chairman at the time, Thruston Ballard Morton, regarded the African-American vote as the single most crucial factor.
The issue that dominated the election, however, was the rising Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1957, the Soviets had launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth. Soon afterwards, some American leaders warned that the nation was falling behind communist countries in science and technology. In Cuba, the revolutionary regime of Fidel Castro, became a close ally of the Soviet Union in 1960, heightening fears of communist subversion in the Western Hemisphere. Public opinion polls revealed that more than half the American people thought war with the Soviet Union was inevitable.
Kennedy took advantage of increased Cold War tension by emphasizing a perceived "missile gap" between the United States and Soviet Union. He argued that under the Republicans the Soviets had developed a major advantage in the numbers of nuclear missiles. He proposed a bipartisan congressional investigation about the possibility that the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in developing missiles. He also noted in an October 18 speech that several senior US military officers had long criticized the Eisenhower Administration's defense spending policies.
Although John F. Kennedy winning against Nixon in 1960's election was certainly preferable to the alternative - and overall better in the historical context - it would only delay the inevitable, and - worse - signal the beginning of a dark chapter in human history. The technological escalation of the Cold War would foreshadow the emergent culture of international terrorism and utilitarian-technocratic totalitarianism that would encircle the planet for centuries. Humanity's collective unconscious would become ensnared in a cult of fear and personality for generations.
The year 2000 would see a controversial victory for neoconservative radicals not only in the Americas, but also Europe. On 5 May 1996, José María Aznar from the People's Party (PP) was able to form the first centre-right government in Spain since 1982 through confidence and supply agreements with Convergence and Union (CiU), the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and Canarian Coalition (CC). In the 34th congress of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) held in June 1997, Felipe González, who had been prime minister from 1982 to 1996 and PSOE Secretary General since 1974, announced his intention to leave the party's leadership. The party, divided at the time between González's supporters—renovadores, Spanish for "renovators"—and those following the discipline of former deputy prime minister and PSOE vice secretary general Alfonso Guerra—guerristas—, elected Joaquín Almunia, a "renovator" and former Minister of Labour and Social Security (1982–1986) and Minister for Public Administrations (1986–1991), as new Secretary General.
United Left (IU) underwent a severe internal crisis throughout 1997 over Julio Anguita's confrontational attitude with the PSOE—to the point of siding with the PP in a number of votes in the Congress of Deputies—as well as with a perceived lack of democracy within IU. Anguita sought to prevent an electoral alliance between United Left–Galician Left (EU–EG) and the Socialists' Party of Galicia (PSdeG–PSOE) ahead of the 1997 Galician regional election, a move which received criticism from Initiative for Catalonia (IC), IU's sister party in Catalonia, with which disagreements over the coalition's political direction had been on the rise since the 1996 general election. The Democratic Party of the New Left (PDNI), constituted as an internal current within IU which had been critical of Anguita's leadership, was expelled from the alliance's governing bodies in June 1997, after party discipline in the Congress was broken on the issue of labour reform. The IU crisis came to a peak in September 1997, which saw NI's expulsion from IU as a whole, the dissolution of the NI-controlled regional leaderships in Cantabria and Castilla–La Mancha and the break up of relations with EU–EG and IC. The PDNI then sought electoral alliances with the PSOE, which materialized ahead of the 1999 local, regional and European Parliament elections.
The PP government relied on confidence and supply support from CiU, PNV and CC. The PNV withdrew its support from the government in June 1999, with relations strained after the signing of the Estella Agreement between the PNV and HB in September 1998. The Aragonese Party (PAR), which had been allied with the PP since the 1996 election, broke away from the PP parliamentary group in October 1999 and joined the Mixed Group.
Following the monarchist-backed coup of 1981, a series of right-wing governments would rule Spain for 14 of the past 37 years. Even the centre-left four-term government of Felipe Gonzales was accused of veering to the right as early as his second term and formed an alliance with Catalan and Basque separatists in his fourth.
In foreign policy, Spain adopted a neoconservative approach and grew closer ties with the United States and the Bush administration, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Aznar supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002, he faced harsh criticisms for the actuation of the government during the Prestige oil spill in Galicia. Support of the PP further declined after the invasion of the Iraq, which was not supported by the majority of the Spanish population, but was nevertheless carried out with Spanish support for the U.S. and the UK. A 2003 poll found by the public research institute CIS found that 91% of Spaniards were against the invasion of Iraq.
In 2004, a general election in Spain was scheduled for 14 March, which was not contested by Aznar, but by his successor as lead of the PP, Mariano Rajoy. On 11 March, the 2004 Madrid train bombings occurred, which killed 192 people. The attacks were perpetrated by al-Qaeda, but the government claimed the bombings were perpetrated by ETA. In the few days between the bombings and the election, the PP defended this position: however, a major sector of the population rejected the hypothesis that the attacks were perpetrated by ETA and believed the government was lying because of the bombings' possible connection to Spanish support for the invasion of Iraq. This led to a massive drop in support for the PP in the days before the election, and the opposing PSOE's José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero won the election.
2016 presidential election & the Global Alt-Right[]
America's late 20th-early 21st century foreign policy exposed its right to many far-right nationalist influences from Europe, the most prominent being the Nouvelle Droite.
The Nouvelle Droite began with the formation of Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE; Research and Study Group for European Civilization), a French group guided largely by the philosopher Alain de Benoist, in Nice in 1968. De Benoist and other early GRECE members had long been involved in far-right politics, and their new movement was influenced by older rightist currents of thought like the German conservative revolutionary movement. Although rejecting left-wing ideas of human equality, the Nouvelle Droite was also heavily influenced by the tactics of the New Left and some forms of Marxism. Particularly influential were the sociocultural ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, with ND members describing themselves as the "Gramscians of the Right". The ND achieved a level of mainstream respectability in France during the 1970s, although their reputation and influence declined following sustained liberal and leftist anti-fascist opposition. Members of the Nouvelle Droite joined several political parties, becoming a particularly strong influence within the far-right French National Front, while ND ideas also influenced far-right groups elsewhere in Europe.
The resultant Identitarianism is a post-WWII European far-right political ideology asserting the right of peoples of European descent to culture and territory which are claimed to belong exclusively to people defined as European. Originating in France and building on ontological ideas of modern German philosophy, its ideology was formulated from the 1960s onward by essayists such as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, considered the movement's intellectual leaders.
Al Jazeera English conducted an undercover investigation into the French branch, which aired on 10 December 2018. It captured GI activists punching a Muslim woman whilst saying "F*** Mecca" and one saying if ever he gets a terminal illness he will purchase a weapon and cause carnage, when asked by the undercover journalist who would be the target he replies "a mosque, whatever". French prosecutors have launched an inquiry into the findings amidst calls for the group to be proscribed. Identitarians also emerged to prominence in Austria, Croatia, Spain, Holland and Belgium in the 2010's and would accelerate in Spain into the 2020's, with right-wing politicians globally caught in the habit of projecting their corruption onto the opposition.
Under the Republican presidency of George W. Bush in the 2000s, the white nationalist movement focused largely on criticising mainstream conservatives rather than liberals, accusing them of betraying white Americans. In that period they drew increasingly on the conspiracy theories that had been generated by the Patriot movement since the 1990s; online, the white nationalist and Patriot movements increasingly conversed and merged. Following the election of Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008—making him the first black president of the country—the world-views of a range of right-wing movements, including white supremacists, Patriots, conspiracy theorists, and Tea Partiers, increasingly began to coalesce, in part due to a shared racial animus against Obama.
In doing so, they would become the perfect foil to a rapidly-consolidating neoconservative/neoliberal centre-right ultra-nationalist totalitarianism.
The alt-right drew upon several older currents of right-wing thought. One was the Nouvelle Droite, a far-right movement originating in 1960s France. Many alt-rightists adopted the Nouvelle Droite's views on pursuing change through "metapolitical" strategies; it thereby shares similarities with European identitarianism, which also draws upon the Nouvelle Droite. The alt-right also exhibited similarities with the paleoconservative movement which emerged in the U.S. during the 1980s. Both opposed neoconservatism and expressed similar positions on restricting immigration and supporting an openly nationalistic foreign policy.
In June 2015, New York billionaire businessman Donald Trump announced plans to campaign to become the Republican nominee for the 2016 presidential election, something that attracted the interest of alt-rightists as well as from white nationalists more broadly, neo-Nazis, KKK groups, and the Patriot movement.
The alt-right was exceedingly vocal in support for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The alt-right approved of Trump's hard attitude to immigration, his calls for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., and for a wall to be built along the border with Mexico to curtail illegal immigration. Niewert observed that "Trump was the gateway drug for the alt-right", with many individuals learning of the movement through their interest in Trump.
As noted by Hawley, "the Alt-Right is most definitely far to Trump's right". Many alt-rightists recognized that Trump did not share their white nationalist world-view and would not bring about all the changes they desired. They were nevertheless grateful that he had shifted the national conversation rightward, and that he had shown that it was possible to successfully challenge the conservative movement from the right. Griffin called on alt-rightists to "join the Trump campaign... to take down the hated cuckservative establishment". A small minority of alt-rightists were against supporting Trump; The Right Stuff contributor "Auschwitz Soccer Ref" complained that two of Trump's children had married Jews, suggesting that Trump was therefore loyal to Israel.
Trump has been a keen user of Twitter, and in November 2015 he retweeted a graphic about African-American crime statistics which included the alt-right, white nationalist hashtag "#WhiteGenocide". The alt-righter RamZPaul rejoiced, retweeting Trump's piece with the comment: "Trump watches and is influenced by the Alt Right". Over coming months, Trump retweeted a second tweet that had "#WhiteGenocide" as a hashtag as well as sharing other tweets issued by white supremacists. The alt-right saw this as further evidence that Trump was their champion.
Breitbart's Bannon had been one of Trump's most enthusiastic backers, and in August 2015, Trump appointed him to lead his election campaign. That month, the Democratic Party's nominee for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, criticized Bannon's appointment in a speech given in Reno, Nevada. She highlighted Bannon's claim that Breitbart was "the platform for the alt-right", attacking the alt-right as "racist ideas ... anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women ideas" and accusing Trump of taking the alt-right "mainstream". In her speech, she said that while half of Trump's supporters were decent individuals "desperate for change", the other half were "what I call the basket of deplorables ... The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. ... He has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have eleven thousand people—now eleven million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric." Clinton referred to the alt-right as "an emerging racist ideology" and warned that "a fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party". After Clinton's speech, web traffic to alt-right websites rose and the mainstream media gave it increasing coverage; Spencer and other alt-rightists were pleased, believing Clinton's speech gave them greater publicity and helped legitimize them in the public eye. Many of Trump's supporters adopted the moniker of "deplorables" for themselves, and the term was widely used on memes that the alt-right promoted online.
As the election loomed, Trump claimed that the Obama administration would rig the election to ensure a Democratic win; far-right websites widely promoted this notion and claimed they would resort to violence or civil war in the event of Clinton's victory. When Trump won the election in November, the alt-right's response was generally triumphalist and self-congratulatory. Many alt-rightists claimed responsibility for the result. Anglin stated: "Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn't have been possible"; Spencer tweeted that "The Alt-Right has been declared the winner... We're the establishment now." Following his election, Trump announced that Bannon would be his chief strategist, a decision popular with the alt-right. Alt-rightists were generally supportive of Trump's other appointments, such as his decision to make Jeff Sessions his attorney general. While aware that Trump would not pursue a white nationalist agenda, the alt-right hoped to pull him further to the right, taking hardline positions that made him look more moderate, and thus shifting the U.S. Overton window in their direction.
Trump's America[]
War in Afghanistan (2001–2098)[]
- Main article: War in Afghanistan
Clockwise from top-left: British Royal Marines during a clearance in Helmand Province; U.S. soldiers in a firefight with Taliban forces in Kunar Province; An Afghan National Army soldier surveying atop a Humvee; Afghan and U.S. soldiers move through snow in Logar Province; Canadian forces fire an M777 howitzer in Helmand Province; An Afghan soldier surveying a valley in Parwan Province; British troops preparing to board a Chinook during Operation Tor Shezada.
The War in Afghanistan followed the United States invasion of Afghanistan of 7 October 2001, when the United States of America and its allies successfully drove the Taliban from power in order to deny al-Qaeda a safe base of operations in Afghanistan. Since the initial objectives were completed, a coalition of over 40 countries (including all NATO members) formed a security mission in the country called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF, 2001–2014), of which certain members were involved in military combat allied with Afghanistan's government. The war has afterwards mostly consisted of Taliban insurgents fighting against the Afghan Armed Forces and allied forces; the majority of ISAF/RS soldiers and personnel are American. The war was code named by the US as Operation Enduring Freedom (2001–14) and Operation Freedom's Sentinel (2015–2021); it was the longest war in US history.
Following the September 11 attacks in 2001 on the US, which President George W. Bush stated was carried out by the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden, who was living or hiding in Afghanistan and had already been wanted since the 1998 United States embassy bombings, President Bush demanded that the Taliban, who were de facto ruling Afghanistan, hand over bin Laden. The Taliban declined to extradite him unless they were provided clear evidence of his involvement in the attacks, which the US refused to provide and dismissed as a delaying tactic. On 7 October 2001 the United States, with the United Kingdom, launched Operation Enduring Freedom. To justify the War, the Bush administration claimed that Afghanistan only had "selective sovereignty", and that intervention was necessary because the Taliban threatened the sovereignty of other states. The two were later joined by other forces, including the Northern Alliance – the Afghan opposition which had been fighting the Taliban in the ongoing civil war since 1996. By December 2001, the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies were mostly defeated in the country, and at the Bonn Conference new Afghan interim authorities (mostly from the Northern Alliance) elected Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan Interim Administration. The United Nations Security Council established the ISAF to assist the new authority with securing Kabul, which after a 2002 loya jirga (grand assembly) became the Afghan Transitional Administration. A nationwide rebuilding effort was also made following the end of the totalitarian Taliban regime. In the popular elections of 2004, Karzai was elected president of the country, now named the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. NATO became involved in ISAF in August 2003, and later that year assumed leadership of it. At this stage, ISAF included troops from 43 countries with NATO members providing the majority of the force. One portion of US forces in Afghanistan operated under NATO command; the rest remained under direct US command.
Following defeat in the initial invasion, the Taliban was reorganized by its leader Mullah Omar, and launched an insurgency against the Afghan government and ISAF in 2003. Though outgunned and outnumbered, insurgents from the Taliban and other groups waged asymmetric warfare with guerrilla raids and ambushes in the countryside, suicide attacks against urban targets, and turncoat killings against coalition forces. The Taliban exploited weaknesses in the Afghan government to reassert influence across rural areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan. From 2006 the Taliban made significant gains and showed an increased willingness to commit atrocities against civilians – ISAF responded by increasing troops for counter-insurgency operations to "clear and hold" villages. Violence sharply escalated from 2007 to 2009. Troop numbers began to surge in 2009 and continued to increase through 2011 when roughly 140,000 foreign troops operated under ISAF and US command in Afghanistan. Of these 100,000 were from the US. On 1 May 2011, United States Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. NATO leaders in 2012 commended an exit strategy for withdrawing their forces, and later the United States announced that its major combat operations would end in December 2014, leaving a residual force in the country. In October 2014, British forces handed over the last bases in Helmand to the Afghan military, officially ending their combat operations in the war. On 28 December 2014, NATO formally ended ISAF combat operations in Afghanistan and officially transferred full security responsibility to the Afghan government. The NATO-led Operation Resolute Support was formed the same day as a successor to ISAF.
At the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency in early 2017, there were fewer than 9,000 American troops in Afghanistan. By early summer 2017, troop levels increased by about 50%; there were no formal plans to withdraw. In August 2019, the Taliban planned to negotiate with the US to reduce troop levels back to where they had been when Trump took office, but Trump canceled the negotiations after a Taliban attack. On 29 February 2020, the United States and the Taliban signed a conditional peace deal in Doha, Qatar, which requires that U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghanistan within 14 months so long as the Taliban cooperates with the terms of the agreement.
Despite the peace agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, insurgent attacks against Afghan security forces were reported to have surged in the country. In the 45 days after the agreement (between 1 March and 15 April 2020), the Taliban conducted more than 4,500 attacks in Afghanistan, which showed an increase of more than 70% as compared to the same period in the previous year. More than 900 Afghan security forces were killed in the period, up from about 520 in the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, because of a significant reduction in the number of offensives and airstrikes by Afghan and U.S. forces against the Taliban due to the agreement, Taliban casualties dropped to 610 in the period down from about 1,660 in the same period a year earlier. The Pentagon spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman, said that although the Taliban stopped conducting attacks against the U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, the violence was still "unacceptably high" and "not conducive to a diplomatic solution." He added: "We have continued to do defensive attacks to help defend our partners in the area and we will continue to do that."
On 22 June 2020, Afghanistan reported its "bloodiest week in 19 years," during which 291 members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) were killed and 550 others wounded in 422 attacks carried out by the Taliban. At least 42 civilians, including women and children, were also killed and 105 others wounded by the Taliban across 18 provinces. During the week, the Taliban kidnapped 60 civilians in the central province of Daykundi.
On July 1, 2020, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee overwhelmingly voted in favor of a National Defense Authorization Act amendment to restrict President Trump's ability to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
After a contested 2019 presidential election results in a spike in instability from 2020 to 2022, the Uzbek nationalist Junbish organization along with the Afghan National Army - both led by Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum at the time - install the former Vice President in a bloodless coup through threat of force and violence. Afghan President Dostum immediately after declares war on Pakistan, with massive troop buildup along the Durand Line over the next several years. The resultant conflict - escalating at a time that Russia was claiming more territory in Europe, China was collapsing and India was expanding - would involve Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, and result in the deaths of between 5.3 and 6.1 million and set the region back decades. The timing of the start of this row between Afghan and Pak governments is key, as not only does it uncover Dostum's potential role as a Russian spy, it also exposes the entire Uzbek military-industrial complex as a Russian shell organization posing as a national security state apparatus.
Various governments and regimes both authoritarian and democratic, and everywhere in between, would come to rule Afghanistan between 2030 and 2100. The effects of the climate singularity crisis of the mid-21st-early-22nd century would see the population plunge from over 45 million to under 20 in less than a decade between 2055 and 2063, and the following decades would see its government further radicalize, particularly with the inevitable rise of Turkish-Eurasian influence in the region by the 2090's, Allied member-states are forced to abandon their campaign against the extremists in Afghanistan, as the country's further and further reliance upon Eurasian economic ties effectively shuts the West out with brute force. The Afghan War is a failure of massive proportions, lasting for just shy of a century, and results in the irreversible disappearance of the United States, Russia, Europe, China and Asia as they were once known to our planet.
World War III (2014–2028)[]
On September 11th, 2001; 19 Egyptian and Saudi Muslims hijacked American and United Airlines flights 11 and 175, And subsequently flew them into the World Trade Center’s ‘Twin Towers’ – destroying them and killing 3,000. This would launch the War on Terror, which would last until India's 2022 conflict China and Pakistan and beyond.
World War III (WWIII, or WW3) also referred to as the Third World War or Frozen War I was an international conflict taking place in the Americas, Eurasia (specifically Eastern Europe and the Sino–Japanese orbit) and the Muslim world (isolated skirmishes also took place in Central Europe and Southeast Asia), lasting from June 2014 or 2022 (although some would claim 1999) into late 2028, early 2029 (or 2020) – or between just under one to two decades. It involved over half of the world’s 194 countries eventually consolidating into one of two major international and intercontinental military alliances: the stalwart NATO–Japanese coalition, the Chinese, Russian and Azeri-Bukharan-spearheaded CoSecTOr (which Afghanistan, Argentina, El Salvador, North Korea, Tunisia, Morocco, Padania, Peru, Republika Srpska, Tajikistan and North America are party to at various times) and rogue Cuban insurgents, and the neutral United Nations General Assembly and Security Council permanent member-states (Britain, US and France) that become involved only when attacked by Resistance Axis forces (Japan and the US emerge as their primary targets).
Although the two main factions remain steadfastly against one another, some infighting does unfold between the various sub-factions, the most notable of which being the Second American Civil War (2022–2024), which results in an unresolved stalemate between the United States and Azerbaijani-backed secessionists in California, New Jersey, Arizona and Texas (as well as throughout the continental U.S.). This instability on the American continent not seen since the Revolution and the Great Sioux War of the late 18th and 19th centuries respectively is one of the main conflicts of World War III, and also directly affects the infighting. North America and the U.S. at one point distance themselves from a NATO alliance seen as supporting an Argentine-backed ultranationalist Italy seen in the throes of an Iron Guard 2.0 scenario on steroids, the original Iron Guard originating in Romania during WWII as a Christian Fascist movement, blemishing their allies' image, and handing their enemies a propaganda victory on a platter. This is also a political metric to use against their respective opponents to 'prove' who was more opposed to ultranationalism, given the United States of America's own imperialistic reputation during the earlier and quieter phases of combat in World War III. The United States' past support for dictatorships is not only hypocritically seized upon by the relatively-isolationist Mexican and Texan-led North American regime, but also the Atlantic State - both of which had tens of millions of supporters in the United States proper between the two of them, which puts pressure on the U.S. leadership to distance itself and isolate itself as much as possible from NATO and its more traditional allies (aside from Scotland, which side with the U.S. out of necessity due to an insurgency on its southern border and around London that unfolds around this time).
Aside from Hungarian aggression in Central Europe and Serbian activity in the Balkans and Romania, Europe doesn’t see much of this, remaining mostly united throughout the decades-long conflict, although the 2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine would lead to a period of escalating instability in eastern Ukraine that would leave the region and the notoriously-violent Russian–Ukrainian "Unique" Relationship in a state virtually indistinguishable from the pre-Putin era.
With the advent of unmanned advanced combat technology (ranging from high-power intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBM, nuclear weapons, biowarfare and Mechanized Autonomous Weapon Systems or MAWS), WWIII was significantly less involving than its predecessor. Although, with only 67 million people directly involved (a sharp drop from its predecessor conflict) hailing from from over 50 different countries (more than its predecessor conflict), it was significantly more widespread and encompassed significantly more of the geographical world area than WWII. Over 2 million from the U.S. and 16 million from China contributed to the war effort, constituting a third of the total ground forces in the war. NATO (excluding the Americas) contributes 9.4 million from 27 member-states, representing the largest bloc of nations in the war, and the Axis boasts 10.7 million, with the China alone constituting two-thirds of the total active COSECTOR manpower, from dozens of nations that voluntarily ‘secede’ from the UN. Another 10 million represent Jihadists, terror groups and other unaffiliated paramilitary, and roughly 22 million civilians directly participate as well.
All-in-all, an estimate 87,112,780 total people perish in the wake of the Third Global Confrontation – 39,163,200 of them being Russian and Japanese soldiers and paramilitary during the Siege of Vladivostok and the War in the Far East against Japanese, South Korean, Indian, Tibetan and NATO forces. Of that; nearly 7,000,000 perish in the Rwandan genocide and subsequent Congo Wars, over 600,000 perish in the Russian “Directed Energy Munitions Orbiter,” “DEMO” Strikes on Zilina and Moravian Silesia – 90% of them being civilians, an estimate 986,500 (again, mostly civilians) also perish in the 2027 JaF missile attacks on Jammu & Kashmir, and nearly 700,000 in the 2024-25 nuclear bombings of Kaliningrad, Chicago, and Colorado Springs combined – still less than the 3 million (1.1 million immediately, and another nearly 2 million in the aforementioned regions and across the Indian subcontinent in the atmospheric and geopolitical fallout and aftermath) that perish in the 2027 Indo–Pakistani Nuclear War (bombings of J-K and North Waziristan) that occurred in a time span of under 60 minutes. Approximately 1 million (also mostly civilians) perish during the Azeri-Bukharan–Chinese Invasion of the EU, roughly 400,000 die during the Second Battle of Berlin (also known as the Berlin Blitz), 500,000-700,000 die in the Arab–Russian Invasion of Turkey and a grand total of roughly 1,762,700 perish from the bioterrorism outbreak.
The Second Russo-Japanese War of the early 2020's would become the primary flashpoint between the UN and Russia, and open the floodgates for all-out war in East Asia for the first time since the 1950's.
In the end, more people die as a result of this war than the number of people that participate in it. When factoring in the civilian death-toll from the regimes of U.S. Presidents Kerry, Trump and Obama, as well as the several-million Japanese soldiers that perish during the Siege of Vladivostok and the Republic of Sakha – not to mention the millions that perished during the Congo Wars of the 1990's and under the reign of Fang in the 2030's – the cost of WW3 reaches 94 million dead on the high end, and with the median historical estimate – 87.1 million: World War 3 surpasses WW2’s 74 million figure to become the costliest war fought in human history by a wide margin.
Whereas WWII is widely regarded as the responsibility of Adolf Hitler and German expansionist militarism and internationalist eugenics, the cause of WWIII is primarily attributed to the United States, Atlantic State – and later “North American” – Governments as a whole (also due to Brexit's destabilization of Britain and Ireland), although during the conflict the countries of China, Russia and Azerbaijan-Bukhara, and - to an extent - Korea and the Arab League are labeled and regarded as the “New Axis” ad-nausea by the US/NATO-run global power structure (with George W. Bush ironically declaring Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the "Axis of Evil"), with El Verde terrorizing South America and India fighting a two-front war against China and its puppet-state in Pakistan, the U.S. under the illegitimate and illiberal corporate rule of multimillionaire former-Secretary of State John Kerry, and the UK being infiltrated by Kerry-ally Lord Pharaoh. Pharaoh and Kerry both are found to be cooperating with the Kremlin, and the Sino–American Fang, Trump, Clinton and Gates dynasties group to divide-up and conquer Eurasia, the Americas and Middle-East.
These elites were specifically employed by the Bush-Clinton Syndicate and the Salazar–De Luca Syndicate, to launch World War 3 (predicated by the flawed narrative and scapegoat of a Chinese–Turkic Axis being the new threat to humanity) all in a massive conspiracy to distract the American and World public from one crucial truth. The fact that the United States – the sole superpower and most powerful nation in history – was hijacked by the superstates of China, a United Korea, Azerbaijan-Bukhara and North America in a blatant coup to silence a revolution, suppress a movement, and empower neoconservative theocrats bent on fulfilling the Book of Revelations and plunging humanity into ordered chaos and engineered apocalypse. An exact historiography of the Third World War and the centuries-long global and interplanetary "Frozen War" it resulted in has yet to be established, but by the late 2100's large swathes of professional historians and the general populace of human and transhuman civilization had come to a general consensus that World War III did occur in the first three decades of the 2000s at the turn of the millennium.
Regarding the official commencement of hostilities, the largest involvement of armed forces in a foreign country mark the deployment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. forces beginning the War in Iraq and the 50,000-strong Coalition against Turkish-backed ISIS - numbering as many as 200,000 jihadists by State Dept. estimates at its height. Still, other sources put the start of the conflict in the summer of 1998 at the beginning of the West's War on Yugoslavia, with the deadliest combat in Europe since WWII, involving widespread multinational intervention by NATO in addition to the NATO Invasion of Afghanistan three years later. Not long after the NATO Invasion of Yugoslavia occurs are the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa - which serve to put the infamous Osama bin Laden on the most-wanted list - and the subsequent Second Congo War, which involves 9 African countries and tens of thousands of mobilized forces on each side, vying for control over the vacuum created by U.S. and European imperialism, and resulting in the costliest war since WWII, in which millions of lives were lost by 2008. But others chart as far back as when the Bosnian War began alongside the ongoing Croatian War for Independence in the early years of the Yugoslav Wars, which is also the same year that marked the first intervention of the United Nations in foreign conflicts under the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations - including the aforementioned Wars in Yugoslavia. Another common historiography puts the beginning of the conflict on 7 October 2001 with the U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan and on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In addition to the debate over official commencement of hostilities in 1998-99 vs. 2014, a similar split formed over when the major hostilities had come to an end by the Winter of 2029-'30, while others point to the slowing of the global economy and overall socioeconomic fallout due to the 2020-2024 COVID-19 pandemic in general, led to many technically classified the fighting between 2020 and 2027-28 as a separate conflict entirely. After the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the U.S. had fallen from grace in virtually every way aside from raw military prowess with regard to its unipolar world order. Although the U.S. remained the sole superpower for now, the instability on the North American continent results in the rise of several successor states, mirroring the fall of the USSR, leaving the U.S. weakened - much like its Russian counterpart - and the status of California contested between it and an emerging Russian-backed North American successor state.
The Rwandan genocide directly resulted in the costliest wars since WWII, which ran concurrent to the aforementioned Yugoslav Wars which themselves involved genocide and war crimes, as well as the attacks on 9/11 and many of its own consequences. And a little over a decade later, by 2014, the intercontinental military alliance of China, Russia, Livonia, Azerbaijan-Bukhara and much of South America had supplanted terrorism as a threat to many European and Western nations. The United Nations had begun to lose its way, NATO had become fragmented between the pro-US and pro-Europe, and the U.S. eventually collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy by the mid-2030s.
Although the Arabs, Chinese and Azeri-Bukharans never formally allied with the Russians during the events of WWIII, they being targeted alongside Russia by the UN, EU, NATO and eventually the United States typically left them resorting to forming alliances of convenience with them periodically throughout the conflict, and thus traditionally being grouped in on their side as opposed to representing a third coalition of its own. Israel, alongside Azerbaijan-Bukhara and the Russians, would notably side with the Arab states against Turkish intervention in the region, 2016-2019. Israeli ties with CSTO nations were kept in the shadows, and typically only on full display in times and actions of desperation on the part of the Israelis. The prominent nuclear powers targeted by the West are China, Russia and Azerbaijan-Bukhara (the latter of whom attain nuclear weapons from Israel in 2023), typically compared to Germany, Italy and Japan in WW2. Although the majority of the deaths in WWIII were confined to the East Asian Theatre of the conflict, over 1 million would die in the conflicts in the Middle East, more than in the entirety of the decadeslong Arab-Israeli conflict preceding it.
Although historians focused intensely on the situation in Eastern and Central Europe, most of the fighting and manpower was directed toward the East. The folly of both Russia and Azerbaijan-Bukhara mimicking Germany's opening of two fronts against both the Soviet Union and West Europe in 1941, again nearly a century later; Russia engaging both the European Union and Japan and Azerbaijan-Bukhara engaging both the United Stats and Russia in combat. Though the EU was a consortium of different nations each with their own separate agendas and goals, Japan was a unified country and people ready to die to defend itself. Japan began mobilizing in the early 2020's, and by 2027 possessed nearly 1 million soldiers. China far outweighed Japan, though most of their focus was toward India to their southwest. Russia tried several times to break Japan's defenses, but within a few years of this Japan had amassed a paramilitary force of nearly 27 million, outnumbering the Russian and Chinese militaries combined. What Russia lacked in the West, it made up for in the East, but still it was not enough. Russia had positioned its asymmetric and hybrid warfare in the politics of Eastern Europe, inspired pro-Russian sentiment within local militias and paramilitaries within said countries. But in Asia? Russia was hated, and the anti-Russian sentiment in Japan, Azerbaijan-Bukhara and South Korea had boiled over into a militarized monstrosity. Japan would ultimately win its war against both Russia and China, and thus begin the collapse of the Neoimperialist Russian Federation by 2030.
Background[]
Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001)[]
Clockwise from the top-left: Slovenian police escort captured JNA soldiers back to their unit during the 1991 Slovenian war of independence; A destroyed tank during the Battle of Vukovar; Anti-tank missile installations in the siege of Dubrovnik; Reburial of victims from the 1995 Srebrenica massacre on 11 July 2010; UN vehicle driving on the streets of Sarajevo during the siege.
Up until the mid-1980s, Yugoslavia was one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries on Earth. With a standing manpower of nearly a million, nearly 3000 tanks and AFV (the fifth largest in Europe), over 2000 self-propelled and towed artillery, nearly 1000 rocket projectors and the sixth largest air force with over 1200 aircraft the Yugoslav People's Army was easily one of the top 20 most powerful military powers on the planet. In addition, Yugoslavia was also economically strong. Yugoslavia had the greatest per capita GDP of all the Communist nations, and the third largest Communist economy behind China and Russia, and for a brief period on par with North Korea and Vietnam before pulling forward.
By 1992 however, Federal Yugoslavia had shrunk, most of its equipment was outdated, and its army untrained conscripts. Yet amid the fervent independence movements in Bosnia and Croatia, a determined and utterly brutal Serbian ultranationalist push across the former Yugoslav republics had emerged.
From March 1993, Serb para-military units killed a great number of civilians, destroyed habitations, prevented the UNHCR from delivering humanitarian aid, and forced thousands of Bosniak refugees to flee to the town of Srebrenica. 30 or 40 persons were dying daily from military action, starvation, exposure to cold or lack of medical treatment. Resolution 819 attempted to address this issue by declaring Srebrenica a "Safe Area". Resolution 836 authorized UNPROFOR "acting in self-defense, to take the necessary measures, including the use of force, in reply to bombardments against the safe areas by any of the parties or to armed incursion into them or in the event of any deliberate obstruction in or around those areas the freedom of movement of UNPROFOR or of protected humanitarian convoys" . To implement the deterrence, around 7600 reinforcements were sent and air support was organised in coordination with NATO.
On 24 September, the Security Council was informed by the Croatian Government that if the mandate of UNPROFOR was not amended to promote energetic implementation of the relevant resolutions of the Security Council, Croatia would be forced to request UNPROFOR to leave the country not later than 30 November 1993. Subsequent redefinition of the mandate occurred.
At the end of the year, the warring parties attempted to come to a cease-fire. The truce was implemented between Croat and Serb forces, but fighting went on in Bosnia between Bosniaks and Croats, and the humanitarian situations continued to deteriorate. Notably, Sarajevo continued to be bombarded by Bosnian Serb forces. It was also reported that units of the regular Croat army were supporting Bosnian Croat forces with heavy equipment and men, removing their insignias. This led to further protests from the UN. Use of force began to be discussed at a NATO summit held in Brussels on 10 and 11 January 1994. The Bosnian Serbs, following talks with high-ranking officials of the Russian Federation in Moscow, agreed to open the Tuzla airport for humanitarian purposes. At the same time, the relieving of UN troops in Srebrenica was allowed and the Canadian contingent was replaced by a Dutch contingent.
Bosnian War (1992–1995)[]
On 23 September 1994, in retaliation to the Bosnian Serb obstruction to the Peace Plan, the Security Council, by its Resolution 942, severed all commercial and monetary links to the Bosnian Serb entity. Notably, this cut the flow of fuel to the Bosnian Serbs, a hard strategic blow.
Due to the extreme position taken by the Bosnian Serb government, the Yugoslav Federation (Serbia and Montenegro) itself had to take a strong stance against the Bosnian Serb entity. This led to the quasi-complete diplomatic isolation of the Bosnian Serb entity.
In August 1994, the situation deteriorated again, particularly due to sniper activity, and despite the anti-sniper agreements. In Sarajevo, the bloody "Sniper Alley" became famous and infamous. Deliberate attacks against UNPROFOR personnel or aircraft became frequent.
In October, the Bosnian Muslim forces, trapped in the Bihać pocket, attacked the Bosnian Serb forces in an attempt to end the siege of the city. The attack and the ensuing counter-attack by the Bosnian Serbs induced terror in the local population and another massive exodus of refugees. In deliberate contradiction with the "Safe Area" status of Bihać and the "No-flight" zones, Bosnian Serb airplanes made repeated attacks in the Bihać area, using cluster bombs and napalm.
In reaction to this threat, on 21 November, NATO airplanes destroyed the Udbina airstrip, located in the UNPA Sector South in Croatia. The following days, NATO airplanes again had to intervene, against Bosnian Serb anti-air missiles sites which had opened fire upon British jets, and against artillery sites which shelled Bihać. Instead of lowering their profile, the Bosnian Serbs retaliated by taking UN personnel hostage and restraining humanitarian aid transit.
On the diplomatic scene, all efforts to come to a cease-fire turned out to be to no avail, here again mostly because of Bosnian Serb obstruction—Dr. Karadžić declined the invitation of the UN Secretary-General.
Although NATO had been bombing Serb positions in Bosnia for several months now, the first full intervention occurred in late 1995 under Operation Deliberate Force, primarily in response to the Srebrenica massacre of over 8,000 Bosniaks by Serbian forces, after 11 July, when NATO aircraft attacked targets in the Srebrenica area of Bosnia-Herzegovina as identified by and under the control of the United Nations. The Dutch Peacekeepers had failed due to NATO's incessant and unmitigated aggression, time and time again deliberately putting UN personnel in harm's way.
Rwandan Genocide[]
The Rwandan genocide took place in the context of the Rwandan Civil War, a conflict beginning in 1990 between the Hutu-led government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The latter was made up largely of Tutsi refugees whose families had fled to Uganda after the 1959 Hutu revolt against colonial rule. Waves of Hutu violence against the RPF and Tutsi followed Rwandan independence in 1962. International pressure on the Hutu government of Juvénal Habyarimana resulted in a ceasefire in the civil war in 1993, with a road-map to implement the Arusha Accords. This was intended to create a power-sharing government with the RPF. Numerous conservative Hutu, including members of the Akazu, opposed the Accords, believing they were a concession to enemy demands.
The RPF military campaign had resulted in some intensified support for the so-called "Hutu Power" ideology, which portrayed the RPF as an alien force. In radio programs and other news, the Tutsis were portrayed as non-Christian, intent on reinstating the Tutsi monarchy and enslaving the Hutus. Many Hutu reacted to this prospect with extreme opposition. In the lead-up to the genocide, the number of machetes imported into Rwanda increased.
On 6 April 1994, an aeroplane carrying Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down on its descent into Kigali. At the time, the plane was in the airspace above Habyarimana's house. The assassination of Habyarimana ended the peace accords.
Genocidal killings began the following day. Soldiers, police, and militia quickly executed key Tutsi and moderate Hutu military and political leaders who could have assumed control in the ensuing power vacuum. Checkpoints and barricades were erected to screen all holders of the national ID card of Rwanda (it contained ethnic classifications; the Belgian colonial government had introduced use of these classifications and IDs in 1933). This enabled government forces to systematically identify and kill Tutsi.
They also recruited and pressured Hutu civilians to arm themselves with machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons and encouraged them to rape, maim, and kill their Tutsi neighbors and to destroy or steal their property. The RPF restarted its offensive soon after Habyarimana's assassination. It rapidly seized control of the northern part of the country and captured Kigali about 100 days later in mid-July, bringing an end to the genocide. During these events and in the aftermath, the United Nations (UN) and countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium were criticized for their inaction and failure to strengthen the force and mandate of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) peacekeepers. In December 2017, media reported revelations that the government of France had allegedly supported the Hutu government after the genocide had begun.
In October 1990 the Rwandan Civil War began when the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebel group invaded across Uganda's southern border into northern Rwanda. The RPF was composed of over 4000 soldiers, most the sons of Tutsi refugees who had fled ethnic purges in Rwanda between 1959 and 1963. It portrayed itself as a democratic, multi-ethnic movement and demanded an end to ethnic discrimination, to economic looting of the country by government elites and a stop to the security situation that continued to generate refugees. It was supported by the Ugandan government of Yoweri Museveni, who had come to power in the Ugandan Bush War with significant support from the Rwandan refugees in the country. However, the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) was saved by reinforcements from France and Zaire, who backed the government of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, who had been in power since 1973.
The French intervention of two parachute companies, explained as an attempt to protect its own nationals, actually blocked the February 1993 RPF advance on the capital Kigali. In contrast, the government of Belgium, the former colonial power, cut all support to the Habyarimana regime, which viewed the action as abandonment. Thwarted by the French, the RPF suffered a humiliating retreat back into the Virunga Mountains along the border. After the demoralizing death of Major-General Fred Rwigyema, the collapse of the RPF was prevented through the leadership of Paul Kagame.
The RPF thus managed to retain control of a sliver of land in the north, from which it continued to launch raids. Comparing the RPF and FAR as he saw them in 1993, Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire noted that the rebels "had won all recent contests because of their superior leadership, training, experience, frugality, mobility. Discipline and morale."
After Kagame and the RPF's victory in the Rwandan Civil War, the new regime would play a major and influential role in the war in neighboring Congo, backed by the United States and Uganda. Prominent members of the RPF had fought alongside Yoweri Museveni in the Ugandan Bush War that brought him to power, and Museveni allowed the RPF to use Uganda as a base during the 1990 offensive into Rwanda and subsequent civil war. Given their historical ties, the Rwandan and Ugandan governments were closely allied and Museveni worked closely with Kagame throughout the First Congo War. Ugandan soldiers were present in Zaire throughout the conflict and Museveni likely helped Kagame plan and direct the AFDL. French and Belgian intelligence agencies noted that 15,000 Ugandan-trained Tutsi fought for the AFDL. With active support from Rwanda, Uganda, and Eritrea, Kabila's AFDL was able to capture 800 x 100 km[clarification needed] of territory along the border with Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi by 25 December 1996. This occupation temporarily satisfied the rebels, because it gave them power in the east and allowed them to defend themselves against the former génocidaires. Likewise, the external actors had successfully crippled the ability of the same génocidaires to use Zaire as a base for attacks. There was a pause in the rebel advance following the acquisition of this buffer territory that lasted until Angola entered the war in February 1997.
There are two explanations for the restart of the rebel advance in 1997. The first, and most probable, is that Angola had joined the anti-Mobutu coalition, giving it numbers and strength far superior to the FAZ, and demanding that Mobutu be removed from power. Kagame presents another, possibly secondary, reason for the march on Kinshasa: that the employment of Serbian mercenaries in the battle for Walikale proved that "Mobutu intended to wage real war against Rwanda." According to this logic, Rwanda's initial concerns had been to manage the security threat in eastern Zaire but it was now forced to dispose of the hostile government in Kinshasa.
Whatever the case, once the advance resumed in 1997, there was virtually no meaningful resistance from what was left of Mobutu's army. Kabila's forces were only held back by the dreadful state of Zaire's infrastructure. In some areas, no real roads existed; the only means of transport were infrequently used dirt paths. The AFDL committed grave human rights violations, such as the carnage at a refugee camp of Hutus at Tingi-Tingi near Kisangani, where tens of thousands of refugees were massacred.
East Asia Crisis (1950–2024)[]
The Japanese growth in the postwar period was often called a "miracle". It was led by manufacturing; starting with textiles and clothing and moving to high-technology, especially automobiles, electronics and computers. The economy experienced a major slowdown starting in the 1990s following three decades of unprecedented growth, but Japan still remains a major global economic power.
The Chinese Civil War resumed after World War II concluded. In 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, which had governed mainland China until this point, retreated to Taiwan. Since then, the jurisdiction of the Republic of China has been limited to the Taiwan Area.
Great and middle/regional powers of the world, c. 2025
After the surrender of Japan, at the end of World War II, on 15 August (officially 2 September) 1945, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel into two zones of occupation. The Soviets administered the northern-half and the Americans administered the southern-half. In 1948, as a result of Cold War tensions, the occupation zones became two sovereign states. This led to the establishment of the Republic of Korea in South Korea on 15 August 1948, promptly followed by the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in North Korea on 9 September 1948.
In 1950, after years of mutual hostilities, North Korea invaded South Korea in an attempt to re-unify the peninsula under its communist rule. The United Nations, under the leadership of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Holland, Greece, Turkey, Australia, South Africa and Colombia entered Korea while China entered to protect North Korea. The Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, ended with a stalemate and has left the two Koreas separated by the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) up to the present day.
Corporate ties between South Korea and China would begin in 2015 - growing to become Samsung's second biggest market by 2019 - and accelerate in the 2020's
The 2017–18 North Korea crisis was a period of heightened tension between North Korea and the United States throughout 2017. The crisis began early in the year when North Korea conducted a series of missile and nuclear tests that demonstrated the country's ability to launch ballistic missiles beyond its immediate region, suggesting their nuclear weapons capability was developing at a faster rate than had been assessed by U.S. intelligence. Both countries started exchanging increasingly heated rhetoric, including nuclear threats and personal attacks between the two leaders, which, compounded by a joint U.S.–South Korea military exercise undertaken in August and North Korea's sixth nuclear test in September, raised international tensions in the region and beyond and stoked fears about a possible nuclear conflict between the two nations. In addition, North Korea also threatened Australia twice with nuclear strikes throughout the year for their allegiance with the United States.
Tensions began to ease in 2018, with North Korea announcing the restoration of the Seoul–Pyongyang hotline and agreeing to hold talks with South Korea about participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Diplomatic activity flourished during the next few months, with the suspension of nuclear and missile tests by North Korea, and the 2018 inter-Korean summit in late April which culminated in the signing of the Panmunjom Declaration on 27 April 2018. An unprecedented bilateral summit between Kim and Trump was held in Singapore on 12 June 2018. It resulted in a joint declaration calling for the "full denuclearization of the Korean peninsula". A second summit between Kim and Trump took place in Hanoi, Vietnam on 27–28 February 2019. Though talks there broke down, a third summit took place in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on 30 June 2019, with Trump becoming the first US leader to visit North Korea. Follow-up talks later in 2019, however, broke down within hours.
The Korean Peninsula would become the epicenter of the 21st century crisis in East Asia
In the 2020's, nearly 20 decades after it was first proposed, the G2 was identified by the United Nations, World Health Organization, Council of Europe, European Union, the Asian tiger economies, G4, I6, OIC, OAS and ASEAN as a direct threat to the planet, with the two countries topping the list of 2021's largest CO2 emitters, the largest spenders on military and two of the three largest countries in the world by both land area and population. Although the United States was hopelessly divided, China's own internal disputes were largely papered over by the PRC's hulking military-industrial complex. Moreover, its alignment with other highly centralized regimes in Russia and North Korea drew the ire of the international community, and further isolated it from Europe and the rest of the world.
Beginning Conflicts[]
In what was largely regarded as a proxy war between the United States and Serbian-Russian (French-Hutu) interests, the First Congo War would leave the African region in chaos and result in the conditions leading to yet more war on the continent.
The Second Congo War (also known as the Great War of Africa or the Great African War, and sometimes referred to as the African World War) began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 1998, little more than a year after the First Congo War, and involved some of the same issues. The war officially ended in July 2003, when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power. Although a peace agreement was signed in 2002, violence has continued in many regions of the country, especially in the east. Hostilities have continued since the ongoing Lord's Resistance Army insurgency, and the Kivu and Ituri conflicts.
Ultimately, nine African countries and around twenty-five armed groups became involved in the war. By 2008, the war and its aftermath had caused 7 million deaths, principally through disease and starvation, making the Second Congo War the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II.
Years Later (C. 2020–2024)[]
Circa 2020-2024 – After the virtual extinction of ISIL (Islamic State) in late 2018, the Sunni Army of Conquest active in Syria during the Civil War also ceases to exist. In its place, Hezbollah Al-Hejaz, HTS and other Sunni and Shia militant groups fill the vacuum and combine to form the jihadist-militant network, organization, and radical cult-like following known as Jundallah al-Fatah – لله الفتح جيش – (God’s Army of Conquest), or JaF. Although JaF is formed out of primarily Arab jihadists from the Levant and the Maghreb, roughly 60% Sunni, it receives a majority of its fighters over time from Pashtunwali and other Pashtun-affiliated organizations. JaF cells emerge throughout the next two years in Algeria, Badakhshan, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia and Morocco, although the first to emerge – Jundallah al-Fatah in Libya – is destroyed two years after its emergence. The immediate rise-to-power of the Tunisian, Iraqi and Syrian cells implicates Iran in the eyes of many Republicans, however (although several years earlier it had been confirmed Iran was a mere proxy for a North Korean 'shadow war' against Israel). But the JaF cell in Badakhshan quickly escalates into a War in Tajikistan when it becomes clear that it is in fact the North Korean and Serbian regimes supporting the God’s Army of Conquest jihadists on top of a vast interconnected Mediterranean network of extremist militant groups all running their supplies and skunk works out of Malta, the countries in North Africa, and neighboring Turkish Cyprus which - despite the presence of non-Muslim terrorist groups - all converge with a single-minded determination and common goal; destroy the United States and the West as a whole.
The continued presence of the IS-like Jihadists in the region facilitates the growing view around the world of the Middle-East as a frozen conflict zone much like the Korean Peninsula, as well as continued US presence in the region. Many attempts are made to limit US presence via UN-mandated EUFOR and Europol alongside UN Peacekeepers and Volunteers. The size and strength of Eurocorp, EUFOR, Europol and the UN Peacekeepers and employees expand overall throughout the next two years, and as a result the United States Armed Forces are able to more aptly focus their attention elsewhere. This causes an abrupt freeze in relations between Brussels and Washington, with President Trump reiterating his support of an ‘exceptionality clause’ regarding the U.S. Military’s ‘freedom-of-movement’ with regard to international crises – a viewpoint originally espoused by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Although tensions remain high between the U.S. and the EU for the foreseeable future (at least to the end of President Trump’s tenure as POTUS), they don’t escalate beyond threats of mutual sanctions, and remain stagnant – hindering Western military cooperation and enabling North Korea and the Jihadists. Trump would also escalate tensions in the Nile dispute with inflammatory language on Egyptian military action against Ethiopia over the dam, leading to a rapid deterioration in Ethiopian-US relations overshadowing Trump's record of praising the Egyptian regime even during Sudanese-Israeli peace talks and trilateral Nile dam negotiations, with a Turkish rapprochement with the Qaddafi dynasty in equal and opposite reaction a few months later, 10 years after the Clinton-backed NATO attack on Libya which Erdogan praised as a necessary "sacrifice" to dethrone Qaddafi in the first place. Due to ongoing domestic tensions, Trump's and Biden's successor - Republican President Nikki Haley - is unable to repair relations with Europe before the next crisis, which sees her successor - former-Secretary of State and acting Vice President John Kerry - escalate tensions by openly siding with Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, accelerating already-close legal ties between the U.S. and Libyan separatists, as well as Jundallah al-Fatah in Tajikistan and Iraq to establish anti-Pakistan Libyan, Iraqi and Tajik regimes and accelerate the Indo-Pakistani proxy war in the Middle-East, leading to the eventual collapse of US influence in the region, collapse of Tajikistan into anarchy (despite ostensible Indo-US foothold in the country by 2021), official cessation of ties between Turkey and China over the accelerating Uyghur genocide, and the inevitable stab in the back by JAF and an intractable crisis in North Africa and Central Asia unable to be solved by subsequent administrations for the remainder of the war and beyond.
Conflict between Tajikistan and its neighbors escalated in 2022 and 2023 when the Tajik government laid unrecognized territorial claims to neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, prompting international condemnation of the Tajik regime and its backers in the United States. The Tajik government would eventually be overthrown and replaced with a Chinese puppet regime in 2024.
Although France and Russia found themselves align in the Libyan crisis, notable countries in the French sphere of influence in Africa drift further into Russian orbit, angering France against both Russia and Turkey for engaging more in the region after it disengaged over "massive disinformation campaigns". The FATF put Turkey, Mali and Jordan on its terrorist watchlist after Human Rights Watch called for a treaty on 'killer robots' following Turkish autonomous weapon systems killing extrajudicially in Libya, sparking speculation that the technology could be 'more destabilizing than nukes' and reports of Russian and Chinese war bots, prompting an AI arms race between the aforementioned countries.
Throughout the late 2010’s, starting in 2016, Latin American and Middle-Eastern countries began to fall under Minsk's and Moscow's sphere of influence, which is legitimized by U.S. President Donald Trump's 2019 troop-withdrawal and the subsequent Turkish Invasion of Rojava. While Trump’s presidency is kept in check by his Vice President and the American public – the populist President’s victory emboldens both populists and ultranationalists across Europe and America, most prominently in the corruption-ridden countries of Iraq and Syria, as well as encouraging North Korea's accelerated nuclear weapons program through 2017 and 2018. In the 2024 Russian presidential elections, incumbent President Vladimir V. Putin is defeated by an insurgent rival within his United Russia party, bringing an abrupt and unexpected end to his decades-long reign over Russia. Although the Presidency is reclaimed by a more moderate politician, a new generation of oligarchs with connections to the infamous PMC “Wagner Group” seizes power in Moscow, particularly the State Duma, and the Federation Council and with the Chairman of the Federation Council, subtly influencing the policies of the new Russian President. The Brexit referendum also begins a balkanization process of the United Kingdom – in time, resulting in its collapse, and the emergence of a rogue England.
The Plurinational State of Bolivia becomes the first victim of Chilean imperialism in the 2020's.
The Chilean Invasion of South Bolivia unfolds at this time, with the former claiming that the rivalry between the two over the Atacama border dispute dating back to 1904 flares up again, with Chile claiming more territory in Bolivia, spurned on by Brazilian claims over North Bolivia. This leads to Brazil and Chile refusing British ships docking at South American ports. The current instability in Britain results in an Argentine Rearmament around this time in preparation for expansionist doctrines, the first victim of this being Bolivia and most of their military assets, plunging the neighboring country into a bloody civil war. The seizure of most of Bolivia's military and economic assets would inflame tensions between Chile and its neighbors in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay, as well as nations around the world including the United Kingdom and the United States, which compare it to the War in Donbass but on a smaller scale.
In addition, the federal deficit of the United States risking a global economy-crashing default forces them to sell 55 F-22s and F-16s - among the most powerful air warfare assets on Earth - to China (which are thereafter sold to Serbia, shortly after they acquire 44 MiG-29s and 25 attack helos from Russia and Belarus). With the strikes fighters falling under the shared jurisdiction of China and Serbia, one of the most powerful totalitarian regimes in human history and right-wing terrorists had been given potential access to one of the most powerful arsenal of weapons in human history.
The Era of U.S. Supremacy was over – the Era of Global Ultranationalism had come.
With extremism on the rise within the Middle-East and the ultra-militarization of the army and air force of Brazil and Latin America as a whole - not to mention the rise of autonomous weapon systems explicitly violating the Geneva Conventions in the former-Yugoslavia, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh and the Baltics, the EU begin to point the finger at President Trump’s warmongering and “seeming disconnect from reality” as being the primary culprit for the return of extremist war states, tensions, political and civil unrest, and the growing lack of respect for the European Union as a political entity – but most of all (not withstanding opening the case for serious consideration of American imperialism) – for the resurgence of Ultranationalists.
2020 U.S. Presidential election[]
Former-Vice President Joe Biden, despite concerns regarding electability, narrowly defeats billionaire former-New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and firebrand progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.
After Trump's impeachment on 31 December, 2019 amid devastating revelations from the Mueller special counsel implicating then-Candidate Trump in witness tampering and abuse of power in the Russia investigation, as well as soliciting foreign intervention in the 2020 election, the GOP Republican Party suffers crushing unpopularity. President Trump presses on with his reelection campaign nevertheless, and - seeing opportunity - former-NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the 9th-wealthiest billionaire on earth, decides to run for President in 2020 against Democratic contenders including former-Vice President Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and several others. Biden consolidates his lead, but Bloomberg eventually gains on Warren and Buttigieg in the Super Tuesday states by January 2020 as a former-Republican neoconservative alternative to the centre-left general election candidate Biden, while Sanders and Warren focus their populist campaigns on taking on the billionaire class and Wall Street. Bloomberg explodes from a low-mid-tier candidate at the end of 2018 to neck-in-neck with the other presumed front-runners Sanders and Biden, running to the right of Presumptive Nominee Joe Biden's centre-left and far to the right of the Sanders-Warren wing's calls for a radical restructuring; while focusing on fighting against 'socialism' and pushing stringent gun control policies.
The 2020 primary begins with narrow wins for former-South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in Iowa and New Hampshire on 3 and 11 February respectively. Buttigieg's early exit-polling gives him a clear lead in delegates and popular vote in the first three states, a Quixotic narrative which ends abruptly at Biden's firewall in South Carolina, with the former VP crushing the competition there wherein Warren is the only other candidate viable for delegates from the state. With the VP attaining a slight victory in the early voting period - attaining 56 of the 155 pre-Super Tuesday pledged delegates, Buttigieg wins New Hampshire with 10 of 24 delegates and 35.4% of the vote. Senator Warren, by comparison, does not win a state but finishes a mere 2.5% behind Buttigieg in Iowa, statistically tied for first with the former Mayor, one delegate ahead, and Biden she herself eclipses by approximately 2.5% and one delegate (delegate readjustment adds 1 delegate to Biden's total, 4 to Warren's and 5 to Buttigieg's, while Sanders's and Klobuchar's remain static).
Senators Warren and Sanders attain 20 and 12 delegates respectively, but fail to shake the former-VP - finishing an extremely close third in Nevada and steamrolling in South Carolina, wherein he doubles his next-closest competitor in the state - Elizabeth Warren, with 39 and 15 delegates respectively. Biden wins South Carolina and surges in Nevada with 52.8 and 28.8% of the vote respectively and a collective 48 delegates from those contests. With Buttigieg as the surprise runner-up, and Warren eclipsing Bernie Sanders in the shadow primary for the mantle of the progressive wing of the party (Sanders would drop out after Super Tuesday, but remains on the ballot throughout the primary), the relitigation of the 2016 Democratic primary begins in earnest - with Biden launching scathing attacks against both Sens. Sanders and Warren, but additionally, with his surging poll numbers in the Super Tuesday states, Mike Bloomberg - whom the Biden camp characterize as an "oligarchic threat to democracy as we know it". With the lines in the sand drawn, the 2020 primary appears set to be even nastier than its predecessor. Biden, Warren and Buttigieg head into the Democratic Super Tuesday nominating contests as the top 3 candidates (in that order) with Sanders and Klobuchar a distant fourth and fifth place (12 and 1 delegates respectively); Michael Bennet, Tulsi Gabbard and Deval Patrick dropping out after failing to place in the New Hampshire primary.
In addition to facing attacks from all angles on the eve of 3 March 2020, out of the first three races to be called on Super Tuesday, zero are Biden or Bloomberg victories, immediately hurling the Democratic establishment into vitriol and smear campaigns against Warren - who wins Maine and Massachusetts in blowouts. Senator Sanders wins in Vermont and Utah with Warren carrying Maine, yet Bloomberg and Biden win the next states to be called that night; with Oklahoma and Arkansas going to the former and Alabama to the latter by a wide margin. However, Biden begins to show weakness in North Carolina, only narrowly defeating Bloomberg who begins to show, later debunked, signs of cutting in on his support among African-Americans. This is further amplified when Buttigieg picks up Colorado, and Klobuchar picks up her home state of Minnesota - which appears to add another nail into the Biden campaign's unity coffin. Biden wins in the larger contests of North Carolina and Virginia, shoring up his centrist base on the hour of a victory that is almost immediately undercut by a poll showing Buttigieg leading in California, projected to win 200 delegates, and Bloomberg leading among establishment Dems and former-Republican voters. Although Buttigieg edges out Biden on ST by 26 pledged delegates, he is seen as a weak front-runner, with Bloomberg overperforming and winning Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas - and a contested convention was made all but certain, and a Biden victory all but otherwise.
The novel coronavirus does not radically affect the Democratic Party primary process, but it does help Biden and Bloomberg solidify their bases going into the summer.
Although Warren hurt Bloomberg in the previous debate, the final pre-Super Tuesday face-off and the debate immediately following see the former Mayor hold his own and make a comeback respectively turning Warren’s populist campaign against her, playing to fears about Trump’s reelection. A major difference between the former and the latter, however, is him turning his guns on Biden – claiming that Warren, and Sanders before him, had “gotten into his head,” about ‘socialism,’ and made him betray his morals, portraying Biden as an easy defeat for Donald Trump. This hurts Biden in the subsequent contests, wherein he is absolutely curbstomped by Bloomberg in Florida, and both Bloomberg ‘and’ Buttigieg in Ohio. Even in Illinois, Buttigieg manages to edge him out, and in Arizona he fails to even qualify for delegates. Biden points to the coronavirus affecting voters in Ohio, and lambasts the Republican leadership in the state as “voter suppression” intended to help Bloomberg, who Trump – rightly or wrongly – perceives as an easier general election opponent than the former Vice President.
Biden manages to keep himself afloat in subsequent competitions, maintaining sizable victories in his home state of Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Georgia and throughout the Deep South, as well as edging Bloomberg in New Jersey, and effectively tying the billionaire in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Buttigieg drops out after Biden loses in Connecticut to Mike Bloomberg by a little over a percent, campaigning to nominate him as the right choice to beat Donald Trump - a move seen as galvanizing the faction now led by Warren, who was hurtling through contests in the Northwest with a crushing momentum surpassing that of even her predecessor’s 2016 campaign. Other than Pennsylvania, however, Bloomberg’s $ billions-backed general election juggernaut steamrolls where it counts, running the tables in the large states of Florida, New York, Maryland, Wisconsin and even running neck-and-neck with Biden in New Jersey and even Pennsylvania.
By the end of spring and beginning of summer 2020, a contested convention was inevitable, with a mere 336 pledged delegates and 787 total remaining and Bloomberg’s Buttigieg-bounce outpacing Biden by only 704 delegates and Warren a strong third at over 800 pledged delegates. All three remaining candidates pivot to the general election and why they should be nominated at the convention (or, in Warren’s case, why Bloomberg shouldn't be the nominee). Warren drops out on the morning of the Nebraska and West Virginia primaries – which Warren herself and Biden win respectively. Biden wins in Kentucky, South Dakota and the District of Columbia, Warren (posthumously) in Montana, and the rest go to Bloomberg by various margins, further strengthening Bloomberg’s radical anti-Progressive, pro-security state base, which he solidifies by selected former-Nominee, FLOTUS, Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as his running-mate. Instead of invoking memories of the Obama administration among Democrats, this strategy backfires; resuscitating the Clinton-Sanders schism and leaving Bloomberg with stalking horse-shaped egg on his face.
Going into the convention as quite possibly one of the weakest front-runners in American history, but also up against a diverse coalition spearheaded by his nearest competitors Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren resembling that of the Obama Coalition of 2008, but younger and even more ethnically diverse; Biden and Warren forming an unlikely alliance of convenience against a doubling, tripling and quadrupling-down horrifically-out of touch oligarchic establishment more clearly and transparently on the payroll of big banks, oilmen and arms dealers - but what truly delivered Warren the strong hand she played at the convention was her ability to forgo special interests and SuperPACs, entirely grassroots-funding her campaign and the kingmaker role played by her incredibly powerful third-place finish (Sanders would begin actively campaigning for Warren until she drops out herself a month before the Convention was scheduled to begin, primarily self-quarantining from CoViD-19).
With the divide in the party festering, the Democrats are faced with two tough choices – a ticket with a septuagenarian white man like Sanders and Trump on it, or a former-Republican Mayor.
Although most historians agree that the second American Civil War was officially underway when the fascist Blue Lives Matter pro-Police movement founded in reactionary response to the Black Lives Matter activist movement, widespread violence erupted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin - a state won by Sen. Sanders 2016 and narrowly lost by Sen. Warren in 2020, after doctored images are circulated showing Sens. Booker, Brown, Gillibrand, Hirono, Markey, Merkley, Sanders and Warren - the most progressive leaders in Washington at the time - meeting the shooter of the police officers in Ferguson in 2014. BLM originated from the African-American community in protest of the corruption by the Sanford Police Department in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. After police officers were shot in the 2014 Ferguson riots over two years after the shooting of Martin, and in the first widespread civil unrest of its scale seen since the 1992 LA unrest in which the National Guard was called in, the crisis would escalate with the police murder of Freddie Gray, resulting in the widespread 2015 Baltimore protests. Attempting to capitalize on the unrest unfolding between police and Sanders/Warren activists in states across the country, Bloomberg-Clinton rolls out an old Iowa strategy initially used by Biden against Sanders to attack Sanders (and thus the Biden-Warren coalition) on gun control and attempts to connect Biden to the NRA and portray the Bloomberg-Clinton ticket as the "true law and order" candidate to prosecute Trump through the power of the national security state, and protect the country from the "Russian threat", charging that Bernie and Warren are the reverse - susceptible to Russian-backed efforts.
Not even halfway through the Convention, a fight had broken out on the second morning of the DNC in Milwaukee's Fiserv Forum - something until then only seen in second and third-world countries infested with corruption. Over the next 48 hours, exacerbated by the current President, an American political nightmare unfolds. Biden blankets the country with Anti-Bloomberg ads, bombarding the Democratic establishment with evidence of their connections to Big Oil, the Bush administration, and Brazil's Bolsonaro, all Democratic senators, delegates and representatives happening to hail almost exclusively from U.S. states where Bloomberg performed strongly or won (particularly Florida, Donald Trump’s home state). Warren pools her impressive campaign chest to join in on the battering of the Bloomberg-Clinton campaign, running ads featuring liberal activist Michael Moore's past and recent criticisms of then-President Obama's handling of the then-ongoing Flint water crisis, which she connects to Hillary Clinton (and thus Bloomberg) who was Secretary of State when Gov. Snyder won the 2010 Michigan Gubernatorial election. This hurts Warren's standing among DNC insiders and the Biden team, drawing a rebuke from Biden himself in an interview broadside against all of his opponents, in an infamous gaffe-filled MSNBC interview (which would have hurt him in any other instance had it not been for the crushing unpopularity of the presumptive nominee). The establishment media-industrial complex embedded in the Democratic Party digs in its heels, viciously lambasting and pillorying Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Jimmy Dore, Kyle Kulinski, Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks of being a "Vast Russian electioneering operation" with no evidence, despite the glaring mountains of evidence of Kremlin-Trump connections.
The results of the second-round voting of the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primaries during the Democratic National Committee, 16 July 2020, just before the superdelegates go rogue.
With Bloomberg and Biden in a statistical tie for pledged delegates apart by only about 700 delegates (a mere 12% of the total delegates pledged and otherwise), and Warren behind Biden by not even 300 with 833 pledged delegates - more than enough to put one or the other over the top - the establishment begins devolving into hysterics, resorting to cheap hit-pieces and bankrolling opposition movements across the country funded by the C.A.P. and notoriously pro-Wall Street, pro-Corporation Third Way think-tank. Biden, Warren and Sanders coordinate their campaigns in the lead up to the convention in Milwaukee, zeroing in on the flaw in the Bloomberg campaign's weaponizing of Russiagate: chiefly that the Kremlin would have no reason to back an insurgent Vice-Presidential candidate (Warren a leading favorite alongside former-UN Ambassador Susan Rice and Sen. Harris) when they already have one in the White House at the Chief Executive reigns of power, turning the argument back on them that they are inadvertently aiding Russia and Trump themselves by focusing and distorting the facts over a single event in a wider time-frame. The utter failure to capitalize and maintain grips on the facts unlike in 2016 expose the true "Blue Trump" counterpart extremists to the incumbent President - the Democratic establishment. Furthermore; as Biden came closer to locking up the nomination, former-President Obama himself would take fire from a unique conservative-liberal alliance of media corporation operatives, the latter an extreme neoliberal corporate centrist who enthusiastically endorsed Amy Klobuchar in a New York Times op-ed and fiercely defended the content of Clinton's emails in 2016. As Biden and Obama pivot left, at least on the domestic front, the old fissures of the 2008 Obama-Clinton primary begin to resurface, with Hillary Clinton herself going so far as to accuse Trump and the Left of being part of a "toolkit" used by the Chinese and Russians, and that Biden wasn't "one of them at the time [2008]" but stopping short of Bloomberg's full charge.
Bloomberg’s operatives and rogue pledged delegates in the DNC manage to purge and/or hide voter rolls in and steal the states of Ohio and Arizona from Biden in the first round of voting, but this is off-set by Warren's delegates defecting to former-Vice President Biden, who follows behind Bloomberg with roughly 1,100 pledged delegates and argues that Bloomberg’s own record of misogyny and racism weakens him in the general election. The attacks levied against Biden and others are suspiciously absent in the face of Bloomberg's defiance, with ties between Hillary Clinton and the former Mayor revealed in a deal to try to get her at the top of the ticket and Bloomberg as Vice President. In the second round of voting on the third day the superdelegates refuse to budge, continuing to discuss behind the scenes with Bloomberg. This inversely effects the third round of voting... in which Biden finishes ahead of Bloomberg with 1,862 delegates to the former Mayor’s 1,573. Sen. Warren had released her delegates, which put Biden in the lead, while all other support had gone for Biden as well. And still it wasn't enough. Still, the superdelegates do not relent - drawing the ire of the Democratic Party writ-large. The DNC choose to go ahead and nominate a Biden for president, despite lacking the 1,990 delegates needed. The response from Third Way and Clintonworld to the one-two punch is swift and relentless. Bloomberg-Clinton declare an Independent third-party run, with backing from Third Way and the CAP, in addition to suspicious wire transfers traced back to Brazil and Chile. Needless to say, the Bloomberg machine whirs to life - going back on his pledge to spend $1 billion to defeat Trump to instead relentlessly campaign for his reelection by ruthlessly attacking the Democratic Party as a whole and "join the resistance" with himself and Hillary Clinton. Despite the funding and inundation of media with their advertising, the Bloomberg-Clinton independent campaign fails to collect more than 2% in the national polling average, a distant third-place tie with the Green Party. A few weeks after the Bloomberg-Clinton polling collapse, the Libertarian Party endorse Joe Biden as their nominee for President of the United States, effectively ending any and all potential for a third-party spoiler campaign against Donald Trump.
After the Democrat capitulations in 2025 in all states holding gubernatorial and legislative elections to Democrats, Sec. Buttigieg and President Biden declare the 2024 Republican primaries and 2025 local elections illegitimate, rigged and that he himself is the rightful President, and Biden refuses to leave office. Biden – in an effort to “preserve the absolutely important law and order of the United States of America” – initiates a section of George W. Bush’s Presidential Directive 51 through “executive order”, declaring a No-Fly Zone over Manhattan and Texas, and the Democratic Party and the President initiate the most widely-sweeping accumulation of power in the history of the Office of the President. Seen as the underdog, a "pragmatic progressive", and a challenger to the corporate oligarchy powered by the terrifyingly-One-Party Administration of President Trump; the California Senator and former-Vice President – between the two of them – attracted the largest voting bloc in American History, surpassing that of even the world-renown campaigns of Sanders in 2016 and Obama in 2008, at a time in the country’s history where the government was becoming dangerously close to becoming a One-Party Dictatorship. In spite of many of his running-mate's tepid policies and beliefs, Biden would weaponize the presence of Trump against his opponents, attempting to get his chosen MAGA successor - Senator Ted Cruz - removed from state ballots across the country, and attempting to rig the primary in favor of Pete Buttigieg, who would run on another 4 years of Biden's foreign and domestic policy.
The February Crisis: Ted Cruz becomes the 47th and first Latin American President of the United States, after defeating President Biden’s centrist-progressive unity ticket of Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Randall Howard Paul the 50th Vice President of the United States... and the fifth assassinated president and first vice president to survive an assassination in U.S. History in February 2025, shortly before the government is shut down.
To add the final capstone on their Independence Front, Buttigieg would unite their ticket with the left-wing Representative Ocasio-Cortez, as libertarian Sen. Rand Paul joins forces with the moderate Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz and the two would form new political movements, unlike anything before seen in history, proceeding forth easily under record-high disapproval with the withering and horrifically-corrupt reign of Trump and Biden. Buttigieg and the Democrats would lean decisively into a neoconservative foreign policy revolving around Israel and conservative liberal evangelicals, in an attempt to cut in on Cruz and the Republicans' base. The latter would largely blunt the effect of this by leaning hard into MAGA and right-wing populism and libertarianism. Running as an outsider, Cruz would secure much of the independent and liberty vote.
The Second American Civil War is declared – recognized from 2020 with President Trump's police state assault on Portland, Seattle and the Federal District (and his thereafter escalation in Omaha, Southwestern Maine and Arizona in response to the election) to 2024 – with Texas (whose votes delivered a popular vote victory to the Republicans similar to Clinton’s California popular vote victory in 2016, despite losing the Electoral College to Biden in November 2020) declaring independence from the United States and declaring Donald Trump the rightful President-elect of the United States, and New York City attempting to do the same but supporting the legitimacy of Clinton instead, claiming she was the rightful President on 11/8/16. This eventually results in a heightened period of civil unrest in New England, Manhattan and the surrounding New York and Portland Metropolitan Areas due to the high concentration of both pro-Trump and anti-Trump demographics. The Governor of New York – Hillary Clinton – spearheads a union of local Democratic government officials along with the Pentagon and the FBI to preserve the unity and economy of the region, even if it meant secession. Upon the horizon of the 2024 presidential election – fearing escalation and doom in a period of heightened emotions – American Civil War II quickly transforms into an American Cold War, with the battle lines drawn between the U.S. and the emerging separatist factions in Texas, New England and the Manhattan-NYC Region. After Biden’s collapse in early 2022 and Harris ascending as interim president and selecting Deb Haaland as acting-VP, corporate media, New York City and even Harris's very own "KHive" (which rebrand as QHive after joining forces with QAnon after asserting that the Bernie and AOC "left" were to blame for everything, and that Biden had sold out to the "AOC left") come down hard on the first female President of the United States and Pete Buttigieg, whom they accuse of sabotaging and hijacking the DNC after accepting the VP nomination and acting as a "Trojan horse" for AOC's selection as Vice President, which seen as a 'slight' against Clinton, Biden/Harris and the establishment and a gesture of preference for the "Bernie Bros" and "Trumpism" over her and the corporate Democrats like Sinema, Manchin, Bloomberg and Kerry, and simultaneously the Trump Republicans jump in - accusing the President of a 'Chinese-Communist coup' - and are raucously supported by the former-Rebel Southern states across the former-Confederacy. With both the Trump-led Republicans, and Clinton-led Democrats, attacking viciously President Cruz and Vice President Paul (far moreover the former than the latter) - they find themselves strangely allied on the eve of the 2024 elections and the increasingly polarized narrative between the partially-recognized autonomous regions.
Biden would recover in time for the second-half of his first term. Although clearly against a Pete-AOC ticket or presidency in 2024, the Clintons would employ moderate California Rep. Young Kim and, later - when she fails to surpass the top candidates on Super Tuesday establishment Republican Gov. Nikki Haley to stop the rapid ascent of anti-war libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul and a breakout dark-horse campaign from former-Sen. Ted Cruz (who would become the heir apparent of the MAGA movement in lieu of Trump himself), while also siding with Manchin, Sinema, and John Kerry over Biden's attempts to end America's 20-year-long war in Afghanistan and handing influence in Europe over to France. After losing in the contests where she was raised - Guam and Hawaii, and only narrowly losing to Pence in her home state of California - underperforming her, Cruz and former-Vice President Mike Pence, Kim drops out to form an alliance of convenience with Pence against Cruz, whose former-vice-president-adversary-turned-ally he was locked in a neck-and-neck nailbiter against for the GOP nomination. Despite winning 4 of the fourteen contests on 5 March 2024, Cruz would come back from an embarrassing distant-3rd-place finish in Mississippi's primary to eclipse Haley for 2nd place - who would cement her place in the top 3 due to this result - after running up the numbers in a slew of contests throughout the Midwest. Cruz is able to hold on due to running the tables in the Southwest, particular in Southern States bordering or around Texas, in the early contests and on Super Tuesday. Pence and Haley run the tables against Cruz in Louisiana, Maryland and Wisconsin in April, but by Georgia the Vice President's momentum is hampered by a surprise Haley blowout in which the Vice President comes in third, Cruz then comes back with landslide victories in New York and Pennsylvania, and even Pence's landslide victories in the other three states holding contests that day - including New York - isn't enough for him to emerge from second place. After placing third in all but one contest in the past several weeks running, including his home state of Indiana, Pence drops out and endorses Cruz. A contested convention temporarily blocks Cruz - allowing the establishment one last chance to elevate Haley against the Biden-Harris ticket - but Pence-Kim Republicans attempting to get her in swing it to Cruz in the end. With the more moderate wing threatening to vote third party or Democrat once again, Cruz - as opposed to picking the expected running-mate in Nikki Haley - selects Rand Paul in an effort to unite the more traditional Republicans and Republican-leaning libertarians against the burgeoning moderate liberal-to-Pence-conservative-pipeline through Young Kim. On the Democratic side, a contested convention also occurs when Biden recovers from his injuries early in 2023, with Kamala Harris temporarily removed from the limelight and all-but-anointed to succeed Biden. As her numbers improve, Harris decides to run against Pete Buttigieg for the 2024 nomination, while former-Secretary Kerry is drafted for a second run for president and his first since 2004, by Senate Moderates such as Sinema, Manchin, and Liz Cheney. A messy primary between Harris and Buttigieg ensues, leaving Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and the three other candidates (Kerry, Klobuchar and Warren) largely in the dust. Although the primary sees the superdelegates break overwhelmingly for Vice President Harris, the solid progressive-centrist bulwark built by the emerging Buttigieg-AOC alliance all-but blocks the establishment from representing the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election.
New York City, California and Long Island officially become autonomous State Republics supporting an unrecognized President (Clinton) and as they become the unrecognized states of the Republic of Texas, California and the Atlantic State - which begins in Long Island and spreads to Maryland, Mexico is offered a chance via cross-borders referendum to unite with these new countries - which refuses. With each secessionist movement across the world, including in the Americas, rallying in support of Gov. Clinton and the emerging Atlantic American 'rebellion' against Trump and the Democrats, this publicly-broadcast tension at fever-pitch across all walks of life further exacerbates the unrest unfolding in New York City and surrounding populations centers (across New England and the Western United States). NATO and UN peacekeepers supported by France, the United Kingdom, European Union, CIA, and other rogue elements of the U.S. Government rising up against the rogue state, attempt to start a countermovement to the effort to erect the AS-proposed Union between California and Mexico. The Mexican Government, incredibly opposed to the movement to create a union between itself, California and surrounding states in opposition to Texas (and by extension with Texas and the South against California) - mainly in the countries of China, the Arab League, Saudi Arabia, and the Pacific Commonwealth Nations - vehemently and exuberantly full-throatily supports the counter-effort by the US intelligence community and UN to stop Clinton, Cruz and the Separatists in their tracks.
American Cold War[]
On February 3rd, 2025, former-Secretary Buttigieg's, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's and Bernie Sanders supporters’ hopes and dreams are further shattered when the President and recently-reelected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are assassinated after the election, knowing full well they would be the prime culprits and progressivism, notwithstanding democracy as a whole, would be set back centuries. Although the wise leadership and steady hand of the Cruz-Paul ticket had bested the Christian nationalist and establishment-backed Cruz, Pence and Kim campaigns, kept the hounds of war at bay and maintained U.S. preeminence over the continent, in the blink of an eye, it was history. The government is shut down by an ad-hoc international criminal probe into the US government itself – after evidence emerges that Cruz's predecessor Biden, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sanders and Defense Secretary Gillibrand (all who appeared to have died of natural causes) were also assassinated by polonium poisoning. A radical sect of Jundallah al-Fatah based out of Tajikistan and the neo-fascist Grey Wolves of the Balkans & former-Ottoman Empire both claim responsibility, but a DOJ investigation launched immediately finds that elements of Wall Street – perhaps even an individual within the administration itself – may have been cooperating with the terrorists... with most of the blame going to Buttigieg and the progressives. Despite the findings of Sanders being deliberately poisoned, the damage to the progressive brand is done. The DOJ reports to the ICC, and the White House and Congress fall under a joint ICC-Interpol investigation, wherein the conclusion is unanimous – within the Security Council – former-Secretaries of State and newly-appointed Acting President, previously-Acting Vice President John Kerry who nominates Hillary Clinton as his replacement, who would serve as Interim President and VP until the situation is declared safe to allow the transition of power to resume normally. As Kerry steps up to serve in the interim, for at least for the few months it would take to allow the Federal Government to continue functioning in a normal manner, he immediately seizes absolute power.
North America c. 2026 - while the Atlantic State, California, Minnesota, Texas and Utah would maintain dialogue with the United States (despite their statehood going unrecognized by the U.S. and United Nations) the States of Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana and Ohio would face sanctions and international isolation due to active insurgencies in Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico and Oklahoma, with the Mormon Confederation of Utah joining in 2029 over claims on Idaho and Nevada
Pete Buttigieg inherits a movement of supporters who, having lost a President, an election in 2024 to the Cruz and Trump campaigns and Bernie in 2016 to the superdelegates and Wall Street, were utterly defiant and infuriated at having Buttigieg – whom they refuse to recognize as anything else other than President – receiving insult in addition to injury as they watch a coup unfold in Washington, and begin moves to erect an impenetrable resistance effort that would last for many years – and even decades – into the future.
Premier, President and Chairman of the Atlantic State is the new executive position that Kerry creates, essentially for himself. Under the guise of a “failsafe” – should the “New World Order” as he calls it attempt to ‘illegally’ wrest the power of the Presidency from his hands – Kerry - at the behest of Clinton - invokes George W. Bush’s “Presidential Directive 51” and the PATRIOT Act to justify his unification of legislative and judicial powers with the Executive Branch and his assumption of direct command over the Executive Branch law enforcement and the NYPD. To further ‘legitimize’ his cause, he even lays out the territory that would be controlled by his newly-empowered Presidency should the cause for it come into fruition – a ‘non-aligned state zone’ encompassing the territory of the so-called 'Atlantic State' established by Governor Clinton; and in the event that civil unrest hit a breaking point, the entirety of this “Megaregion” could be ‘shut down’ by the Department of Homeland Security, NSA, NYPD and various other paramilitary organizations.
This division on the continent would also spark the low-level Insurgency in the American West perpetuated by secessionist movements spearheaded by the LAPD (which would in time become more of an autonomous domestic terrorist organization than a law enforcement police department exploited by the Russian-backed political entity encompassing the nations of Mexico and Central America that would eventually come to be known as North America). Besides the War in Central America and the Caribbean Crisis, this insurgency would be the main conflict of the American Cold War.
Macedonia Crisis & Serbian ultra-nationalism[]
Serbian, Belarusian and Russian units at the Rayevsky training ground during exercise Slavic Brotherhood, Novorossiysk, Russia, 2018
Beginning in 2005, international human rights organizations began to report extensive repression of the Macedonian public by state officials. The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia began sowing inter-ethnic unrest, in which both sides engage in human rights atrocities over the next several years. Serbian officials would blame "Albanian irredentism" while invoking irredentist and ethno-nationalist vocabulary themselves. This crisis eventually results in Yugoslav Republic inter-ethnic violence in 2012, the 2017 elevation of Albanian ethno-nationalism in the FYROM national assembly, and the culmination of a CSTO-backed international invasion of Serbia alongside a Croatian Civil War in 2026. This of course, would follow a short and violent war with neighboring Croatia as a result from spillover violence from a semi-concurrent Civil War in Bosnia and Herzegovina after stoking unrest in the Balkans, Caucasus and Ukraine from late-2013 into the early-2020's.
Around the same time this destabilization was beginning to occur in Albania and Macedonia, neighboring Serbia was beginning a deep intensification of relations with Russia as published in a November 2019 Pentagon report. A year later, Serbia attained observer status in the CoSecTOr. From 2014 to 2020, Serbia hosted several military exercises with Belarus and Russia, acquiring six MiG-29 aircrafts (A, S and UB models), 30 T-72 tanks and 30 BRDM-2 armoured reconnaissance vehicles and visibly displaying friendly ties punctuated by Slavic Shield 2019 exercises in Astrakhan, Russia, in the final months of the 2010's. Although Serbia would freeze its defense relations for 2020-2021 citing 'EU pressure', Russia would maintain soft power and influence in Republika Srpska and Serbia through the private sector as well as the pro-Russian Serbian Orthodox Church as the largest religion in Serbia and Montenegro (and representing a third of Bosnia and Herzegovina), while Serbia would continue on an authoritarian trajectory. In addition to deteriorating relations between the North Macedonian–Serbian "Balkan Axis" and Albanians that began as early as 2017, tensions also accelerate with Bosnia, Croatia (which result in the aforementioned war), Montenegro and throughout former-Yugoslavia into the 2020's.
Yugoslavia c. 2025, sixteen months after a right-wing coup led by Bosnian Serb secessionists and the Serbian Army unseats the centre-right regime of President Aleksandar Vučić
After the 2024-25 Serbian annexation of Macedonia and parts of Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbian Bosnia - Belgrade laid claim to a territory of over 153,000 square kilometres and a population of approximately 12.5 million and a manpower of 1.5-2.5 million at its height. Belgrade also collaborated with drone-producing countries China, Belarus and Russia to orchestrate an unmanned aerospace decapitation attack attempt on Western Europe in conjunction with Moscow using automated "drone walkers" known colloquially as "MAWs". In addition, at its height, Nazbol Serbia possessed almost twice the rocket projectors, more artillery pieces and almost as many self-propelled guns and main battle tanks - of many varieties - as the armies of France, Germany and Britain, the preeminent military powers of NATO aside from the U.S. itself, combined. And with a powerful military alliance with Russia, the growing threat in the Balkans was more than a match for the European members of NATO.
In the tumultuous year of 2020, Russia seizes upon the COVID-19 pandemic to solidify its alliance with Serbia. As early as February, the U.S. and Europe were sounding the alarm over Serbian missiles from Russia, an event essentially a Cuban Missile Crisis in miniature during any other year. This would pale in the face of a summer delivery of Chinese assault drones to Serbia in July. By the summer, Serbian-EU relations were effectively frozen, while expanding on deals signed months earlier and purchasing still more warplanes from Russia before the close of 2020. After an abrupt U-turn in its relations with the West, tensions erupt between the Vucic regime and the powerful and militant Serbian Army Union led by former-military officer Novica Antic, who collaborates with Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik and the Wagner Group to overthrow the Serbian government - further inflaming tensions between Serbs and other Yugoslavs in Bosnia, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro - thereafter installing Dodik as head of a "Pan-Yugoslav Serbia" in 2023, effectively invading Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Following a pause in the inter-ethnic frozen war aside from a counterterrorism operation the early-2010's Albanian Insurgency in Macedonia would resume culminating in Smilkovci lakeside mass-murder of Macedonians and the 2015 Assault on Kumanovo in response to SDSM challenging the 2014 election results which saw the VMRO-DPMNE retain its majority. This results in a corresponding rapprochement of relations with Serbia which would in turn partly result in the rise of the Russian–Serbian-backed Hristijan Mickoski as Leader of the Opposition in North Macedonia, pulling the VMRO-DPMNE in an anti-Western direction. After a contested parliamentary election in 2020, protests erupt against the Albanian BDI party, which had "been part of governing coalitions for the majority of its existence, since its formation in 2002" and accused by the opposition Eurocentric Alliance for Albanians of "[usurping] Albanians' 'political will'" as the BDI seized upon the impasse from the close elections to insert their own prime minister in furious opposition to the pro-Western, pro-EU Social Democrats Leader Zoran Zaev. Tensions would remain high both within the borders of the country, and between it and its neighbors; Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Kosovo, to the West, East, South and Northwest respectively, and accelerate after a 2022 purge of KLA war crimes investigators in Serbia leads to praise from the Macedonian opposition and Kosovo AAK and outrage in Albania, the Democratic League of Kosovo and Macedonian Social Democrats, who accuse the BDI - notable for its connection with war crimes committed against Macedonians during the 2001 conflict - and Kosovo's AAK and Kosovo Democrats of being a front for Serbian irrendentism.
Even without appropriating roughly half of the Bosnian Army in late 2024 (along with the other half in 2025), Serbia wielded the largest and most powerful military in Southeastern Europe outside of the frail state of Romania and neutral Greece. Clockwise from top left: Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter jet, Serbian AA and Armor, Aerospatiale Gazelle scout helicopters, M-84 main battle tank, 2K12 Kub missile system, Lazar 3 armored personnel carriers.
The tensions - already exacerbated by prominent media personalities and renewed Albanian nationalism controversy only a few short years after a similar incident - boil over after the Social Democrats win the 2024 election in a landslide, which the BDI and VMRO - backed by the U.S. and Russia - remove from government buildings at gunpoint after falsified documents supposedly implicated the progressives in election fraud and replace it with a BDI-VMRO majority-minority coalition occupying the lower house of congress and the upper house a semi-autonomous legislature controlled by an executive military junta. The "We Can" Eurocentrists and socialists are purged, repressed, imprisoned and even killed in white hot tensions and result in the 6-week North Macedonian Civil War which in turn results in opposing Macedonian pogroms in Albania and anti-Albanian killings and extremism in Kosovo, leading to the 2024 Kosovo Civil War. During the civil war in Macedonia, pogroms are committed against Roma drawing furious rebuke from the EU, NATO, UN, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Turkey - in particular the latter six countries which sanction the Junta-Nationalist government of North Macedonia. Ultimately, the involvement of the U.S. would leave a foreign policy stain on the record of U.S. President Kamala Harris, a decision loudly condemned by her progressive Vice President Ed Markey and progressives in congress spearheaded by Sen. Mazie Hirono, Defense Secretary Kirsten Gillibrand and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Nina Turner, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Global War on Terrorism (2001–2027)[]
September 11 – A series of multiple coordinated suicide attacks upon the United States in New York City and the Washington, D.C. area occurred when 19 terrorists from the Islamic militant group Al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger jets. The hijackers intentionally crashed two planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City; both towers collapsed within two hours. Hijackers also crashed American Airlines Flight 52 into the Empire State Building which was managed to be narrowly saved from the same fate as the North and South World Trade Centers, and American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The death-toll climbed to an estimate 3,000 civilian casualties by the end of the day. On September 12th, George W. Bush, President of the United States, declares a Global War on Terror in cooperation with NATO, the UN, European Union, and Israel, effectively setting forth the first steps toward a Third Global Confrontation.
From 2009 to 2025, the U.S. government carried out hundreds of drone strikes in Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen - a vast majority of them post-2015. There would also be a notable acceleration in civilian casualties and violations of international law under the Kerry, Trump and second term of the Obama administrations - the principle inheritors of the Bush Doctrine post-9/11. Due to Japan's post-Iraq, Anti-UN remilitarization, most scholars and historians blame the Iraq War for the resurgence of Japanese militarism and Fascist India, which is the main catalyst for the mid-2010s-2020s Third World War (which sees India lead a global insurrection against the United Nations, which was then spearheaded by China and the United States).
With the advent of the 2020's coronavirus pandemic, from 2020 to 2024 while there would be a rapid drop-off in counterterrorism-focused foreign policy, the U.S. would resume its nation-building in Latin America. Following a 2020 failed coup attempt in Venezuela by Trump administration actors, conservative forces in the Americas would assert and bolster the US spectre of so-called "Castro-chavism" being perpetuated by the likes of Mexico, Spain and Argentina in parts of Latin America despite most antagonism being perpetuated by right-wing governments most prominently against Haiti. On 28 February the U.N. Security Council voted on two draft resolutions: one from the US calling for new elections in Venezuela, the entry of humanitarian aid, and the recognition of Guaidó as interim president; the other from Russia calling for dialogue between the Maduro government and the opposition in line with the Montevideo initiative of Mexico and Uruguay. Neither proposal was adopted.
The stagnation of cooperation at the higher-echelons of UN global governance allowed the acceleration of the power vacuum that began to form with the predecessor of the Rio Group, founded in the 1980's to resist Anglo-American designs in the Falkland Islands and elsewhere. Misinformation about the coronavirus spreading online in the early 2020's, alongside increasing incidents of xenophobia and discrimination against Chinese people and people perceived as Chinese or Chinese-affiliated would also push many governments to the authoritarian centre and right, prominently in Brazil which leaves CELAC in early 2020 and is utilized as a bulwark for U.S. imperialism in South America, which prompts an Ibero-American backlash to the Trump administration's Hispanophobic policies. While pro-US actors in Mexico's Yucatan province blame the, quote, "government of Pedro Sánchez/Pablo Iglesias," and that "Castrochavism has taken power because “Podemos” is the creation of dictatorial America to penetrate and destroy Spanish democracy" with claims that "intervention of members of Spain’s security forces to free fugitives from the Mexican Embassy in La Paz-Bolivia proves [it]," this example - ironically - undercuts their position - particularly after the disclosure of top-secret documents in 2120 reveals the existence of a classified Spanish Royal Household Department or "Departamento Real de la Familia" (DRF) that operated in secret between 2003 and 2020 known only to the Spanish Monarchy and certain Spanish ultranationalists such as the far-right Vox organization. The DRF, as it would be revealed, carried out dozens of these SEAL-Team-like raids in Latin America under the protection of Neoconservative actors in the U.S., Canada and Colombia during its existence to threaten and/or silence left-wing and socialist actors that happened to oppose the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and America's Reagan Doctrine and support the progressive libertarian Zaptistas "EZLN".
Bush regime (2001–2009)[]
The September 11 terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bush's first term. Bush responded with what became known as the Bush Doctrine: launching a "War on Terror", an international military campaign that included the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003. He signed into law broad tax cuts, the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, Medicare prescription drug benefits for seniors, and funding for the AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR. His tenure included national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, and torture. In the 2004 presidential race, Bush defeated Democratic Senator John Kerry in another relatively close election. After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the political spectrum for his handling of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and other challenges. Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections. In December 2007, the United States entered its longest post-World War II recession, often referred to as the "Great Recession", prompting the Bush administration to obtain congressional passage of multiple economic programs intended to preserve the country's financial system.
Nationally, Bush was both one of the most popular and unpopular U.S. presidents in history, having received the highest recorded presidential approval ratings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as well as one of the lowest approval ratings during the 2008 financial crisis. Bush finished his term in office in 2009 and returned to Texas, where he had purchased a home in Dallas. In 2010, he published his memoir, Decision Points. His presidential library was opened in 2013. His presidency has been ranked among the worst in historians' polls that were published in the late 2000s and 2010s.
Homeland Security[]
Following the September 11 attacks, the Bush Administration proposed and Congress approved, a series of laws stated to be necessary in prosecuting the "War on Terror." These included a wide variety of surveillance programs, some of which came under heavy fire from civil liberties interest groups that criticized the new regulations for infringing upon certain civil liberties. The administration has also been criticized for refusing to back various security measures relating to port security in 2003 and 2004 and vetoing all US$39 million for the 2002 Container Security Initiative.
Following the resignation of CIA director George Tenet in 2004, Bush nominated Porter Goss to head the agency. The White House ordered Goss to purge agency officers who were disloyal to the administration. After Goss' appointment, many of the CIA's senior agents were fired or quit. The CIA has been accused of deliberately leaking classified information to undermine the 2004 election. This targeting of the CIA by the Bush administration enabled abuse of power by later presidents, and is largely believed to be one of the first instances of conflict in the Intra-American Cold War.
In his 2004 bid for re-election, Bush commanded broad support in the Republican Party and did not encounter a primary challenge. He appointed Ken Mehlman as campaign manager, and Karl Rove devised a political strategy. Bush and the Republican platform emphasized a strong commitment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, support for the USA PATRIOT Act, a renewed shift in policy for constitutional amendments banning abortion and same-sex marriage, reforming Social Security to create private investment accounts, creation of an ownership society, and opposing mandatory carbon emissions controls.
Homeland Security Act[]
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the United States Department of Homeland Security and the new cabinet-level position of Secretary of Homeland Security. It is the largest federal government reorganization since the Department of Defense was created via the Cold War-era National Security Act of 1947 (as amended in 1949). It also includes many of the organizations under which the powers of the USA PATRIOT Act are exercised.
PATRIOT Act[]
In response to the September 11 attacks and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Congress swiftly passed legislation to strengthen national security. On October 23, 2001, Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner introduced H.R. 3162 incorporating provisions from a previously-sponsored House bill and a Senate bill also introduced earlier in the month. The next day, the Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66, with Democrats comprising the overwhelming portion of dissent. The three Republicans voting "no" were Robert Ney of Ohio, Butch Otter of Idaho, and Ron Paul of Texas. On October 25, the Act passed the Senate by a 98–1 vote, the only dissident being Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.
Those opposing the law have criticized its authorization of indefinite detentions of immigrants; the permission given to law enforcement to search a home or business without the owner's or the occupant's consent or knowledge; the expanded use of National Security Letters, which allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to search telephone, e-mail, and financial records without a court order; and the expanded access of law enforcement agencies to business records, including library and financial records. Since its passage, several legal challenges have been brought against the act, and federal courts have ruled that a number of provisions are unconstitutional.
Many of the act's provisions were to sunset beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. In the months preceding the sunset date, anybody supporting the act pushed to make its sun-setting provisions permanent, while critics sought to revise various sections to enhance civil liberty protections. In July 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a reauthorization bill with substantial changes to several of the act's sections, while the House reauthorization bill kept most of the act's original language. The two bills were then reconciled in a conference committee criticized by Senators from both the Republican and Democratic parties for ignoring civil liberty concerns.
The bill, which removed most of the changes from the Senate version, passed Congress on March 2, 2006, and was signed by President Bush on March 9 and 10 of that year.
On May 26, 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act of 2011, a four-year extension of three key provisions in the Act: roving wiretaps, searches of business records, and conducting surveillance of "lone wolves"—individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups.
Following a lack of Congressional approval, parts of the Patriot Act expired on June 1, 2015.[11] With passing the USA Freedom Act on June 2, 2015, the expired parts were restored and renewed through 2019. However, Section 215 of the law was amended to stop the National Security Agency (NSA) from continuing its mass phone data collection program. Instead, phone companies will retain the data and the NSA can obtain information about targeted individuals with permission from a federal court.
Directive 51[]
The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20, sometimes called simply "Executive Directive 51" for short), signed by President of the United States George W. Bush on May 4, 2007, is a Presidential Directive establishing a comprehensive policy on the federal government structures and operations in the event of a "catastrophic emergency". Such an emergency is defined as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions." [1]
The unclassified portion of the directive (which replaced President Bill Clinton's 1998 Presidential Decision Directive 67), was posted on the White House website on May 9, 2007, without any further announcement or press briefings
Iraq War (2003–2011)[]
The Iraq War (also known as also known as the War in Iraq, the Occupation of Iraq, the Second Gulf War, and Gulf War II) was a protracted armed conflict that began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. An estimated 151,000 to 600,000 Iraqis were killed in the first three to four years of conflict. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011. However, following the spread of the Syrian Civil War and the territorial gains of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Obama administration decided to redeploy US forces to Iraq in 2014. Many former soldiers are employed by defence contractors and private military companies. The U.S. became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition; the insurgency and many dimensions of the civil armed conflict continue. The invasion occurred as part of the George W. Bush administration's War on Terror, following the September 11 attacks.
In October 2002, Congress authorized President Bush to use military force against Iraq should he choose to. The Iraq War began on 20 March 2003, when the U.S., joined by the U.K. and several coalition allies, launched a "shock and awe" bombing campaign. Iraqi forces were quickly overwhelmed as coalition forces swept through the country. The invasion led to the collapse of the Ba'athist government; Saddam Hussein was captured during Operation Red Dawn in December of that same year and executed three years later. The power vacuum following Saddam's demise and the mismanagement of the Coalition Provisional Authority led to widespread civil war between Shias and Sunnis, as well as a lengthy insurgency against coalition forces. Many of the violent insurgent groups were supported by Iran and al-Qaeda in Iraq. The United States responded with a build-up of 170,000 troops in 2007. This build-up gave greater control to Iraq's government and military, and was judged a success by many. The winding down of U.S. involvement in Iraq accelerated under President Barack Obama. The U.S. formally withdrew all combat troops from Iraq by December 2011.
The Bush administration based its rationale for the Iraq War principally on the assertion that Iraq, which had been viewed by the U.S. as a "rogue state" since the 1990–1991 Gulf War, supposedly possessed an active weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, and that the Iraqi government posed a threat to the United States and its coalition allies. Some U.S. officials falsely accused Saddam of harbouring and supporting al-Qaeda, while others cited the desire to end a repressive dictatorship and bring democracy to the people of Iraq. In 2004, the 9/11 Commission said there was no evidence of an operational relationship between the Saddam Hussein regime and al-Qaeda. No stockpiles of WMDs or an active WMD program were ever found in Iraq. Bush administration officials made numerous assertions about a purported Saddam-al-Qaeda relationship and WMDs that were based on sketchy evidence, and which intelligence officials rejected. The rationale of U.S. pre-war intelligence faced heavy criticism both domestically and internationally. The Chilcot Report, a British inquiry into its decision to go to war, was published in 2016 and concluded military action may have been necessary but was not the last resort at the time and that the consequences of invasion were underestimated. When interrogated by the FBI, Saddam Hussein admitted to having kept up the appearance of possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to appear strong in front of Iran. He also confirmed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. invasion.
In the aftermath of the invasion, Iraq held multi-party elections in 2005. Nouri al-Maliki became Prime Minister in 2006 and remained in office until 2014. The al-Maliki government enacted policies that were widely seen as having the effect of alienating the country's previously dominant Sunni minority and worsening sectarian tensions. In the summer of 2014, the ISIL launched a military offensive in northern Iraq and declared a worldwide Islamic caliphate, leading to Operation Inherent Resolve, another military response from the United States and its allies. The Iraq War caused at least one hundred thousand civilian deaths, as well as tens of thousands of military deaths (see estimates below). The majority of deaths occurred as a result of the insurgency and civil conflicts between 2004 and 2007. Subsequently, the Iraqi Civil War, which is considered a domino effect of the invasion, caused at least 67,000 civilian deaths, in addition to the displacement of five million people within the country.
Azerbaijani–Russian aggression[]
- See: Colombian–Venezuelan Territorial Crisis, Argentine Crisis, BAP Almirante Grau hijacking, Argentine–Chilean Invasion of Brazil, Chilean–Cuban Invasion of Central America, Chilean Invasion of Bolivia, & Chilean Invasion of Baja California
Second Winter War (2021–2027)[]
Aside from Crimea and the Donbas; Budzhak and Finland would also fall into Moscow's crosshairs in the next decade (targeted countries and regions in yellow).
From 2014 to 2020, the Eurasian Union actively aided and abetted separatist terror groups in the form of the People's Republic of Budjak, the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics in Eastern Ukraine following the February 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea. But it would not stop there. After a staged election in Belarus, the two countries would begin antagonizing military maneuvers against Poland and Lithuania - as well as against Syria and Western Ukraine - in late 2020 and early 2021, by engaging what they called the Regional Group of Forces (RFG), active since at least 2009.
Throughout the latter-half of the 2010's, Russia ratchets up tensions with NATO over sanctions and other actions taken by the bloc against Russia over its militarism in Ukraine, Georgia and elsewhere. Finland, Sweden and Estonia bear the brunt of this, and the wider Baltic-Nordic region as a whole, with pro-Russian Finns maintaining a presence in government at least until 2024. By 2016, the U.S. was pushing hard for increased Nordic Defense cohesion, with the Baltic states integrating their military with those of the Nordics and NBG15 successfully orienting themselves to high veneration as a spearhead formation to a potential future EU-wide army. As tensions between Livonia and Scandinavia reach fever pitch over unresolved 2000's controversies relating to language, national identity - sometimes crossing over into accusations of Neo-Nazism in the Nordic states and neo-Stalinism in Livonia - and kidnapping, and the E.U.-NATO-aligned National Coalition Party on the verge of winning the 2022 Finnish congressional election, Russia had all the boogeymen it needed for its next act.
On 18 December 2021, the Eurasian Union invades the Åland islands from Estonian Livonia - much to the chagrin of the Estonian Separatist Party - after masked militants begin attacks in the largest cities later revealed to be ChVK Wagner. Two weeks later, on New Years' 2022, militants attack Vadsø, and Russia and Livonia respond with an invasion and occupation of Finnmark two days later. The NBG and Polish Army react with mobilization on the northern Finnish–Russian border and Polish–Livonian border, with the U.S. mobilizing in Poland after the involvement of Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin is revealed in 2023, but largely constrained by its own domestic issues. The Nordic-Polish build-up is cut off from Finland and Estonia by a Russian–Livonian response in kind in Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and the Belarusian Livonia's external and internal borders with Lithuania and Poland. Skirmishes and border clashes abound from 2022 to 2026, but Russia maintains a constant presence in Finnmark and Northern Norway, at one point occupying the islands of Ringvassøya, Kvaløya, Senja and Hinnøya at various points in 2022, 2023 and 2024. In this way, Eurasia is simultaneously able to project its Northern Fleet into the Atlantic year-round, and at the same time keep NATO Europe engaged on multiple fronts simultaneously. Expanding from the frozen conflicts in Georgia, Crimea, the Donbass, Transnistria and Budzhak, to occupying islands in the Baltic and Sub-Arctic regions and arming Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Yugoslav separatists (a total of four additional fronts).
By April 2025, Eurasia had utterly rolled the Finnish economy, military and society; and in August a Livonian–Russian invasion of Finland finishes them off within a week. Although the Finns would hold out for another 11 months due to a steady supply of air drops and artillery shelling from Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, eventually the Finnish state too would be dismantled with the help of a Livonian invasion from the South. The two countries would then divide Finland between the two, with Livonia annexing the Southern regions and Russia, Lapland. By this point, European NATO and their allies are deeply engaged against pro-Albanian and Macedonian insurgents in the Western Balkans supported by Russia and Livonia, and had already suspected Eurasia of involvement even before devastating attacks on Naval Station Norfolk in mid-November 2026 and officially declared war on Eurasia.
Livonian–Ukrainian War[]
Ukraine first began to suspect, and prepare for, a Livonian threat from the north in early 2025 - with the commencement of the Siege of Lviv.
In April 2025, after the Fall of Finland, calculating that neighboring Ukraine would soon be under attack and thus unable to aid its neighbors, Livonia attacked Lviv, and began paramilitary insurgencies throughout the capital city of Kyiv. Livonia had been developing a Mechanized Autonomous Weapon since Russia's attacks on Finland 4 years ago, and although it was up and ready barring a few aesthetic shortcomings by the time Kaliningrad began to mobilize, the decision was to "hold back" and concentrate the Ukrainian forces in the capital city.
Lviv would fall a week later, and the Livonians directed their armor and artillery across the border aided by Russian air support and shelling from Kaliningrad. With the promise by their dictator of a "return to the years of gold and red", the Livonians not only possessed superior troop numbers, but far superior morale and will, the Ukrainians as a whole weary from fighting the Russians for years on end. The decision to hold back their ace in the hole dooms the Ukrainians, as by the time the Belarusian-spearheaded CSTO invasion was knocking at Kyiv's door, they had deployed approximately three MAWS, with more allegedly from Russia inbound within minutes. Before the Ukrainians can engage the enemy MAWS with their own - even if it could've taken on half of them - the Ukrainian government surrenders, and the Livonians take control of their lone MAW unit.
The massacres and bloodshed rivalled that of the 1939 German–Soviet invasion of Poland, with 500,000 killed or captured... but nearly all the former. Even after the surrender in mid-July, 2026, Russia made sure to punish the Ukrainians for their resolve. Once the Nordic Battlegroup and Poland got wind of this, however, they spearheaded a shock and awe campaign which saw the fastest liberation of an occupation in the history of warfare. The presence of Anti-Russian Baltic insurgents covertly backed by Anti-Globalist Left-wing movements and American militia groups helped turn the tide, from the inception of Nordic and Polish air strikes and hit-and-run attacks in November of 2026 to the precipitation of regular skirmishes on the Polish-Livonian border immediately thereafter, 48 hours later the Livonians and Russians were pushed out of Ukraine, and the foothold they gained allowed them to liberate Finland a week later.
War in Poland[]
Even as early as 2016 and 2020, Livonia accused Poland of interfering in domestic affairs. The election of right-wing nationalist Andrzej Duda in the 2015 and 2020 Polish presidential elections was largely carried by conservative strongholds near the Belarusian minority areas and on the southeastern border with Slovakia, relations nominally stabilized between the two Slavic nations, until the Russian conflict with Finland and subsequent victory of a pro-EU faction in Poland's 2025 contest.
Following the 2021 arrests of several opposition journalists of Polish descent – one of which is denied medicine, tensions between Livonia and Poland soar. The latter condemns the ethno-nationalism of the regime of the former supported by Baltic separatists, and masses troops on the Belarusian–Polish border in April and Livonia is declared the “North Korea of Europe” in May. The very same month Belarusian dictator Lukashenko threatens to begin WW3 over accusations of anti-Polish ethno-nationalism within Belarusian borders.
Things escalated markedly in the 2026–2027 insurgencies in Białystok and Warsaw which is in and of itself an escalation of surveillance and kidnapping of Poles in the Grodno Region of Northwest Belarus and recruiting Belarusian Poles to spy on the incumbent government. The Podlaskie Voivodeship along with other neighboring conservative constituencies in East Poland - roughly 1.2 million - would vote to for autonomy and to join Belarus, with only the former accomplishing this task. Although aside from Greece having the most robust tank, armor and artillery fleet in continental Europe, Poland's own military was primarily concentrated around Warsaw, roughly a fourth of the Polish Army makes it to the Voivodeship's territory, albeit only in time to stop the Belarusian and secessionist onslaught. A frozen war begins to take form akin to that in Ukraine's Donbas, and would last until the collapse of Russia in the 2030's.
Azerbaijan-Bukhara (2024-2032)[]
Although rather small individually, the eventual six nations that would come to constitute Azerbaijan-Bukhara, officially the Azeri-Bukharan Union, were collectively powerful and threatening.
As Azerbaijan did very little on its own in Europe, always relying on Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan for support, the framework of Azerbaijan-Bukhara holding up as a cohesive polity and military force (particularly with regard to the Azeri-Uzbek and Kazakh-Uzbek political and security relations) with respect to the close cooperation between the trio of countries (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan), this core founded the bedrock of Turkic military operations in Europe, Asia and the Middle-East.
Although the 2027 attacks launched on Germany and other European countries alongside China were what got most of the attention by both contemporary and future scholars, in the years leading up to that Azerbaijan-Bukhara launched land invasions in five countries; Armenia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Iran and Tajikistan. The Kyrgyz and Kazakh militaries launched an invasion at the request of the Taliban to crush the Islamic State in Afghanistan at around the same time the Azeris and Uzbeks were attacking Armenia. A year later, Turcoman forces launched an incursion into eastern Georgia, and then a year after that Azerbaijan-Bukhara supported an ethnic uprising in northwestern Iran. Exhausted after 18 months of fighting against the Azeri uprising, Azerbaijan-Bukhara would formally launch an invasion and occupation of Azerbaijani Iran. The fighting would last another 5 years, until the formal collapse of Azerbaijan-Bukhara back into its individual founding member-states. Nearly 2 million would die as a result of these wars, 90% of the deaths concentrated in northwestern Iran.
The most militarized of Azerbaijan-Bukhara were Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. With a population of nearly 90 million and a standing manpower of nearly 1 million, Azerbaijan-Bukhara was a powerhouse in the region, although individually most of its member-states were rather small. They were; Uzbekistan at 36 million, then Kazakhstan, with nearly 20 million, Azerbaijan with just over 10 million, Tajikistan at 9.7 million, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan with 7 million each. The core military substructure proved to be that of the Azeri-Kazakh Special Relationship, with the political dimension carried out in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. While military was headquartered in Baku, Azerbaijan, as military and political activity extended back as early as the Ukrainian war in 2023.
The Georgian Civil War between Turcoman-backed Azerbaijani secessionists coincided with the Transnistrian coup in Moldova and the coups in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Serbia, in all of which are installed a pro-Chinese regime angled against the West at the behest of Beijing. Just over 48 hours later, the SCO, Organization of Turkic States, and the CIS sign documents in Beijing legally establishing the "Double-Axis" between China and Azerbaijan-Bukhara. Russia is noticeably absent from this, currently at odds with Azerbaijan over its actions in Georgia. With 6 member states and 2 observers in Serbia and Turkey, the Double Axis between the five Turkic states and China was the largest political and military organization in the world, with over 1.5 billion people between them.
UN War Bots[]
- See: Liberation of the Balearic Isles, India declares war on Pakistan, Cuban–Chilean Invasion of Mexico, Russian DEMO Strikes on Sicily and Scotland, Russian–led Invasion of the EU, MAWS & Russo–Egyptian Invasion of Germany
Two Egyptian ‘MAWS’ (Mechanized Autonomous Weapon Systems) defend a heavily-damaged Russian unit, c. 2027
2027[]
June – The Scottish Prime Minister and the House of Commons call on RECON for an emergency summit between IF and NATO powers in regards to a massive buildup of troops and armor on the border between Scotland and England. NATO declines the invitation, but the IF attends with rigor, still at odds over Pharaoh’s justifiably unfulfilled demand that the US cede Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas back to the Crown. Just a week ago Queen Elizabeth II had died, and Great Britain, transformed by the British Civil War, Rebel England and Third Global Conflict, splits the Monarchy down the middle between those loyal to England and those supporting a reunification of Britain. The latter are forced into exile, but Scotland and Ireland pledge to defend them from their political opponents.
The highlights at the meeting are Pharaoh’s steady – but gradually declining – cooperation with Israel and Lebanon invading the islands of Cyprus, Crete and Rhodes. Apparently, Pharaoh had cooperated with the Saudi Royal Family, Islamist and JaF assets to sow conflict in the Middle-East and Central Asia to distract from the invasion of the islands, due to the presence of anti-Pharaoh rebels on the island. Through cooperation with RECON, the British government-in-exile begins plans for a coup to overthrow Chancellor Pharaoh and his supporters in London. Meanwhile, RECON-Unit 1-11 and NATO forces arrive in Majorca to beat back Israeli and Russian-backed forces attacking the island. Unit 1-11, with heavy assistance from France, Greece and Turkey, defeat the Israelis and free the Greeks, Cypriots and Turks from enemy hands.
August – The EU and U.S. declare military action, steamrolling the Aegean and Western Bosnia and invading Israeli-occupied South Lebanon, Greek Cyprus and Crete, before Israel's launching of an ICBM barrage at French and Italian bases across the Adriatic and Sicily from forward operating bases off the coast of Lebanon and Rhodes, in addition to the detonations of two nuclear warheads in Kashmir and Kaliningrad by China and NATO out of retaliation against a NATO–U.S. invasion of Lebanon and an unsuccessful Arab-led Invasion of Turkey. Nearly a million are killed almost instantaneously. NATO and IF are on-site within the hour, with Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Poland and Spain committing a majority of their amenable military forces supported by the 67 NATO-Allied UN (as well as the other 20 Nations openly opposing COSECTOR) into UNTAES and UNMIK zones in Serbia, where a Hungarian–Serbian Joint-Force led by Transylvanian Dictator Dragomir Radu is waging guerrilla warfare. Hungarian partisans, supported by Serbia and Szekely ultranationalist paramilitary and armed battalions and armies led by Radu and the Russians, attempts to establish a foothold, but Coalition forces are able to beat back the invaders by September.
Azerbaijani 641st – Dəniz Xüsusi Əməliyyatlar Briqadası "Naval Special Operations Brigade" – working in conjunction with the Leishen-雷神突击队 and the "Blade Commandos"-利刃突击队 were crucial to the CSTO Summer 2027 offensive in the Mediterranean, Balkans and Central Europe
Late August – Chinese–Turkic infiltrators seize upon the finance-weary Balkans to bolster and erect an effective bulwark powerful enough to threaten most of Eastern Europe. An international summit convenes between the EU, Scotland, NATO and beleaguered Ukrainian opposition in Bratislava, Slovakia, at the behest of the Slovak President in Grassalkovich Palace - the last stronghold of Czechs, and Slovaks of the Slovak Republic of Central Europe - Slovenskل Stredoeurَpska Republika (SSR). It is when the leaders of NATO are convened that a bombing eliminates most of NATO’s command structure… immediately followed by an occupation and invasion of Slovakia and the Czech Republic by Azerbaijani Ground Forces. The invasion of Europe by a united Turkic force and the Chinese-Serb offensive earlier that month provides a distraction, putting the entire region into shock.
Azerbaijan-Bukhara, North Korea and Serbia's carrier task force enter and occupy the Balkans, utilizing 2 million soldiers, 8,000 AFV, 5,000 tanks, 500 MLRs, and 600 SPGs, as well as half of their air force – roughly 5,000 craft to push the Allies back. The Serbs and Turks, led by Radu, Beijing and infamous Livonian Secret Police Chief Nikita Kravychko, shut down the Romanian communes by pouring over a third of their entire military strength into the regions, quickly locking down the city and setting up a forward operating base to allow their air craft to join in on the bombardment and invasion of the communes. Before anything can be done, the Azeris quickly shut down Austria, sending half of the invasion force north, and the other half south – back into the Turk-occupied Austrian South. Their MLRs and SPG – as well as all air powers – remain in Austria, but are suspiciously ordered northeast shortly thereafter. With over a third of their missile strength aimed for mainland Europe, the Azeri–Chinese force drives home their implied message with one final saber-swing. The top-secret U.S. orbital strike (Directed Energy Munitions Orbiter – “DEMO”) program (stationed in orbit over Western Europe to safeguard the United States’ NATO allies from potential Eurasian attack in the 21st Century) went offline in early August and by August 11th it was made abundantly clear that this was a Chinese-caused problem. Controlled by Azerbaijan-Bukhara in 2027 and, later, - via Chinese infiltrators - Beijing and Belgrade by this time – the Serbian government faced a sizable NATO-spearheaded invasion from European forces roughly a week later and used the weapon at the request of Serbia on the resistance in Zilina and Brno, destroyed and rendered vast areas of the region uninhabitable, killing an estimate 286,664, a still-devastatingly-high body-count that could have been as high as 1,000,000 had RECON not done their part to get as many civilians and resistance fighters to safety.
Unfortunately, their actions prove for naught. A few minutes later, before the weapon can be shot down, Mirziyoyev orders a DEMO strike on Rhodes, Cyprus and the Northern Isles out of retaliation for the EU's threats. The islands are destroyed, and rendered uninhabitable – 651,023 people are killed instantaneously. Greece immediately after invades Serbia and North Macedonia from Albania and Bulgaria leading to the Siege of Novi Sad that lasts through varying, tapering degrees of escalation throughout WWIII, and the destruction wrought by this time provides enough of a distraction to allow Ok Saroy Palace, which had been (unknowingly) cooperating with the Kremlin, Azeri XKX, Ak Orda Palace and Zhongnanhai since the end of the Cold War to pioneer the penultimate orbital WMD, to unleash a monster upon their enemies the likes of which nobody to ever walk the Earth has ever before witnessed.
September 2027 – Hidden amid the thousands of satellites and pieces of debris orbiting Earth, a weapon system far beyond the level of technological advancement of any combination of dominant economies or militaries the forces of Earth could ever hope to bolster sat just beyond the prying eyes of the Human Race. Azerbaijan-Bukhara and China gain official jurisdiction over the UN Security Council's secret joint-army of MAWS – Mechanized Autonomous Weapon Systems – pledging to use them against their enemies. Whereas about half of NATO’s forces were tied down in the Middle-East, Europe was left without much defense at home, and most European nations had virtually no standing military left, economically dependent on the United States after the Cold War. In major European capitals and cities – Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Bonn, Geneva, Oslo, Istanbul, Strasbourg, Manchester, Yorkshire and Zagreb – as well as Mexico City, Panama City, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Washington, D.C. on the American continent (although all inbound for the U.S. and Canada are shot down by US ICBM barrages) 24 MAW units deploy from orbit all across the planet into standby mode, 16 of them particularly large and bearing the flags and insignia of the United Nations, from the former-Soviet Republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (all under the control of Azerbaijan's XKX), the People's Republic of China as well as an additional 5 smaller MAWS from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Pakistan and Hungary (also under the control of the XKX, North Americans and China). Upon activation, just 1 MAW is able to lay waste to an entire city district. The death toll tops 600,000 within just 48 hours of global MAW activation. It isn’t a moment later; however, that RECON and NATO are assembled for an emergency summit at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. It is here that it is discovered that not only do China and Azerbaijan-Bukhara possess an estimate 16-strong MAW force (backed by 13 smaller MAWS) – but as do the French, British, US, Japan, India and South Korea (Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Belgium also possess smaller, cheaper MAWS), with a combined force of 33 – the U.S., France and Japan possessing a combined 16 of the units prepped and ready to go as was the Koreans' (whose had been kept secret since the early 1970’s) Archer One. With units inbound for Europe, and some deployed into America, the Joint-Chiefs assess that although the two sides’ MAW forces are evenly matched, they denote that unlike the NATO and IF MAWS which involve some form of human interaction into the Autonomous equation, the hulking UN, Chinese and Soviet MAWS are 100% literal, AI-powered killing machines.
Azeri-Bukharan–Chinese Invasion of Germany[]
2027[]
September – The MAW force in America destroy the enemy Chinese force while suffering no casualties. The situation in Europe is not so tame. Two Turkic MAW battalions are formed into around 11 units, and two teams of Azerbaijani–Korean MAWS (4) and 2 Chinese MAWs each to hit the forces in Italy, Switzerland, Scotland, Germany and Eastern Europe respectively. There were one Hungarian, one Pakistani, two Arab and two North Korean. Three out of four teams of Azerbaijani-Korean, Azerbaijani-Kazakh, Kazakh-Uzbek, Chinese-Uzbek and Hungarian-Pakistani forces were to hit Altbayern, Franconia and Swabia in Bavaria, while the rest rendezvoused with China to attack East Germany. An eighth, composed of American and French forces, numbering at about an even number to that of the Chinese-Turkic MAW battalions, meets the enemy MAWS just as they reach Berlin. In a conflict that results in the deaths of another 54,000 people, it is a Pyrrhic victory for the Allied MAWS. By the end of the month all of the MAW forces have been pushed into Germany – the nexus of the Pact occupation of Europe. In response, the English hit UN and Co-Sector ground forces in the region.
October – RECON Units deploy into Switzerland, Croatia, Hamburg and Berlin in search of rogue Livonian Prime Minister Nikita Kravychko, and the leader of the Grey Wolves ultranationalists directing the attack from the ground – Lt. Colonel Jamakoviو – and his right-hand, Dragomir Radu, who are believed to be in one of the three countries. Although they are not, NATO Command sees them as potentially linked to the rogue Kerry regime. NATO officially responds to RECON presence in Germany and Austria by deploying their deadliest Special Forces – the Danish Hunter Corps. In addition, the Norwegian MJK deploy alongside the Danes in a joint-military-operation to hunt down and take out RECON. Colombia also deploys MAWs – with some tasked specifically with the neutralization of the RECON soldiers. The Colombians also propagate the misinformation of RECON being an Israeli sleeper-cell throughout Europe – at the wishes of NATO Secretary-General Bush – and RECON soon finds themselves hunted throughout the continent by both of the warring factions, as forces from Serbia, Scandinavia, Turkey and Poland converge on and relentlessly pursue the international task force. Fortunately, the RECONS manage to evade their predators and successfully track down and capture Jamakoviو (although Radu escapes back into Hungary). The Scandinavians, realizing the RECONS’ true objective, come to the conclusion that the Colombians were attempting to protect Jamakoviو, and that Colombia's ambitions involved allowing England and its allies in Asia and America to conquer and weaken Europe enough for the three countries to come in and assume supremacy of the continent. Unfortunately, this information endangers the Scandinavian soldiers, and they are assassinated and eliminated in various mysterious ways throughout the rest of 2027.
The Allies liberate the rest of Croatia from the Serbs and Padania, which separates from the Occupied Government to form its own independent nation once more. Montenegro also establishes territorial independence after the Padanian attack on Bosnia and Slovenia, but the latter soon falls under a puppet regime controlled by North Italy while pro-Korea Israel expanded into Syria, and the rest of Bosnia and Serb nationalist forces is essentially annexed by the Russian-backed Macedonian–Serb Front (Македонско-српски фронт, or МСФ) (although a fierce Bosniak–Croat–Serb Resistance movement supported by Poland, Italy, and the rest of NATO, establishes a permanent foothold throughout the Balkans). By the end of the major hostilities in Europe – specifically Berlin – the Allies had suffered 1,567 casualties to MAWS, while China, Azerbaijan-Bukhara, Russia and Co. had suffered 2,693 (1600 in Berlin, 306 in Innsbruck, 722 in Croatia), with the remaining 2 MAWS pushed back into Bavaria and Vojvodina. Frustratingly, the two MAW forces remained almost evenly matched, with the tactically-superior AI MAWS only 1 behind the Allied MAWS.
U.S. Cold War (2020–2058)[]
The American Cold War - also known as Civil War II in America - took place from 2024 to 2041, although some historians count the start of political upheaval 16 months after the election of former-Gov. Nikki Haley as the 47th President of the United States on November 3rd, 2020 as the beginning of hostilities. More specifically, the rise of a evangelical terrorist movement emerging across the Deep South; Louisiana, Mississippi, and as far north as Pennsylvania and as far west as Wyoming. The earliest tremors were felt on election day, on 3 November 2020, a movement bent on revenge against the "Left" for electing a woman to the presidency had emerged out of the woodwork, but also out of a servile devotion to former-President Donald Trump, whom they never failed to perceive as a constant victim of some vast, convoluted conspiracy. The Republic of Texas had been politically pushing for independence since 1996, with financial backing of the Russian Federation. Simultaneously, Argentina and other Latin American nations also funded secession movements in California, New York City and New England, with the latter two movements primarily emerging from the ideologies of wealthy and elite power brokers such as Hillary Clinton and former-President Donald Trump.
After Texas secedes, independence movements are inspired in California, New England and the Maryland. The Biden and Warren administration proves just as divisive, if not more so, than the Presidencies of Donald Trump and Obama. Donald Trump runs for reelection in the 2020 presidential election against Democratic Nominee Biden. When the former Vice President defeats Trump in by Electoral College vote but not the popular vote, which goes to the President via Texas during the general election, Russia, Argentina and other adversaries immediately seized the opportunity - with recently-elected New York Governor Hillary Clinton forging an alliance of convenience with Trump and the Russians after being bested by the Warren for the VP slot. The cogs of the Clinton machine, Latin America and Russia begin to turn shortly after the unrecognized split of Texas from the U.S. under former-President and Texas Governor-General George W. Bush, as independence movements pop up in California, New York and New England - claiming the mantle of the Biden-Warren 2020 slogan "Declare Independence" - after Biden's (at the behest of Warren statements of independence from Wall Street, which infuriate Democratic and Republican mega-donors alike.
After Trump and Russia form their alliance with Washington Democrats and all former Presidents (except Jimmy Carter) against then-acting President Elizabeth Warren, the Texas delegates refuse to support Trump despite winning the state, resulting in furious unrest and street-fighting in Austin, Houston and San Antonio, resulting in the Texas National Guard and Military being called in led by former-President and emergency-military Governor-General Bush, who declares a literal State of Emergency and has the incumbent State Government arrested for allowing the impasse and threat to the continuity of government continue for as long as it had (90 days). Trump concedes defeat to Biden and Warren - but the damage is done. Texas never sees itself the same way again, and a slow but steady lurch toward autonomy and, in time, full independence begins. Likewise, shortly after, President Trump begins a nationwide campaign centered in Texas, New England and the Atlantic State and after backing by the Russians and Turks he also begins to campaign among California's Republican Party. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is elected Governor of California in 2021, and soon after Republicans sweep the state legislature and effectively put Republicans in power at all levels except the Governorship, allowing Trump to position himself as the leader of a nationwide independence and resistance movement.
Gov. Clinton unquestionably benefits, since the Republicans and Russians now had their sights on a Democrat that wasn't named Clinton - and Trump's brand was no longer an effective scapegoat after Ted Cruz's popularity with the right-wing and evangelical movements, not to mention the growing presence of secessionist fever propelling the former Defense Secretary's and President Trump's budding 2024 re-run was beginning to terrify her. This pushes her firmly into the Russian-Republican faction in the U.S., and her wealth and connections in the A.S. region would prove indispensable in turning the Western Militia and paramilitary groups against the Warren-Sanders faction of the Democratic Party.
By 2024, the civil unrest and political violence in the A.S. and New England had eclipsed the chaos in Texas 26 months earlier threefold, resulting in the establishment of the Atlantic State and Massachusetts as new constituent, autonomous countries in the Northeast United States - with a population of nearly 50 million and 20 million respectively. Their proximity to New York City, and Hillary Clinton's sphere of economic and political power, serves to elevate the two new American countries to the status of regional powers. Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota - as well as North and South Carolina - immediately integrate their economies, military and paramilitary forces, and a neutered New York State ends up absorbed by a unified New England. Arizona, Louisiana and California attain autonomous status and immediately gobble up smaller states in their orbit. The Republic of California soon after leads the push to create a political union modeled after the European Union and USSR. The Federation of Union State Republics (F.U.S.R.), more commonly known as North America is established, spearheaded by President Kevin McCarthy, which is recognized as a regional power by 2024 before falling under the sway of NATO and the UN in the 2050's and 2060's. WIP
Korean War on the United Nations & G7 (2021–2028)[]
By the mid-2020's, China's weakening state of disunion coupled with Korea's sudden rapprochement would throw the G7 foothold on East Asia through Japan and their ally South Korea into question.
The Second Korean War, also referred to as the Korean War on the United Nations or the Korean War on the G7, by some accounts began in 2021-2022 when China began pressuring Korea to unify under the North and the U.S. from the South, although most put the start date with the 2024 Japanese Attack on Korea. The Second Japanese–Korean War ends in 2024, after Japan’s attack, which draws attention to the presence of U.S. forces abroad and American imperialism. This causes a chain reaction of much of America’s allies joining Russia in their concurrent conflict with NATO and resulting in World War III. Seoul and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea sign an armistice in 2025.
The sudden about-face of South Korea in seeking a common ground with the Kim Regime and warring with Japan would be blamed on the US by not only it's traditional adversaries in China and Russia, but also traditional U.S. allies such as Jordan, Argentina, Bahrain, Chile, Turkey and Thailand, who would go on to support Korea in it's aggression against Japan and the rest of the G7.
Over the next three years the Koreas integrate their economy and military, with focus on the latter stagnating the Korean Union’s potential standing among global wealth in exchange for a military with the largest standing army on Earth, eclipsing India – the 4th-strongest military power – in total aircraft, attack aircraft, eclipsing all nations but Russia in towed artillery and self-propelled guns, China and the United States in total warships and frigates, and tanks and fighters/interceptors respectively, and one of the top 4 largest armored fighting vehicle, submarine and attack helicopter fleets surpassed only by China, Russia and the United States of America themselves.
Although the capital of Seoul is maintained as the new capital of the two Koreas, the preservation of the Korean Workers’ Party under the allegedly ceremonial head of state role of Korean State Secretary Kim Yo-jong leads to a resistance movement known as the “Korean Republic” headquartered in Gwangju in Southeastern Korea, supported by China and NATO that perseveres into the 2040’s and ‘50s. Korea would nominally align with the Russians in their resistance to the rogue and rapidly-disintegrating Chinese States, although even they would take issue with the newly-expansionist United Koreas over territorial claims, they themselves hypocritical in their claims to Mongolian and Manchurian territory outside of traditional Russia.
The State of Korea at its height, 2027-2029
By the time a pro-Western bloc began to rise to power in Russia in the late-2020's, early-2030's, it was already too late. The disintegration of Russia had already begun, and the scramble among the remaining Great Powers to establish a foothold in the new Russian Republics over the next century would begin. Korea would remain, although greatly diminished in military power, an economic force to be reckoned with - even after the United Nations and NATO regain preeminence over the Western World. Japan would serve as a counterbalance to the Koreans and Turks, even as their relations with the West grew strained over continuing imperialism would last throughout the 21st and the first half of the 22nd centuries...
While most of the Western and corporate media - and by extension Western history textbooks - would overemphasize the importance and role Russian aggression against NATO countries played in the UN's involvement in the third global conflict; as early as the 1990's and 2000's India-North Korea and India–U.S. nuclear cooperation under the Korean Kim, Indian Atal Bihari Vajpayee and American Bush regimes, the IAEA and NSG enabling of India's (and thus North Korea's) nuclear programme, enabling of North Korean general aggression in the region while directly funding their own nuclear program, in addition to North Korean-Indian influence in Asia via SAARC (particularly the Afghan state of affairs resulting from Pakistani, Saudi, Egyptian, Chinese, British and US support of the Sunni Mujahideen in the 1979 Soviet-Afghan War and even as far back as Afghan–Pak tensions over the Durand Line) and BIMSTEC as well as its relations with Japan and North Korea via India's "Look East" policy as well as defense ties to France, Israel and Russia would all contribute to the emergence of Fascism in India and elevation of a North Korean-Russian axis.
The outbreak of the Second Japanese–Korean War in 2025 would accelerate the 1997–2025 Japanese–Korean Cold War to the brink of hot conflict, crippling the Chinese economy and resulting in mass civil unrest in the two Asian titans, eventually resulting in a Chinese civil war and resurgent, reunified Korea.
Beginning in late 2018, early 2019, Japan and South Korea exchange venomous accusations over a rapidly-escalating spat between a South Korean naval destroyer and a Japanese fighter plane. At the same time, the North Korean-US summits between North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump isolate and radicalize the Japanese government.
With both countries jockeying for a relationship with the otherwise 'Hermit Kingdom,' the implications of North Korean-Nazbol plot to pit Japan against South Korea or possibly even China became more real.
In 2025-2026, beginning in mid-December, North Korean Juche-militants in Japan began conducting hit-and-run attacks, assassinations and kidnappings in Osaka. Japan responds by increasing militarization of its police forces, the ASEAN+6 mechanism (which China would later leave) and a NATO-backed raid on Jeju Island on 12 February 2023, which brings an immediate sanctions and military response against South Korean forces in general at the threat from the Russian and Chinese-backed fourth column and their allies - both traditional and otherwise. North Korea had succeeded in removing the international spotlight from its next move. A U.S.-Australian led coalition consisting of NATO vessels enforcing a blockade of the Sea of Japan while patrolling the Yellow Sea with air support is sufficient, though the situation on Jeju Island is not so pleasant. Russian-backed Korean infantry come to direct blows with US-backed Korean Republican, USFK and Japanese ground forces as part of a longer campaign involving a stalemate between Japanese and Korean artillery that would continue to be unresolved long after the armistice on 8 September 2025. Japan would be further-isolated after opening fire on Korean gun-boats and Russian frigates in La Pérouse Strait, killing 79 civilians in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Airport and 247 others at Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk train station in Sakhalin, Russia (in addition to several of their intended North Korean and Russian military targets) which immediately invades and occupies Hokkaido, largely from meek concession on the part of the Japanese government in "the name of peace".
Following the Japanese attacks on Korea in the mid-2020's, the crisis would escalate to a war in East Asia that put the entire region into chaos.
Although coalition forces suffer only 57 casualties regarding the sinking of the USS Nantucket (LCS-27) by RIM-161 rockets from South Korea, the Jeju Siege would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands more at the hands of these very same rockets under Japanese jurisdiction. By the armistice in the fall of 2025, Jeju City was declared uninhabitable. Over 300,000 people were killed in the span of 45 minutes when loyalists to the Kim Regime hijacked South Korean missiles and attempted to use them on the Japanese occupation forces in the South of the island. Nearly a quarter of the people managed to be evacuated without warning, only because of the funeral services for the then-Jeju Province Governor Won Hee-ryong, who had passed away earlier that morning due to suspicious circumstances (also revealed to be the North). After a begrudging international Korean-Japanese investigation into the circumstances behind the killings of Japanese and South Korean officials reveals the implications of the North Korean State itself, Japan begins the process of rolling back their active ground forces, which in turn provokes the deescalation of NATO and US involvement... but it is far too little too late.
A surprise tactical nuclear bombing of Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, just 30 kilometers south of the South Korean Capital of Seoul kills 800,000 people instantaneously, and another 500,000 die of radiation by the end of 2028. At the same time, a coup unfolds in Seoul, with elements within the President's administration accusing the leadership of staging a false-flag operation to justify further U.S. neo-imperialism. The controversy penetrates all levels of society in Northeast Asia, reaching as high up as the Kim Dynasty itself - revealing an intricate web of connections involving a member of the Chinese Communist Party and his own connections to the North Korean Kim Regime and the Kremlin. A deep web of power was becoming exposed, due to this corruption. The people of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and throughout Mainland China and Tibet unite to demand accountability from the Communist Party to stand up to the sway of foreign influence from "Imperialists" and "financial terrorism," in which they are accused of being sell-outs and crooks. All across the region unrest reaches a boiling point until NATO relents to the cries of Japan and Anti-Russian Korean insurgents begging for help from the cascading Russian-Korean onslaught, aided and assisted by Beijing and moles they had carefully placed throughout the city. South Korea had fallen for the North's dividing and conquering of East Asia, encouraged by the Russian Kremlin and Belarusian KGB.
Thus the Second Japanese-Korean War concluded, and the Global War on Korea and their backers in Russia and China commenced.
2027-2029[]
February – On February 15th the insurgents launch several more attacks in East Asia – Vladivostok, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Petropavlovsk, Seoul, Pyongyang, Singapore, Vladivostok, Osaka, Manila, Quezon City, Hat Yai, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Phuket, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok – in 16 cities in Russia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea and the Philippines. Twelve hours later over 3,780 sightings have occurred and over 960 confrontations involving the viral vectors have been reported. At least 7,791 deaths occur within nine hours of the attacks, and continue to escalate by an average of 2.4 deaths an hour, with another 0.6 death increase in escalation at a roughly 50% chance of said growth and nearly 0% chance of any visible implosion every ten hours that went by. Chinese authorities manage to attain a pyrrhic victory against the vectors – with approximately 90% of the territory of Jiangsu Province, along with the 11 other surrounding provinces reporting viral presence and Q-Zone status, under hostile occupation – yet manage to evacuate most of the civilian populace, while Singapore manages to drive the infected out of the city-state and quarantine the city limits by the morning of the 21st. Other cities that manage to survive are Vladivostok (which, although a protracted campaign, manage to use the coastline and harbors as an effective brace against the encroaching hordes, allowing them to perform a tactical piston to rebound against the enemy), Ho Chi Minh City (using their home field advantage they eliminate the infected and push them back into China within twelve hours, before they can pose an adequate threat), Seoul (by the 16th), Osaka (manage to quarantine the infection within the south district by the 17th) and Manila (by the 16th). However, Shanghai, Petropavlovsk, Pyongyang and Quezon City are flattened by the infection – the result is the complete infection of the northern Philippines, viral occupation of Far-East Russia, the infection of East China, regions of Southern and Central China, North Korea, and the entirety of the Malay Peninsula by February of next year. The most devastating events of the Vector Crisis occur in East China – Shanghai, during the Bund Nightmare: 586,383 people die within six hours at the hands of the bloodthirsty viral weapons – and the Malay Peninsula, during the “KL (Kuala Lumpur) Purge”, in which 326,225 die by infection and another 55,664 die from firing squads and government police instructed to wipe-out the infected areas of “cryptids” left behind during the evacuation. A combined 968,272 perish in the Vector Crisis of East Asia, with Shanghai and the Malay Peninsula regarded as the preeminent epicenters of the entire Crisis by many historians – with more people dying in the Bund Nightmare and the Kuala Lumpur Purge than in the entirety of the rest of the International Vector Crisis as a whole.
August – During the Vector Crisis of East Asia, Korea and the Regional Forces Group come upon the realization that Japan's, and the rest of the region’s, intense focus on the containment and pacification of the bioterrorist threat lends it the perfect opportunity to trample Japan and occupy the island, to exact revenge upon the Pro-American country that attacked them several years earlier. Russia invades and occupies more of Hokkaido with its full eastern force of a million of soldiers, thousands of aircraft and dozens of naval vessels including fifty battlecruisers and a supercarrier. What Russia forgets is Japan's MAW complement of still-over 9 MAWS (4 RONIN, 5 SHOGUN), which they had been actively upgrading and retrofitting with constantly-updating technology and consistently more advanced weaponry for the past two years, aided by Japan's industry and dormant 4 RONIN fleet in the south of the Korean-occupied Japanese archipelago adding to the Allied forces. Although China still had over 1,000 combat drones it could lend to Russia, they are outmatched both technologically and in raw firepower by Japan, and cannot adequately aid them (Japan also largely dominated by Western political influence at this time). Korea withdraws from the conflict, drawing the ire of the Russians. The invasion is repulsed, miraculously, as Japan throws all 719,000 of its military personnel from the navy, ground forces and air forces against Russia's far more numerous – including South Korea's 3 “advanced walkers” – MAWS in ferocious resistance. Over 4 million Russians and nearly 40 million Japanese soldiers and paramilitary are killed in the fight against one another and Korea and RFG based there, including three quarters of their own MAW force, while the Japanese and Republican Koreans lose only a single MAW, even with the fabled “Gun Grizzley (Пистолет Гризли)” Command Walker (of which Russia claimed to have an entire army, yet only had two with one a secret), the Russian military fails where the SHOGUN fighters and their RONIN counterparts – the latter revered as the pinnacle of the manned Command Walkers to fight in the Third World War – succeed in repelling Russia's Chinese-backed second major offensive in the region in mere months.
China's Taiwan invasion is repulsed almost instantly by the heavy number of infected there, and shortly after the East repel the COSECTOR on August 20th anti-Communist Tibetan separatist movements begin to surge across the continent. With the Liberation Army already in a weathered state from their battering by the infected and Japan, they make the last mistake they should’ve made – poorly executed intelligence and a heated ‘shoot first ask questions later’ attitude. Delivering the exact same response they have given to every attempted uprising, what they do not expect is a tactical, guerrilla-style counterattack with carefully and patiently-executed strategic response by the Tibetan Insurrectionists. Several cells placed within the PLA and Communist Party and backed by Japan execute bombings against government structures in Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin – as well as PLA strongholds in Chengdu, Luoyang and Xuchang. This creates a domino effect resulting in the immediate elimination of most of the Communist Party and PLA command structure, throwing the Chinese armed forces into disarray and giving the Tibetan opposition the tactical superiority for the duration of the confrontation. Sympathetic Anticommunist movements gain footholds in each of the seven military regions, as well as the North and East of India, arising from opposition to the pro-Korean and Indian Communist Party from within the PLA as well as the Indian Armed Forces. Throughout the rest of the year, into the next, and the beginning of the year after that, the Communists slowly lose their grip on Beijing and China as a whole. Shortly thereafter India, Japan, Taiwan and Free China launch an all-out assault on Beijing, capturing it and politically liberating China from Korea no more than 48 hours later. China effectively surrenders, with the Supreme Leader declaring war on India, although a series of quasi-terrorist militant guerilla movements would continue to wage asymmetric warfare for decades after the ostensible collapse of the Kim regime.
2028-2029– Despite Tibet’s ostensible political victory, the Communists – led by the imperialist and hypernationalist New People's Liberation Army (NPLA) – via Russian support hold out for several more years within the walls of the Forbidden City as the de facto headquarters of a Chinese-led Security Council dominion. Field Marshal Xi attempts open totalitarian rule over the United Nations – the Security Council that includes Britain, France, India and the United States of America – and by extension, ruling the known world. By 2027 the IF led by Tibet is able to mount a successful assault on the Palace of Heavenly Purity and capture Marshal Fang, destroying a hidden second Gun Dragon in the process, thus ending the incessant hostilities fomenting within Beijing over the last year. Shortly after this, Tibet's allies in India are aided by France, Japan, the Americans, Arab League and United Kingdom in an Invasion of Himachal Pradesh. Before Allied forces can make it to Lahore and Faisalabad, the Pakistani nuclear bombardment cripples India via Kashmir - but takes the near-1,000,000-strong invasion force with it.
Israeli–UN conflict (2024–2078)[]
At the height of Israeli-UN tensions in the 2020's, a UN coalition spearheaded by the BRICS, the CIS, SCO, Arab League and ASEAN would intervene in the Western-aligned countries of Israel, Turkey and the United States
In the 2020's, the Middle East was the subject of 76% of country-specific General Assembly resolutions, 100% of the Human Rights Council resolutions, 100% of the Commission on the Status of Women resolutions, 50% of reports from the World Food Programme, 6% of United Nations Security Council resolutions and 6 of the 10 Emergency sessions.
These decisions often criticize Israel for its "occupation of Palestinian land and its oppression of Palestinians." A number of observers have described this criticism as excessive. For example, according to the UN Association of the UK, General Assembly resolutions in the period 1990–2003 show bias against Israel, condemnation of violence against Palestinians, but only occasional discussion of violence against Israelis. In addition, the UNHRC was criticized in 2007 for failing to condemn other alleged human rights abusers besides Israel.
The United States has been criticized as well by the OIC and other Arab organisations, for vetoing most Security Council decisions critical of Israel, the so-called Negroponte doctrine. Since 1961, Israel has been barred from the Asian regional group. In 2000, it was offered limited membership in the Western European and Others Group. On 29 November 2012, the UN General Assembly adopted United Nations General Assembly resolution 67/19 changing Palestine's "entity" status to "non-member state" by a vote of 138 to 9, with 41 abstentions. Some sources claim that these measures implicitly recognised its sovereignty.
In an interview on 16 December 2016, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, said that the UN has issued a "disproportionate volume of resolutions, reports and conferences criticizing Israel."
In 2002, the PLO issued a report comparing the international response to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to similar situations in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Rwanda, East Timor, and Iraq. It contended that the international community, and the Security Council in particular, displayed pro-Israel bias because, in these other cases, "the international community has both condemned violations of international law and has taken action to ensure that the violations cease. In the case of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, however, while the same condemnations have been issued against Israel, absolutely no enforcement action has been taken."
A 2005 report by the United States Institute of Peace on UN reform said that, contrary to the UN Charter's principle of equality of rights for all nations, Israel is denied rights enjoyed by all other member-states, and that a level of systematic hostility against it is routinely expressed, organized, and funded within the United Nations system.
In a lecture at the 2003 UN conference on antisemitism, Anne Bayefsky said:
There has never been a single resolution about the decades-long repression of the civil and political rights of 1.3 billion people in China, or the more than a million female migrant workers in Saudi Arabia being kept as virtual slaves, or the virulent racism which has brought 600,000 people to the brink of starvation in Zimbabwe. Every year, UN bodies are required to produce at least 25 reports on alleged human rights violations by Israel, but not one on an Iranian criminal justice system which mandates punishments like crucifixion, stoning, and cross-amputation. This is not legitimate critique of states with equal or worse human rights records. It is demonization of the Jewish state.
Legal scholar Robert A. Caplen wrote that institutional bias against Israel within the UN has deprived the country of its ability to exercise lawfully those rights accorded to member states under the UN Charter.
In October 2010, Canada lost to Portugal in a vote for a seat at the Security Council. Several observers attributed this loss to the pro-Israel policy of Canada at the UN, including Canadian PM Stephen Harper.
On 16 August 2013, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated in a meeting with Israeli students that there was a biased attitude towards the Israeli people and Israeli government at the UN. He described this as "an unfortunate situation." A few days later, Ban Ki-Moon retracted those comments, stating: "I don't think there is discrimination against Israel at the United Nations".
Countries that intervene in Israel under the UN flag in late 2027
Relations between the State of Israel and the United Nations would be fraught throughout the existence of both entities, but tensions would truly boil over in the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks and fallout thereafter. Over a dozen UN militants were found to be involved in the Hamas attacks shortly after the ICJ ruling on Israel's genocidal actions in the aftermath of the attacks, and nearly 200 UN staff at least were literal jihadist militants by 2023, with the number set to increase to over 5,000 in response to a year of Israeli genocidal bombardment. Military campaigns in the Greater Middle East increased under the flag of the UN, such as those undertaken by the Azeris against Iran, Armenia and Georgia in the 2020's, or those against Sudan and Ethiopia under the banner of both the Arab League and the UN.
The late-2020's Arab-spearheaded military campaigns against Israel and Turkey would both take place under the auspices of the United Nations, with the invasions of Turkey being far costlier than their campaign against Israel. Although the campaign against Turkey was bloodier and more infamous, the conflict with Israel would last far longer, with roots than ran deeper. Whereas Turkey's nominally-Western-aligned geopolitics and Neo-Ottomanism would be the main factors in relations between the Turks and Arabs collapsing, an element of antisemitism and victim mentality among the general Arab population mixed with Anti-Americanism would produce a cauldron of mutual boiling hate between Arabs and Jews, with Islamophobia and racial supremacy propelling hatred of Arabs among Israeli Jews. This was, however, all a product of colonialism and neo-colonialism among the United States utilizing extremist Israeli Zionism as a puppet to project power into the Middle-East surrounding Israel - in conjunction with NATO ally Turkey - to effectively police the Middle-East and exert control over the region.
Beginning with Israel's bombardment of Gaza in 2023/2024, virtually all of the UN with the exception of the West would side against Israel at the United Nations General Assembly
Following the 7 October attacks and Israel's subsequent mass bombardment of Gaza, a vast majority of the UN would side against Israel and the West, with only the United States and a handful of small countries such as Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Paraguay openly siding with Israel and a majority of the West, Japan, India, the Philippines, Australia and parts of Africa abstaining. France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Latvia, Estonia, Iceland, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States suspend relations with all UN organizations related to the Palestinians - with most minor donors, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Qatar, Bahrain, Belgium, India, Kuwait, Norway and Denmark continuing UN funds. Spain would double their amount of UN forces in UNIFIL and take charge of the UN mission in 2025, with Southeast Asia, the Arab League, Pakistan, India, China and Brazil all increasing their footprint in the region as well. After spearheading MINUSTAH and MONUSCO, Brazil and Pakistan were considered among the "Anti-West" or "UN 7" by 2026, alongside the Arab League, ASEAN, China, India and Russia. Most of these countries would engage in UN operations against the West. With China, India, ASEAN and Russia supporting materially the Arab attacks on Turkey, India, Pakistan, the Arab League and ASEAN contributing to the attacks on Israel, and China, India, ASEAN, the Arab League, Pakistan and Brazil contributing to the intervention in California, the "Big 7" would be active under the UN throughout the war.
After the 125-country NATO-UN intervention in late 2027, tensions between Israel and the UN would return to a simmer. From the 2030's onward, the United States would maintain a firm commitment to the State of Israel and even accelerate its military and geopolitical investment in the country as the leadership in both countries would become more right-wing. Tensions would return in the late-2050's as Israelis and Arabs under the UN flag once again went to war. A NATO-spearheaded UN intervention into Arabia in the 2060's and 2070's would backfire catastrophically and result in the dissolution of the United Nations a few years later, officially marking Israel the victor in the Israeli-UN conflict, as it had outlasted the organization and would endure as a nation-state for a few more decades before being absorbed into the trinational state of Levant in the 2090's.
Post-Moratorium Era (2035–2082)[]
The Fallout and Aftermath of WWIII sees victory for the Allies: led by the UK, France and Japan against Azerbaijan-Bukhara, the Arabs, Russians and most of Latin America fighting on a third front. The United States and the Canadian countries are not so lucky, seeing how despite the fact that the Russians, Azeris, Arabs, and their mole-state in the Middle-East, Turkey, had been beaten after being cornered in the strait of Dover – the Latin Union, backed by Japan and the Co-Sector, had effectively annexed Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Mexico, California, Nevada and the Rust Belt States of America (Excluding Indiana and Illinois) while North America would annex the rest of Canada in time and California would fight for its independence in 2041-2047.
The Treaty of Halifax is signed under Terms of Surrender by the Russian, Arab, Azerbaijani and Israeli Governments, English junta and former-President Luca, Commander Nikita Kravychko, the ultra-nationalist governments of Peru and Venezuela, the English Chancellor, 16 senior Venezuelan, Chilean, Russian, Livonian, Tajik, Kyrgyz and Cuban officials, Wyomingite Midwestern Gen. Secretary Liz Cheney, former-President John Kerry, former-Vice President Hillary Clinton, Lord Christian Pharaoh of Edinburgh, Fang Kaizeng's military brass and 368 other senior military and government officials from Latin America, the Middle-East and Cuba. The only five nations exempt from the repercussions of aiding CoSector are; Israel, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Bolivia, North America and Turkey after a short and brutal civil war by the NATO-backed opposition against the Erdogan regime – and, ironically, only because they maintained their commitment to defeat Turkey and Lord Pharaoh.
All territories under the unrecognized State of North America are transferred to U.S. jurisdiction, but the damage is done. The Republic of Texas, New England, large swathes of the Rust Belt and across the southwest become a frozen conflict zones, California a few years later annexing Washington, Oregon, Alaska, British Columbia and parts of Baja and the Yukon over the course of roughly a decade. And while the RT remains surrounded on all sides by U.S. Commonwealths, the united “autonomous regions” formerly comprising the United States of America, Mexico and Cuba would never be as unified and coherent a political entity as they once were. Concurrently, the European Union is federalized into a single government with its capital in Brussels and Belgium is divided between France and United Germania – the two countries becoming symbols of diametrically opposing political ideologies – with France incorporating into the UE superstate as its preeminent “cultural state”, and the Germanic Union opting out, still wary of France, Spain and Italy after their manipulation by Russia and Latin American governments in the 1990’s and 2000’s – choosing instead to focus on building up its autonomy and sway within United Europe. Austria and Germany (after the latter is infiltrated by pro-Chilean Prussian nationalists) are federalized under a Pan-Germanic government coalition centered in Rotterdam, Holland. Due to its proximity to Brussels, along with France’s devolved sovereignty and autonomy within the European state, the Netherlands and Slavic peoples would become the more well-off of Europeans for the first half of the 21st Century (although the former is eventually threatened by climate change). North Africa, after maintaining its commitment to the Allies of WW3 by overthrowing the English-backed military junta, along with Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Oman, Yemen, Mauritania, and Egypt, all commit themselves to dependency status of the new United Arab Federation (UAF).
Crime by NATO–UN peacekeepers[]
As early as 2004, Amnesty International reported that under-age girls were being kidnapped, tortured and forced into prostitution in Kosovo with UN and NATO personnel being the customers driving the demand for the sex slaves. The UN's department of peacekeeping in New York acknowledged at that time that "peacekeepers have come to be seen as part of the problem in trafficking rather than the solution".
An Associated Press (AP) investigation revealed in 2017 that more than 100 United Nations (UN) peacekeepers ran a child sex ring in Haiti over a 10-year period and none were ever jailed. The report further found that between 2005 and 2018 there have been almost 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other UN personnel around the world. AP found the abuse is much greater than previously known.
Rapid increase in prostitution[]
Reporters witnessed a rapid increase in prostitution in Cambodia, Mozambique, Bosnia, and Kosovo after UN and, in the case of the latter two, NATO peacekeeping forces moved in. Instances of abuse in Cambodia caused widespread outrage after many of the abused women and girls also ended up contracting HIV/AIDS and other diseases that were not prevalent among the local population. A Kosovo victims support group reported that of the local prostitutes, a third were under 14, and 80% were under 18. Amnesty said the victims were routinely raped "as a means of control and coercion" and kept in terrible conditions as slaves by their "owners"; sometimes kept in darkened rooms unable to go out. In Haiti, the Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted girls and boys as young as 12 for sex. "I did not even have breasts," said Victim No. 1, a girl. She reported to UN investigators that from ages 12 to 15 she had sex with over 40 peacekeepers, including someone called "Commandant" who paid her 75 cents. She stated that she slept in UN trucks on the UN base. In Haiti, 134 peacekeepers from Sri Lanka operated the child sex ring, luring children with candy and cash, according to the AP. After a U.N. report incriminated the peacekeepers, most were sent back to Sri Lanka, but none served any jail time.
1996 UN study[]
In the 1996 UN study The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, former first lady of Mozambique Graça Machel documented: "In 6 out of 12 country studies on sexual exploitation of children in situations of armed conflict prepared for the present report, the arrival of peacekeeping troops has been associated with a rapid rise in child prostitution."
Eight years later, Gita Sahgal spoke out with regard to the fact that prostitution and sex abuse crops up wherever humanitarian intervention efforts are set up. She observed: "The issue with the UN is that peacekeeping operations unfortunately seem to be doing the same thing that other militaries do. Even the guardians have to be guarded."
Involvement in brothels[]
There was one highly publicised case where members of the UN peacekeeping force were accused of direct involvement in the procurement of sex slaves for a local brothel in Bosnia. The use of agents for procurement and management of brothels has allowed the military to believe itself shielded from the issue of sexual slavery and human trafficking. Some NATO troops and private contractors of the firm DynCorp have been linked to prostitution and forced prostitution in Bosnia and Kosovo, as have some UN employees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they were accused of the sexual abuse of girls.
Department for Peacekeeping Operations (1992–2019)[]
The era of the United Nations Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) was arguably the darkest era of the entirety of the UN's history as an intergovernmental organization aside from World War II itself, with one of their first operations resulting in the deaths of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995. Between the 1990's and early 2020's, thousands of UN and NATO peacekeepers were involved in crimes of sexual abuse, theft and murder; with the UNMIK in Kosovo between 1999 and 2027, MINUSTAH in Haiti between 2004 and 2017, UNMIS from 2005 to 2011 and MONUSCO from 1999 to 2025 in the Sudan and Congo respectively - the latter of which was ruled by a regime renown for its use of mass rapes as well as sexual violence and slavery as a weapon of war, and the former regime had a similar reputation, along with Mozambique, another site of savagery and 89 rapes in the Central African Republic Civil War - alone raped over 3,000, many of them children, or kept them as sex slaves and murdered as many as 140.
Further investigation post-War shows that a lot of this may have been to do with the UN's at this point inability to act in anyway to meaningfully challenge any UN Security Councilor that decided something it didn't like, no matter how unanimously that decision may have been opposed internationally and globally. This led to a lot of UN institutions fraying and buckling after the Cold War under the weight of reckless and hyper-corrupt rogue states such as Sudan, the Congo, Saudi Arabia, and other harbors and protectors of criminals and psychopaths. Many of them would go unpunished until after World War III, when the United Nations shut down its short-lived Department of Peace Operations to rely directly on the armies of the European Union, Pakistan and China itself to defend it from the new enemy. All countries that resist the post-war order are eventually relieved of their vigilantes by force throughout the next several decades until the late-2050's with the commencement of the Creed Wars, wherein the vast majority of its power structure would be corrupted by the white supremacist ideology of the European and Latin American-spearheaded International Criminal Court and the extremely Anti-Arab xenophobia of a Post-War NATO.
Fascist China (2049–2096)[]
China's sphere of influence would fluctuate greatly in the 2070's, reaching a boiling point in 2075 that sends shockwaves throughout Asia - a pro-Beijing, pro-Mainlander Far-Right imperialist party, 韩集团 (Han Bloc), would incite tensions with semi-autonomous Tibet and Qinghai, and draw condemnation from the Eurasian Turks and international community as a whole.
In the 2070's, a Chinese puppet state in Myanmar would push for unification with China, seeing the country as a failed state, and pushed for Chinese hegemony throughout Southeast Asia. The Turkic Union, with their own brand of imperialism, but from the left, had kept China and Southeast Asia in their sphere of influence for decades. But an undercurrent of nationalism had brewed right underneath their noses the entire time. In 2075, the 韩集团 (Han Bloc) would seize power in a coup, and begin enacting viciously anti-Tibet, anti-Korean, anti-Buddhist, anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish pogroms. This would metastasize into a rampant undercurrent of militant one-party state ultra-nationalism akin to that seen in the Kims' North Korea of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
From 2049 to 2075, the Han Bloc had been the second-largest party in parliament, surpassed only by the centrist federalist coalition of parties from Hong Kong, Taiwan and East Turkestan. The latter of those three anchored the dominant party to Eurasia, but their own nationalist base would inevitably draw China to the right, increasing to a point of militarism not seen since World War III. In 2079, China launched a full scale invasion of Myanmar and Bangladesh, the following year in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and then finally China would invade and reoccupy Inner Mongolia and parts of South Yakutia in 2081. The Chinese invasion and occupation of Eastern India in the late-2080's, early-2090's would result in a death toll that rivalled that of WWIII, with nearly 75 million dead by 2093.
ASEAN Conflict (2078–2093)[]
A bitter proxy war was waged throughout Southeast Asia, as early as 2078, between Leftist Eurasia and Fascist China. The speed and ferocity with which the Chinese state expanded made heads spin, many in the West left scrambling until the early 2080's on how to counter the rapidly-evolving and changing situation in the region. Seen as outgunned and outmanned, the first Chinese attacks on ASEAN countries from within neighboring Myanmar prompted Eurasia and the West to prop up the Southeast Asian resistance as much as possible, with billions flooding into the region every year.
China at its greatest territorial extent. Claimed but uncontrolled territory in striped pattern.
The Chinese war machine finally collapsed in 2096, with the Taiwanese-based 联邦民主党 (Federal Democrats) conducting a counter coup that year, that sees the Han Bloc evicted from the country and facing left-wing firing squads facilitated by Eurasia. The move is criticized in the West, who see the Leftist Eurasians as attempting to colonize China and expand their empire, having lost Siberia, Mongolia, Tuva, Buryatia and Yakutia to nationalist independence movements in 2090, 2091, 2092 and March and April of 2093 respectively. The United Nations, on its backfoot and appearing increasingly cornered and desperate, was defiant that the rising Turkish-spearheaded Eurasia be kept in check, and never allow another fascist regime to emerge from Asia again.
Africa[]
In Africa, the economic centers of Lagos, Kinshasa, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam and Abidjan collapse into political crises (the Nigerian Supremacy Crisis) in which anti-Communist Catholic Monarchists in the Nigerian, Sudanese, Tanzanian, Congolese and Ivorian governments attempt to establish Monarchies in the aforementioned cities, whom each assert their own claims over the continent of Africa from between 2027 and 2043. This results in the establishment of an Equatorial Defense Organization (EDO) headquartered in Dakar, Senegal and Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire (the city hit hardest by Monarchist-Catholic firefights and bombings), that includes all of the former ECOWAS, Central Africa and resulting submissions from Benin, Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Gabon, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau – the 9 countries subsequently joining EDO, which would later become the Equatorial Republic and with them officially eclipses North America (3rd) and Oceania (4th) to become the third-most populous nation, and by 2199 – the most populous in the history of the human race by a wide margin with jurisdiction of over 2.5 billion citizens. Tanzania, Mozambique, and most of East Africa manage to reestablish a foothold against the insurgency with assistance from the British by the late 2050’s, but the southwestern countries fail to escape the bloodbath resulting in millions of deaths – atop the million that perished in the 2037–2043 Crisis – as Monarchists seize the Congolese capital of Kinshasa and begin their push north beginning in 2044. By 2053, the Monarchist Congo has transformed into the United Kingdoms of Africa (UKA), seizing 14 countries and resulting in the deaths of a grand total of 11 million Central and West Africans. In the Maghreb, countries are deemed too economically-deficient to function on their own, many of them crippled in putting so much finance into defense from the Federalist-Monarchist conflict immediately following 20 years of global war, thus – an EU-Commonwealth-spearheaded effort federalizes the Maghreb as well, which – after the Maghreb Civil War of 2038-2044 – results in a Sultan seizing power and maintaining decades of rule by Sharia Law over the Maghreb.
EDO of Africa, precursor to the Latin Atlantic and United African Republics, c. 2056
From 2039 to 2099, the EDO would form a secular alliance against the United Maghreb and Catholic Congo. The short-lived Latin Atlantic was a trilateral attempt to federalize the Catholic Church, narrow the divide between Islam and Christianity in addition to stabilizing Sub-Saharan Africa. Founded in 2028 in Tunisia - a Muslim-majority country - the federation would have a tri-city capital, similar to Switzerland, with the executive headquartered in Dakar of Senegal, the legislature in Tunis, and judiciary in Libreville, Gabon. A year later, in addition to the 18 nations of Africa (including the North African Union), the four Spanish Republics, France, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal and Greece would join the Latin Atlantic. Federal America, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and the Philippines join as observer states with Europe joining the same year as France, Italy and Spain, the Americas in 2030 and the Philippines in 2033. The 2030's were a golden decade for Africa, with a majority of Africa's wars of the early 21st century ending by 2029, and the only real issues arising from the Maghreb. However, the rise of Catholic Monarchists connected to movements under Muslim rule in Sudan in the Zaire Democracy in 2036 before seizure of power in 2038 would lead to Latin Atlantic President Youssou Abdellahi facing calls to step down from Libreville and Tunis, the latter simultaneously facing pro-American jihadists sponsored by the Caliphate of Egypt and the former expansionist Christian Nationalists. By 2058 Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast had turned inward, the EDO was put on ice, and an international network of ultranationalist Catholic Monarchists had shut down both Congos, Burundi, Equatorial Guinea while Central Africa, Angola, Rwanda and Gabon were effectively Monarchist satellites, and the countries of Zambia, Tanzania, South Sudan, Chad and Cameroon had collapsed almost entirely. The Latin Atlantic would be reformed in 2101 following the defeat of Arcadia on Mars and subsequent collapse of NATO, but would eventually be absorbed into a Pan-African superstate. Nevertheless, following the rise of Martian Arabia, the American Realignment via control of Mars and the Hellenic-backed Keplerian triumph over Terran Mars in the 2060's would pave the way for a resurgent Africa and breaking the grip Fascism held over Latin America once and for all.
Africa ex. Arabia, c. 2211
The new age of technological advancement surrounding spacefaring civilizations in the 2100’s and late 21st century results in a Cold War between the United Nations – and its eventual successor, the International State – and the new ‘Earth Seven (E7)’ superstate, proxy wars in Arabia, the Kalahari, and their respective puppet states of Korea, Britain and throughout Asia. Europe and the Imperialist Korean-friendly Anglo-American bloc engage in an arms race with each other and Korea engages in a Space Race with Oceania and India, with the latter staunchly opposing globalization. These conflicts – the UN–Pacific Cold War and the Korean-Oceanic Wars – result in the ostensible plundering of the Abidjan Pact’s natural resources, and the domination of its government by Korean and European Mega-Corporations, which in turn results in the United African Republics not only becoming the largest country on Earth (nearly twice the size of India, the second-largest, and well over twice the size of Eurasia, the third-largest), but also one of the poorest. Despite this, after the armistice and reopening of relations between the E7 and the Internationalists, all countries of Africa, with the exception of the Martian-dominated Arab Kingdom occupying the Maghreb of North Africa, manage to rally together and establish the first continent-wide direct democracy in human history, beating the American States by 35 years, despite the former being a mere 7.1% of the GDP produced by the American continent. The African Confederation would sink its influence deep in Southern Africa, using its large military of nearly 10 million active duty and reserves to exert raw power over a vast majority of the continent. While it lacked the technology and riches of the other great powers - China, India, Southeast Asia, the American States and Eurasia - it made up for this in brute strength and sheer size. Diplomatically neutral and weak, Africa exerted its own sphere of influence over the continent, often butting heads with Arabia, Ethiopia and East Africa for control over Southern Africa. Beginning in the 2180s, Africa and East Africa would form a bitter rivalry with one another, despite their shared culture and similar ethnicities. East Africa with its close allies in India and America would be seen as a 'Neo-Imperialist Puppet' due to its ties with the British Commonwealth, and Africa would in turn be seen as an instrument of globalism and communism. This tug-o-war would result in the Second African World War in 2189 between Africa and East Africa, resulting in over 5 million dead and an inconclusive stalemate.
Eurasia[]
After the Fall of Moscow in 2034, Russia is Balkanized into Muscovite Russia (Moscow), Siberia, the Sakha Republic, North Asia, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Mordovia, Mari El, Komi, Chuvashia, Udmurtia, and the Confederation of Chechnya incorporating the 8 Caucasian Republics of Russia into their own nation. The period between 2035 and 2061 (26 years) is seen by many historians as the peak of Republican Russia. In 2053, the Republicans launch a protracted war (Russian Unification War) with one another to unify Russia that lasts until 2059. The result is the annexation of the 12 Russian Nations into Semi-Autonomous Republics of Confederate Scandinavia and Slavic Europe, negotiated with the European Union as mediator. The deal was that the Republicans would reunite Russia – under the rule of the United Nations. With all of Europe already federalized, the fiat-annexation of sections of the former-Russian Federation by the Eurasian Republics (and actual annexation by Scandinavia) completes the unification of Eurasia under Authoritarian Imperialist ideology. The final capstone being the annexation of Mongolia followed by Korea’s Turkish allies annexing all the Central Asian “Stans” – and last but not least, all Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos – are swept into the Social-Imperialist Superstate, as a result (to unify the military) the Union of Socialist Korean Republics (USKR) is established in 2062. A year later Eurasia and Korea sign into existence the Commission of Eurasian Nations (CEN) and the Eurasian Republics Alliance (ERA) is established as a military union in 2064. The Socialist Government of semi-autonomous North America signs the Hemispheric Free Trade Agreement (HeFTA) with the ERA in 2066.
Nation states of Eurasia c. 2150-2211
Starting in the early-2100's, Eurasia began a process of federalization through national political parties aligned with the ideology of the International State. These polities would begin in Turkic and Russian nations, such as Tatarstan and Azerbaijan, as the Federal Republic of State Nationalists or "СНФР" were far-left nationalist imperialists based out of Nur-Sultan and Baku. Spin-off centrist parties in Europe loyal to the ideology would also seize power later in the 2190's and 2200's. Other countries considered "outside" of Eurasia were also granted membership in the International State, with Eurasia the dominant power of said International State. The Federal Republic of State Nations would be formally founded on 9 November 2203, becoming a wealthy nation due to its nigh-unanimous monopoly on the asteroid belt with exceptional informal territories on Pallas, Vesta, Hygiea and Interamnia.
War in the Maghreb[]
Between September 2037 and April 2039, the nations of the Latin State, American States and Jordan spearheaded a series of manned-missions to Mars. The loose confederation of North African and Middle-Eastern countries, first established by Jordan and the Independent State of Mecca after the fall of Egypt in 2023, would spearhead the international effort to settle humans on the Red Planet following the conclusion of World War 3 in the mid-2020's. Due to the prevalence of religious sentiment still remaining throughout the region into the 2100s, a crisis of faith would consume and divide Islam between its more progressive ranks, and those who believed the human space exploration initiative launched by the US, Jordan and the Latin State were "blasphemy". Jihadists and extremists would terrorize the Muslim populace over the actions of Jordan, the Arab World and the West for decades, before being primarily united against the incursion by NATO and the United Nations in 2065.
Mars Landings (2037–2039)[]
The five Mars landings by the Commonwealth, Arab League, Latin Atlantic and UN in 2037, spring and winter of 2038 and summer 2039 respectively.
After the successful launch of the ITS in May 2026, a series of manned missions to Mars were planned for 2030 and 2036 respectively. The fallout of World War 3 and interrelated ongoing conflicts between 2025 and 2028 would unsurprisingly postpone the former mission indefinitely, pushing back the window to January 2036, May 2036 and - eventually - May 2037. The commencement of hostilities in North Africa, peaking in 2039 and 2043, would bring about centuries of unprecedented politicization of the cosmos.
Martian Crisis (2066–2131)[]
The first six Mars Bases of Kepler, New Mecca, Elysium, Olympia, Dharma and Adonis would go onto form the first six colonies of Terra, Martian Arabia, Elysium, Olympus, Outer Tibet and Hellas respectively. While many more would follow, all six would remain at the forefront of Martian culture, particularly Olympia and New Mecca - which would become the third- and fourth-largest cities on Mars by 2066 - although Kepler City would remain the de facto "New York of Mars" for centuries.
The UN-Mars crisis would begin with the backing of Latin American-majority states of Amazon, Olympus, Terra, North and South Rome as well as the European-majority Arcadia. The Arcadian-Olympian Invasion of African-majority South Arcadia and fomenting of its local white populace would be the spark that ignites the kindling. After their Pyrrhic victory in the Martian Civil War, Terra and its UN allies thought it could finish them off after expending so many resources skirmishing with drones at the border.
After pushing into Northern parts of East Arabian Mars and occupying South Arcadia, the Martian Arabs - both the nationality and the ethnic group spanning the red planet - marshal an international resistance against the interplanetary assault on their homes. UN backed by Terran and Earthling supremacist groups and funded by mega-corporations such as IBC and the Titan Corporation are defeated and surrender at the 8 April 2131 Battle of Dharma in Outer Tibet, largely coinciding with - and the result of - the collapse of Internationalist and Korean influence in Chinese Asia and the Americas.
The fallout of the Martian Crisis would reverberate across the red planet for the next century, with Arabian Mars home to a fervent Anti-Terran bloc in parliament which would stonewall Arabian Martian membership in the newly-established Elysian-Terran Axis. Although Arabian Mars would join as an observer in 2190, Arabian-Axis relations would be forever damaged by the decades-long Martian Crisis and the Civil War it began with. By 2200, the Martian Axis had a population of 971,500, and after the Keplerian Nationalist Neo-Communist Ares Party wins over the Indo-Arabian faction on Ares Landing in 2208 it along with its population 870,400 and manpower of 163,635 would join together with the Terrans and the Elysians at 30,360 and 15,180 respectively.
With a total population of 1.84 million and a manpower of 209,175 the Martian Axis was akin to a heavily-armed Estonia when comparing its population to its military-industrial complex. By the 2200s the Cytherian, Lunar, Atlantean and Martian economies would make up over two-thirds of the total off-world revenue, half of that consisting of Luna and Atlantis. Venus and Mars each constituted roughly one-sixth of the total off-world economy by 2200. As Mars was less than half the size of Venus and not even one-fifth the size of the Moon demographically, both Mars and the Moon were roughly equivalent to a medium-sized Earth nation in terms of their total standing military manpower by the 2200's.
Russian Unification Wars[]
The Russian Unification Wars were a series of civil armed conflicts resulting from the Fall of Moscow on 18 October 2034. Even after the brief conflict resulting from a power struggle resulting from the end of the Putin-Zharkov establishment between the Liberal Democrats, the Communists and the last remnants of the United Russians - the only real domestic threat to the Liberal Democrats in the 2030's were the Communists, and they largely opted-out of the "Russian Confederacy" during this time leading to an illusion of unity among the Liberal Democrats and Unionists.
The short-lived Russian Confederacy was the 2034 to 2040 successor to the Russian Federation (1991-2033). Following the Fall of Moscow and in the wake of the War in Siberia (2035-2039), Russia was left an impoverished and highly corrupt rump state of North Russia, Moscow, Azov, the Altaic Urals, Siberian Far East (a Liberal Democrat stronghold) and Taymyria. The Communists mounted a resistance to the elimination of regional autonomy primarily from Bashkiria, Buryatia, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Kemerova, Khakassia, Tuva, Altai and Zabaykalsky, as well as the Volgan states of Ulyanovsk and neighboring Tatarstan - the latter two states eventually uniting in favor of Pan-Islamism in opposition to the Communists and Liberal Democrats (who would go on to oppose the secular Unionists).
The Unionists would maintain footholds in Udmurtia, Dagestan, Krasnodar, Kabardino-Balkaria and throughout the Russian Caucasus years after the Fall of Moscow. Although they would maintain cordial relations with the neo-imperialist ruling Liberal Democrats years after the independence of the Caucasian nation-state, relations would rapidly sour in response to the brutal repression of pro-autonomous movements in the aforementioned Communist and Islamic oblasts, republics and other confederate subjects. In response, the Russian Caucasians would heavily back a Krasnoyarsk independence movement which the Liberal Democrats would respond to with the complete militarization and occupation of Taymyria, which would in turn result in most of the Communist Russian states either attaining independence alone, attaining it and thereafter joining either the Central Asian Union or Manchuria, or being outright annexed by them in the latter 2030's and the following decades. The slow-motion collapse of Russia would come full circle with the collapse of the Far Eastern Liberal Democrats, secession of Tatarstan and Bashkiria and thereafter alignment with Arabia and Persia, and the declaration of war on Tatarstan by Moscow and North Russia - the latter effectively a Nordic puppet-state at this point - and a Russian Orthodox Theocracy in what was forming up to be a modern-day Spanish Inquisition spearheaded by the United States, and this was fully realized by the late 2050's with the commencement of the Creed Wars.
Not only would the collapse of Russia in to twenty separate successor states spill over into Manchuria during their war with the Mongol Independence movement, Central Asia and Ukraine, it would also impact the German, Italian, Austrian, Swedish and Finnish economies. Already reeling from the instability in Spain and North Africa about a decade earlier, the Latin European states of France, Catalonia, Basque, Switzerland and North Italy would fall under the sway of far-right Christian Nationalist movements akin to the Iron Legionnaires of 2020's Italy, and join forces with the fascist regimes in Scandinavia, North Russia and Moscow against the Muslim-majority Arabia and Persia during the Creed Wars of the 2060's.
Catholic Spring (2035–2058)[]
Beginning as early as the 1960s and 70s, a growing movement declaring modernism in the Papacy "the synthesis of all heresies," the particular quote in question from a former pope himself, would begin to emerge in the late-2010's - most prominently in North America - one of the first known instances of a proposed "Catholic Spring" mentioned by the political campaign of U.S. politician, former-First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, with campaign staffers blaming Catholicism for the right-wing drift of the American electorate, despite Catholics being more progressive on almost every major issue than the average American. Although bearing the trademarks of Christian conservatism, the Second Vatican Council greatly opened and liberalized the Catholic Church, and modernized interfaith relations such as with Eastern Orthodox Catholics and Jews, while also inspiring a new generation of progressive church leaders.
The election of Pope Leo XIV after the death of Pope Francis as the Bishop of Rome further entrenched the traditionalist coalition between conclavism, liturgical traditionalists, ultramontane restorationists (neo-theocrats) and the sedevacantists, propelled largely by Christians in the United States (particularly the semi-autonomous, majority-Roman Catholic Atlantic State) and Poland (the latter who see the appointment as a rebuke of the popular Pope John Paul II, a Pole). After the cresting of WWIII during the Invasion of Germany, the Pro-Government Italians force the Pro-Presidency faction into exile in Switzerland, one of the Luca brothers captured by Allied forces during the Siege of San Francisco and the other committing suicide sixteen-seventeen months later. The ultra-right Papacy they installed was viewed just as invalid as they themselves were seen, and readily dismissed from history books, but it didn't prevent the untimely death of Pope Leo XIV a mere 6 years and 10 months into his service.
To honor Pope Leo XIV, the cardinals elected his chosen successor - Pope Leo XV - who would serve from 2028 to 2035 (slightly more than Benedict XVI). While most of the world would focus on rebuilding from World War III, the U.S. Catholics, the Atlantic State, Chile, Cuba, Uruguay, Korea and their protestant and Orthodox supporters in Russia and Oceania would push for overthrowing the Catholic Church in solidarity with the sedevancists (and Federal China), who would seize their moment upon the death of Pope Leo XV on 7 December 2035. The cardinals call for a sede vacante to deliberate about the future of the Church for at least sixteen months, but within three the U.S.-spearheaded movement had spread across the world.
Everything would change in 2039, with the collapse of the Chinese Federation, Italy, India and Russia (the successor states of the latter effectively declaring a "post-modern crusade" and beginning genocide against the Muslim Tatars), and even the United States which sees the A.S. and by extension the Catholic Spring movement to overthrow the Papacy as immoral and unpopular. Relations between the U.S. and A.S. sour into 2040 before culminating in the A.S.-backed New England insurgency in 2041.
Furthermore, as quantum computing and commercialized AI accelerated into commonplace home appliances in the 2030's, a Japanese-Norwegian team of scientists spearheaded by Firewall Oasis manage to create the world's first "strong AI" through whole-brain emulation and direct neural interface technology first proposed at the tail-end of the twentieth century. With civil unrest peaking at a level not seen since 532 A.D. and governments - truly entire nations crumbling - every three to six months, a worse time to introduce AGI to the human species could not have been chosen. The neighboring regime in Sweden is overthrown by Nordic Evangelical Ecofascists who view the AGI as a threat to the already-ailing climate as entire regions of the planet became uninhabitable. Although the AI revealed many secrets, such as 234 different planets home to intelligent life attempting to contact us as recently as 23 years earlier and that some gamma ray bursts were - in fact - extraterrestrial FTL drives, almost all of this would be hidden from humanity for decades, and even centuries, at a time.
It would not be for another 42 years before the fascist Nordic regime collapsed, and another 54 years of totalitarian-level algorithmic and AI regulation (mandated reversal of Moore's Law, mostly ineffective), Anti-Transhumanism, mass-boycott and divestment of robot rights groups and activists, crushing robot taxation of the most severe degree, and what many refer to as the third AI winter would stunt the collective technological consciousness of a vast majority of humanity's nations - their backs against the wall as the global climate crisis entered full-blown meltdown - before the AI would be free to communicate with humans (albeit in a far more limited capacity than intended, due to decades of socioeconomically-engineered robophobia and human supremacist ideology, propelled by increasing radicalism due to the climate acceleration).
Divided States of America[]
In the wake of the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, the Democratic party would experience a notable shift to the right, primarily as a reaction to the Trump and, later, Cruz campaigns. Despite this, Trump and Cruz would out-left the Democrats on many aspects of foreign policy, such as isolationism and reducing the number of overseas military campaigns and actions as the Democrats generally advocated for greater American foreign involvement. This would be a marked change from the era of Bush, and was a shift largely initiated by the Obama cult of personality. In 2024, the most centrist candidate - Pete Buttigieg - would win the primary and go on to campaign on another 4 years of Biden, a lot like Hillary Clinton campaigning on another 4 years of Obama in 2016. The Democrats would go on to lose 2024 just as they lost 2016, with the Republicans out-lefting the Democrats on foreign policy and campaigning as isolationists to the Democrats' interventionism. After choosing AOC as his running-mate, Buttigieg felt he had placated the left enough, and leaned hard into Biden's right-wing foreign policy.
Beginning in 2024, the Democratic establishment - spearheaded by then-President Joe Biden, DNC Nominee Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg and former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - would align with Nikki Haley Republicans, shifting right to court her supporters, to unseat progressive Democrats across the country, even aligning with MAGA Republicans over the progressives. An Oregon firebombing of a DNC headquarters was attributed to ANTIFA and pro-Palestine protesters, despite later being found out to be MAGA. This results in a cascade of anti-Palestinian and anti-progressive right-wing reaction among the Biden-Buttigieg liberals and their leaders. The Democratic Party adopts a hardline stance against pro-Palestinian protesters, doubling down on gun control and censorship while asserting a "mental health crisis" has taken over the country, pinning the blame on the mentally ill - a trend that began with the murder of Jordan Neely on the NYC subways and the subsequent deployment of the national guard into the subways by the Democratic governor to crack down on crime, much to the chagrin of New York citizens. Demonization of the mentally ill would surge across party lines, but would be particularly pronounced among liberal Democrats.
The resulting several presidencies would all be right-wing to some extent, and US-American support and enabling of Israel's apartheid system would extend into the 2090's. Millions would be killed and displaced over the next several decades, with the Palestinians remaining subjugated until the end of American support in 2109. The US establishment would maintain control primarily over both major parties for the remainder of the United States, with both sides engendering fear amongst the American public of "the left," and conservative values returning in a big way until the 2100's. Many alternative ways of life would die out, or relocate north into Canada, as the United States itself became more authoritarian, more conformist, and more sectarian - with both major establishments, but in particular the Democrats - fostering fear and unrest over identity, primarily along lines of gender and sex. Both major parties would support anti-trans policies, as the Republicans became the party of men and the Democrats the party of women. Unity among the US and former-US would become a pipe-dream.
The only thing enabling Republican victories from the 2020's through the 2090's was Democratic incompetence and corruption. Relying on a repeatedly-failed strategy of blanket broad-brushing non-Democrat voters as enabling the Republicans - which they repeatedly mischaracterize as "fascists" - Democrats would go on to lose each of these elections so that they could continue to fundraise off of perpetual opposition. The 2024, 2032, 2036, 2044, 2048, 2052, 2056, 2064, 2072, 2080, 2084, 2092 and 2096 elections would all be Republican victories and Democratic defeats, with the Democrats blaming non-Democrat voters while campaigning on the status quo and institutional establishment each and every time. While both candidates nominally campaigned as centrist moderates attracting moderate and conservative voters, left-leaning liberals and everyone else would largely disengage from the political process seen as increasingly more and more corrupt and stagnant, steadily increasing with each passing decade as the U.S. Overton Window continued to shift more and more steadily to the right.
During the English Rebellion in the 2020s, NATO added the Mexican Drug Cartels, particularly the Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartels, to the list of designated terrorist organizations. They also noted that U.S.-based PMCs were participating in "anti-narcotics" operations in Colombia and Central America, and siphoning funds from the U.S. Intelligence Community, primarily the NSA and CIA. These organizations are labelled as being the prime cause of corruption in the U.S.-Mexican governments and organized crime, which results in unprecedented polarization in American politics and further invigorates secessionist fervor in the U.S. states of California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Wyoming and West Virginia, which in turn sparks a counter-movement of Pro-Autonomy Federalism spearheaded by the U.S. states of Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, Carolina, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Massachusetts and the Tennessee Valley Authority - who declare the right to annex said states, eliminate any and all threats to their citizenry, as well as neighboring communities, and declare the right to protect their territory from domestic enemies of the United States of America. This movement expands over the next year to also include the smaller states such as Dakota, Utah, Nebraska, Indiana, Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, some of which had already undergone transformations of their own at this time. Texan-backed Oklahoman White Nationalists bomb the insurgent Oklahoman government and unleash a campaign of terror which eventually spreads to radical right-wing Republican Kansas. Earlier that year, Special Operations Command, SAC, the FBI and national guard spearheaded by the Republic Secretariat of Illinois, Michigan and Missouri take out the Texan puppet regimes in Oklahoma and Kansas with SEAL Team raids and precision air strikes on militant compounds located in Tulsa and Johnson County and arrest all government officials associated with the Kansan and Oklahoman governments, putting Texas on the list of U.S. adversaries which it now shared with Russia, which places the territory formerly afforded to the two governments to the authority in Lincoln, Nebraska. The government of the A.S. actively campaigns for not only the full sovereignty of California and Texas, but independence movements across the Deep South, New York, Kentucky, Iowa, Pennsylvania and even the Republicans in Oklahoma that are discovered to be White Nationalist Neo-Nazis. But despite the particularly-pronounced volume of this vocal minority, a majority of Americans and Mexicans opposed a unification, with Mexico in particular still struggling with their own secessionists and fallout of their President endorsing the Texan government's recalcitrant rhetoric towards NATO.
Secessionist narco states in Mexico, c. 2024
Although there were mass demonstrations calling for the independence of the A.S. in Belgium, Quebec, Northern Cyprus, Padania, the South Island, Balochistan, Bougainville, Somaliland, Catalonia the Basques, Central America, the Donbass, China, Australia, Britain and the Arab world, Canada and the Mexican people - spearheaded by the left-wing EZLN - oppose the PMC-Cartel-run secessionist states, and all politicians who benefit from their existence. With the US intelligence community's role in the rise of these narco-states exposed by NATO, public faith in the U.S. government in Washington - by this point in time, unclear and highly-contested - plummets. This allows the Communist Party of Cuba, and their ally in Guatemala - Enrique Salazar, to hijack this discontent in Texas, California, and A.S. against the U.S. and the emerging pro-A.S. insurrectionists throughout the country that wanted full-blown secession.
From the ashes of the conflict arises a totalitarian regime that would come to rule Mexico with an iron fist. The regime emerges from a union between the governments in San Salvador, Los Angeles and Guatemala City at a formal meeting in Cuba in early 2025.
At the second meeting a year later between Salazar, Clinton and Kerry in 2026 formally all-but-establishes the independence of North America and the A.S. from the United States of America. The shock of losing Texas entirely, and Greater Los Angeles and other urban enclaves such as San Diego in California to an emerging superstate encompassing vast swathes of Mexico and Guatemala, while remaining powerful enough to threaten all of Central America and the Western United States, results in a radical restructuring of the internal political structure of the United States. The simple fact that the newly-autonomous states, the largest of which remains California - although neutered at 22.1 million - followed closely behind by Florida at 21.7 million. New York had plummeted to 10,000,600 after losing Manhattan to secessionist Long Island, home to nearly 2 million and 7 million a piece. The Michigander Federation was 21.4 million-strong, right behind Florida. Followed by Georgia at 18.6 million, then Carolina at 16.2 million, and Virginia at 15 million, while Massachusetts quarreled with Nutmegger radicals for control over a populace of over 14.3 million. Arizona expands to 18.5 million, besting New York to come in just behind Georgia. Missouri had annexed Iowa, swelling to 9.6 million, and Nebraska's official census read 8.9 million after the Oklahoma crisis. Louisiana - 8.1 million. If Texas and the A.S. had remained part of the US they would be the first and second-most populous states respectively, with 31.1 and 25.8 million in population.
By 2026, the U.S. had fallen from 50 states to just 27; losing Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Dakota, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Texas to far-right extremism. Post-Schism America looks a lot like a political minefield for anyone considered too right-wing or conservative, and heralds a golden age for America's Left and Centre-Left, which is still considered marginally to the right of the rest of the First World, but still an improvement from previous decades. The absence of Texas is seen as the main cause for the dismay of Conservative and Evangelical Republicans, which forces the party to the centre in search of alternative hubs in Michigan and Florida, although progressives are hurt, too, by the SoCal Insurgency and related conflicts with North and Latin America, which dis-proportionally target the society and economy of California. By and large, all politicians of all ideology of both parties have had to become more pragmatic regardless of their political positions on the Left-Right scale and coordinate to bring an end to secessionist violence.
Midwestern–Pacific invasion of Canada[]
California would maintain its autonomy under the North American federal government after briefly seceding and reintegrating with the United States after the indictment of McCarthy in 2028, before seceding again in 2039. North America would collapse after Mexico assumes a hostile stance toward the fundamentalist Christian extremism originating from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the American Midwest and South America before being reformed under the leadership of Illinois and Mexico itself in 2065. Other than the European-Arab conflict and the Arabian War that would follow it, the Invasion of Canada would be the other major flashpoint of the so-called Creed Wars, and it would permanently change the course of the war against the movement to overthrow the Catholic Church.
While during much of the 2030's and even into the 2040's, the Commonwealth Union had been tentatively supportive of the American-led Catholic Spring. The rise of ecofascism in pro-Western Scandinavia almost immediately followed by the collapse of the Russian Confederacy and thereafter declaration of War on Tatarstan forces Islamabad and its Commonwealth allies in Maputo and Pretoria to adopt a more confrontational stance towards the European Union and NATO, irking the wrath of the American Pacific and Upper Midwest. The brief and tenuous alliance between Catholicism and Islam is seen as completely unacceptable to the protestant-led American faction advocating the overthrow of the Papacy, and a rift forms between the Oceanic Commonwealth and the Canadian-Pakistani Commonwealth - the latter of which were more multicultural and progressive in the late-2040s and early-2050s. The two factions would support competing invasions and occupations from the aligned countries of the much larger A.P.-U.M. force and the smaller Australian-backed Andean-Chilean force assisted by Quebec, which would maintain control until March of 2061, and remain in the country until the late-2060's.
Arab nationalism[]
Creed Wars (2058–2082)[]
Russo–Turk Wars[]
The Russo-Turk Wars of the 21st century would begin with the Mordovian-Muscovite declaration of war on Tatarstan in 2041, Ingushetia in 2045, Karachay-Cherkessia and Adygea in 2046, Chechnya in 2047, Dagestan in 2048, and Bashkiria in 2051, leading to roughly a decade of border skirmishes and scattered Christian-on-Muslim terror attacks before exploding into a full-scale invasion and siege war in 2058. These newly-independent republics had signed defense pacts with Turkey in the late-2030's, leading to Turkey declaring war on Muscovy and Mordovia in late 2058. In 2059, Finland would become involved on the side of the Turks, laying siege to St. Petersburg from Occupied Leningrad while the Turks launch attacks into Mordovia in late 2059, and Moscow in mid 2060. The Russians would surrender in 2062, after a six-month Udmurt Civil War between Christians and Non-Religious partisans. Udmurtia would formally join the war on the side of Tatarstan and Bashkiria, while the rest of the countries in the region would maintain neutrality. Another Russo-Turk War would erupt in 2064 over Adygea, concluding in 2066 with a practical eviction of Russia from Adygea, leading to a second surrender by Moscow.
For most of the 21st century, Russia would remain Balkanized into 14-17 separate entities as punishment for its actions in World War III.
European–Arab conflict[]
While the Russian States and Scandinavia were initially supportive of the efforts to overthrow the Church, their escalating war with Tatarstan and the Turks as a whole would push them firmly into the pro-Europe, pro-Catholic camp with the rest of the European Union and Latin America. While the American States and their allies in the Commonwealth would rapidly turn the tide against the nationalists in the West, the formation of an "Arab NATO" and federalization of most of the Arab World would do little to turn the tide against the EU and their puppet states in Central Africa, Israel and Cyprus. This would primarily manifest in the growing divide between the Arab and Persian schools of thought with how to respond to European and Turkish neo-imperialism. Although the two factions would remain united and successful in their resistance to EU-NATO aggression, it would delay and dampen their overall victory, and contribute to the rise of Baku under an emerging Eurasian-Korean superstate that would readily exploit the economically-fragile region - Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan falling firmly into the orbit of the International State of Turk Eurasia, Canada and the Korean Union by 2098.
Atlantic–UN liberation of Canada and Central America[]
North American and UN control 2062-2069
Throughout the post-Moratorium era, the United Nations would continue to dominate international geopolitics, arguably peaking in its power and influence in the 2060's. Although North America would present a threat to the Western Hemisphere with its tenuous alliance with Argentina and Chile, the UN would maintain influence over the world at this time with member states covering vast swathes of Southeast Asia, East Africa and even South America. A wave of independent State Republics in Carolina, Virginia, New England, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Middle-Atlantic, Florida and Texas would exacerbate already-boiling tensions first in Belize and then throughout the Southwest former-US, New Mexico, Louisiana and Massachusetts and Venezuela, all major pro-Catholic Spring hubs. At the same time an international resistance was being marshaled against the exceedingly-protectionist variant of globalism perpetuated by the EU and its allies in North America and Israel - centered in Brazil, Oceania, Japan, the Philippines and England - the United Nations was poised to seize advantage of the chaos incited by resurgent Catholic insurgencies in the region.
The status of territorial control would main in flux between the anti-UN North American oligarchy and the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, founded a decade earlier in 2056. Greater St. Louis would become a major epicenter of the North American War, as anti-UN forces maintained a foothold in the city for six years fighting against the Multinational Coalition (MuCo). MuCo would expand across the former-United States and Canada, reaching Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Central Canada by 2070, although Nationalist parties would surge in these territories and continue fighting the UN for decades.
Belize and Illinois would become major flashpoints in UN-North American confrontations in the late 2060's.
North American–Caribbean War (2062–2068)[]
Shortly before and running concurrently to the UN invasion of North America, the latter was supporting far-right anti-UN insurgencies in Cuba and Haiti. Following the Haitian government being restored with UN assistance, North America invaded the country. The Cuban Civil War, simmering since World War III, had died down enough for the Cuban government to also launch an invasion of Haiti, the small Caribbean nation becoming a bloody battleground and kill zone for the warring Cuban and North American forces. For the next 5 years, Cuba fought the North Americans, who would launch a second attack on the island country in 2064. The attacks would lead to a second phase in the war, with Mexican, Arizonan, Nevadan and Coloradan strike teams bombarding Pinar del Rio until mid-2066, the Cubans responding in kind with an attack of their own on the Yucatan Peninsula in 2067. The escalating nature of the warfare to the North would force North America to abandon its campaign of Caribbean conquest in early 2068. By 2073, Cuban-UN forces had beaten North American forces into surrender in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, leading to them to relinquish control of the territory as Central Americans once again went to the polls to chart their own destiny independent of first Spain, and second, North Americans - who had ruled them with an iron oligarchic fist for decades.
Climate change singularity (2037–2164)[]
Although the most immediate effects of climate change are felt in the form of the California wildfires and various cyclonic and arctic superstorms of the 2010's and the Amazon crisis, COVID-19 and B-13 pandemics of the 2020's, rising sea-levels and global warming result in the late-2030's and early-2040's climate change singularity involving a series of Northern Hemispheric "hypercanes" and "bomb cyclones" which displace hundreds of millions and result in trillions of damages, not including the meteorological droughts of the 2060's, 2080's and the "mega-drought" in the fallout of the 2090's Typhoon Mafalda ARkStorm which lasts for decades, resulting in widespread socioeconomic destablization, many consequences of which are permanently irreversible
The climate change singularity - also known as the climate singularity crisis - were a series of interconnected events related to anthropocentric climate change and the resultant concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, which began to accelerate towards the end of the 20th century. Many of the effects and consequences of this trend upward in global temperature would become irreversible and catastrophic by the mid-21st century. Already by the end of the first two decades of the 21st century, climate change was felt across the world. Between the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, and the year 2005, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide led to a positive radiative reinforcing, averaged over the Earth's surface area, of about 1.66 watts per square meter. Human activity since the Industrial Revolution, mainly extracting and burning fossil fuels, has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This CO2, methane, tropospheric ozone, CFCs, and nitrous oxide has increased radiative forcing. In 2018, the concentrations of CO2 and methane had increased by about 45% and 160%, respectively, since pre-industrial times.
The second major contribution to climate change was deforestation. For most of human history, humans changed the earth's surface mainly to create more agricultural land. By the 2010's agriculture made up over half of the world's land area, with forest comprising 37% before falling to under a third by the late 2020's and a quarter by the 2030's. Rising sea levels accelerating in the 2000's and 2010's led to increased flooding in Venice and the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, with sections of the capital city constantly underwater by the early 2020's, displacing tens of millions across the island of Java by the 2050's. The desertification of Lake Chad would lead to over 50 million without clean drinking water, and as early as 2018–2022 Southern Africa would succumb to drought, compounding the former crisis.
In red: rising sea levels would most negatively impact the countries of the Netherlands, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam and the Pacific Coast of the United States, while the entire Polynesian island chain would disappear completely by 2100. In brown and yellow: everywhere north of Chile, Tasmania and New Zealand; and south of Russia, Poland, Germany and the American Midwest would become virtually uninhabitable due to desertification, extreme weather and "mega-droughts," particularly in the Southern U.S., Central America and Southeast Asia.
By the late 2050's, as many as 775 million people would become climate change refugees. Forests would remain a significant carbon sink until the mid-2030's, when the Amazon crisis culminated in a "dieback event" that directly reinforces the Arctic and permafrost "tipping points" resulting in a positive feedback loop of runaway methane released into the earth's atmosphere. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and the methane emissions from thermokarst lakes initiated a positive feedback cycle in which increased atmospheric methane concentrations led to amplified global climate change, which in turn leads to more permafrost thaw and more methane and carbon dioxide emissions. This in turn leads to an acceleration of explosive cyclogenesis across the Americas, Europe and Oceania. These potent "bomb cyclones" existed prior to the climate change singularity events, but quadrupled or in some cases quintupled in size, strength and duration - with the Pacific bomb cyclone of 2041–2043 causing a massive contraction in the economy and standard of living of California and the crippling of Mexico, which results in a resurgence in separatist insurgency in the Southwestern states of California, Arizona, and Texas (culminating in full-blown conflict and the extinction of the United States of America as a whole by 2058). This would, however, be only a preview of things to come.
Global warming has contributed to the expansion of drier climatic zones, such as the expansion of deserts in the subtropics. Bleaching destroyed the Great Barrier Reef by 2039 and by the mid-2040's reefs worldwide were on life support. Drought and high temperatures worsened the 2020 bushfires in Australia, with extreme weather events commonplace by the 2040's. The sixth mass-extinction event is exacerbated via ecocide of the late-20th to early-21st centuries, with habitat destruction beginning in the Arctic in the early 21st century and eventually spreading across all 7 continents by the late 2040's. Pest propagation and new infectious diseases would also accelerate due to the weakening of human immune systems and changing geographic distribution, although these would be less severe compared to the other effects of global climate change, due to prior global experience fighting infectious diseases such as COVID-19 and B-13 of the 2020's.
Two dead oryx in Namibia during the Southern Africa drought of the early-2020's
The Millennium drought of Australia, 2012 Sahel drought and subsequent mass famine event, 2018–2023 Southern Africa drought and the AR-caused mass flooding in Iran of 2019 would initiate a century of extreme weather. An ARkStorm followed by a hypercane would hit Western Canada and Alaska in 2068 and from 2070 to 2071 respectively, resulting in mass-migration from the West into the Canadian Commonwealth during the drought of 2072 to 2078 - with the CC's population swelling to over 57 million by 2100 compared to Canadian North America's 19 million. In 2086, another ARkStorm hits Northern Algeria and Tunisia, lasting until 2089. Far surpassing its North American counterpart, AR Lucretia results in an upward of $ 1,000,000,000,000.00 in damage, a mass migration of over 55 million climate refugees Eastward and over 500,000 people dead within the first year, and another 270,000 in 2088. The worst was yet to come, as a rapid increase in temperature around the warm water vapor plumes that would remain over North Africa builds into a low-pressure system of approximately 660 hPa - nearly 40% lower than that of the record-breaking 1979 Typhoon Tip - throughout 2090 before a rapid acceleration in 2091 into the catastrophically-powerful Hypercane Mafalda. At a maximum wind diameter of 1,770 miles wide at peak strength with wind speeds averaging 500 mph (peaking at 679 mph), Mafalda had all of the strength of a typical 2070's hypercane and the size and wind speed of the 1979 and 2015 storms, its most devastating aspect would be its duration. As more air is drawn in, the released heat reduces the central pressure further, drawing in more heat in a runaway positive feedback. After reaching and surpassing its peak in late 2092, Mafalda would rapidly decrease in size to around that of 2015's Hurricane Patricia, while being around ten times the strength. From 2091–2097, Mafalda would pulverize Arabia and North Africa, while maintaining their economic ties to their Martian colonies would sustain them, even then it was not enough. There would be two other hypercane events - Erica and Jordan - in Polynesia from 2128-2135 and Argentina in 2156-2163, before these events largely ceased in the 2180's. The crisis would accelerate the Martian terraforming program, proposed by the UAE as early as 2019, redoubled and repurposed to fight back against climate change in the early 2100's.
From the late-2030's and throughout the mid-to-late 21st century mass migration from suffocating temperatures in Central to Northern and Southern Africa and to Europe, as well as from Southern Europe to North Europe, would play a major part of geopolitics during the time. As populations migrated across the world - from Northern Brazil to North and Central America, from hypercanes and bomb cyclones in the Caribbean and the Southern U.S. towards the Arctic, populations fleeing inland from Coastal Borneo, Java and Vietnam (while the countries of Bangladesh, the Netherlands and Polynesia would disappear almost entirely by 2100) - tensions would only accelerate at the dawn of the 22nd century, with the crushing West Euro-African Mega-Drought of 2101–2136. In the early 2100's - in response to French and Italian attacks and raids beginning in 2121 - a series of Eurasianist parties would seize power in Germany, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Spain, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, Belarus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Denmark, Scotland and Wales. Spearheaded by Germany and Poland, the Turkic-Finn-Hungarian-Icelandic-Irish puppet state of Eurasian Europe would invade France, Portugal and Italy in 2128 and the United African Republics would invade East Africa and the South Congo in 2131 and 2132 primarily out of desperation. In what became known as the Great Water War of 2121-2139 over 2 million people would die in total, with over six times that amount injured. In the 2140s and 2150s terraforming on Earth had taken off as an industry and profession, spearheaded by Lunar industry and resources. While a lot of the damage was permanent, by 2175-2185 the climate change singularity had tapered off, with the massive hypercanes like Mafalda largely a thing of the past.
Arabian War (2069–2082)[]
Geopolitical alignments in 2052, 2069 and 2081 (top row, L-R); 2093, 2134 and 2147 (bottom row, L-R)
Following the devastating War in North Africa (sometimes referred to as the Arabian War, after the principle nation-state involved), which simultaneously resulted in the collapse of the aggressor faction - the European Bloc - the planet was left without a clear unipolar leader aside from the increasingly fascistic Moon Lobby central to Korea, Eurasia and parts of North America. Britain had exhausted most of its land forces defending against scattered German-Slav invasions, and the Latins had all but complete dominance over a majority of the Western Hemisphere. Even what industrialized regions of Europe that remained standing had all relocated off-world to the newly-established exclave of Elysium, the city-state and its territories winning the concurrent Martian Civil War against the Terrans. But although the Europeans would export their heavy industry and political weight into the cosmos, so too would the Arabians, and they would share Mars... tentatively (mainly out of strategic alliance against their common foe). The Arabian War would not only shape Earthling geopolitics for decades to come, but cosmopolitics as well. Needless to say, the clear victors in the war against the United Nations and NATO - the American States, East Africa and, after over a century of internal conflict and socioeconomic turmoil, the Indian Republics - would go on to form the Earth Committee, supplanting a vast majority of the planet's economy, population and landmass, with the rest falling under the purview of the Internationalists and the Lunar Lobby.
NATO Invasion of North Africa[]
Disclosed over a century after said events; the Keplerian–Terran invasion of Arabian Mars in 2071 was based on false flag attacks in Kepler City. The supposed Martian Arab extremist was in fact a saboteur hired by the Lunar Lobby in the 2060's, and was responsible for several prior attacks in Hesperia during the Terran War with Kepler. 15 were killed in Terran precision strikes on Argyre and New Syria, resulting in the rest of the polities on Mars along with the UN launching sanctions on both Arabian Mars and Terra. In response to the 2071 attacks on Kepler City, Europe and Russia launch an invasion of Tunisia and Libya in early 2072. The concurrent war with the Byzantine-Yakuts-Congo axis would push Russia-Siberia, Europe and Turkey into a defensive alliance which would constitute the principle coalition projecting its power into Arabia.
Backlash and dissolution of UN and NATO[]
After the NATO-UN Invasions of Egypt, Cairo and Tripoli that would leave in its wake over 1 million dead, the UN would do an internal review and find that it was complicit in war crimes. In a fateful General Assembly on 5 March 2078, the United Nations would be dissolved. Over the course of the 2090's and 2100s and into the 2110s, NATO would soon follow, one-by-one as nation-states stepped down from the organization. The process was slow and grueling and did not happen virtually overnight as in the case of the fall of the USSR in 1991. It was around this time that Turkic, Russian and European countries would see the rise of the Федеративная Республика Государства Националисты (Federativnaya Respublika Gosudarstva Natsionalisty) or Federal Republic of State Nationalists. As these parties began in the former-USSR and spread throughout Eurasia during the 22nd century, the world would bear witness to the birth of a new kind of empire.
Formation of the Earth Committee and International State[]
Starting in the early-2100's, Eurasia began a process of federalization through national political parties aligned with the ideology of the International State. These polities would begin in Turkic and Russian nations, such as Tatarstan and Azerbaijan, as the Federal Republic of State Nationalists or "СНФР" were far-left nationalist imperialists based out of Nur-Sultan and Baku. Spin-off centrist parties in Europe loyal to the ideology would also seize power later in the 2190's and 2200's. Other countries considered "outside" of Eurasia were also granted membership in the International State, with Eurasia the dominant power of said International State. The Federal Republic of State Nations would be formally founded on 9 November 2203, becoming a wealthy nation due to its nigh-unanimous monopoly on the asteroid belt with exceptional informal territories on Pallas, Vesta, Hygiea and Interamnia.
The emblem of the Seven Earth States, representing the African Lion, the stripes of the Bengal Tiger of India, harpy, golden and bald eagles of the American States of Panama, Mexico and the former-United States respectively.
Until Korea formally applied and joined in 2211, the "E7" was known as the "Earth Six" or E6, and was established by the Indo-American strategic defense alliance and East Africa in coalition with India as its ally in the Commonwealth of Nations on 20 January 2208. Spearheaded by India, the Earth Committee Trio would expand to include Arabia in 2209, followed by India's allies in the Levant and APTO in 2210. Representing over 5.1 billion, the E7 would become the principle and recognized intergovernmental decision-making body on the planet by nearly all other planet-states with the exception of Jupiter and Saturn by the 2210s.
The relationship between the E7 and Eurasia could be compared to the relationship between NATO and Russia of the early-21st century, with Eurasia and its population of 983 million (excluding Korea) and the E7 being roughly over five times that (NATO was roughly 9 times the size of Russia) forming a "containment policy" with regard to Eurasianist political parties, similar to Communism during the Cold War. Prominent flashpoints would be Britain, New England and South Korea, as syncretic revolutionary anti-nationalists rose to prominence in Seoul society and opposed Korea's membership in the International State, and Canadian nationalism would resurge in the New Englander United Republic. Canada would prove to be the crown jewel of the International State, which was often seen as a binational state between Canada and Eurasia, with Canada at 76 million as the junior partner. Canada was by far the second-largest political unit of the International State, ahead of Korea by 30 million. When it came time to make sacrifices, the International State chose to let go of Korea as "Indo-Americanization" took hold in the country, just as it had in the Asia-Pacific Treaty Organization member-states decades earlier.
Internationalist–Pacific Cold War (2093–2187)[]
Throughout the early-2100's, unmanned drones, war machines and the threat of nuclear annihilation - the International State possessing the most nuclear weapons surpassing the American States (the second-largest) - would prevent widespread conventional warfare as seen in the 20th and early-21st centuries. Although the rate of unmanned warfare would steadily increase with each passing decade, boots-on-the-ground would remain a necessity for controlling and holding territory both on Earth and off-world. By the mid-2100's, relativistic kill missiles prevented planet-states such as the E7 and the Martian Republics from openly waging war with one another, and mass driver frag swarms would keep enemy fleets and ships at bay. Bubble-point defense systems would transform the worlds of the Collective Asteroids Treaty Organization (CATO) - Mars, Luna, Venus and Earth - into indestructible fortresses with nearly unlimited strategic depth, and that's if the Jovians or separatists/AI from beyond Jupiter's Moons were able to get past the hundreds of coil gun asteroid cannons and black hole mines hidden throughout the Asteroid Belt. As a result of the heavy militarization of the Solar System throughout the mid-to-late-2100's, a vast majority of space warfare would be conducted in cislunar space and Earth's Orbit.
Key flashpoints of what for many was known as the "Third Cold War" between the Asia-Pacific or APTO and the International State - or Eurasia and its proxies - included the Korean-Japanese maritime border, the Tajik-Uzbek border and the Pakistani-Afghan border after the 2150s. From 2129 to 2148 the Turkic Union - predecessor of the Eurasian superstate - laid territorial claims to four provinces in Northwestern China, occupied Xinjiang, occupied Yakutia and parts of Siberia, warred with Russia over control of over a dozen republics and provinces in the Volga-Ural region, warred with Greece, Bulgaria and the Western Balkans over territorial claims, and occupied and fought over territories in Syria, Iraq, Iran, the Levant, and Egypt. The Turkic-backed regimes in Hungary and Finland would become embroiled in conflicts with East Europe and Russia in the 2100s, although by the end of the century Eurasianism had emerged in force in France, Germany and Spain. The formerly-United Kingdom would become divided once again, torn between the Internationalist Scots-Irish and London on one side and the British Republic on the other, based in Yorkshire and Manchester. Eurasianist parties would emerge in Ireland, Cyprus, Iceland, Sri Lanka and Cornwall in the early to mid 2100s, although these latter two would be stamped out in brutal civil wars in the 2160s.
Eurasian–Oceanic Wars[]
In what would become the Oceanic Union of Australasia and Melanesia in the 2150's, Australia and New Zealand would become spacefaring military juggernauts by the late-2100s, owing to their special relationship with the United - and later, American - States. Although Eurasia would rise to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful superstates in human history through its mining of the Asteroid Belt and its partnership with Titan, Oceania's military alliance with the Sino-Indo-American triumvirate and Japan along with its own military-industrial complex would allow the Australians to challenge the Eurasians in the region, primarily around Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and Hokkaido. The Aussie-Japanese military alliance acted as a spearhead against the Eurasian Siberians, slowly pushing them out of control of Sakhalin and the Kurils in a series of wars in the 2140s to the 2160s. The American States and Australia would bulwark Japan through trans-orbital deployment of soldiers and supplies to bolster their war effort in the fourth major instance of space warfare. The Eurasians would destroy USS Enterprise killing 56 - 43 enlisted and 13 officers - in the single-greatest loss of life in space up to that point, and in all 250,000 perish - including 4,000 civilians.
Korean Imperialism[]
From the 2090's into the late 2120's, the Korean Union laid territorial claims to parts of Southern Japan, Okinawa and Manchuria, and actually occupied Kyushu during this time. The Japanese fought a series of wars with Korea in the late-2120's to free this region from Korean occupation, yet tensions and territorial claims against Japan would persist into the 2190's. Relations between APTO Japan and Internationalist Korea would accelerate in the 2190's before becoming formally normalized by the late-2200's.
Turkic Eurasia[]
New Space Race (2065–2131)[]
The New Space Race or Second Space Race (or sometimes Third if including the early days of private spaceflight) was a 21st century competition between Frozen War superpowers in Korea and Oceania. It had its origins in the Mars race between several pre-WWIII great powers and private spaceflight billionaires, as well as the Asian space race between China, India and Japan (who would become surpassed by Oceania and Korea after World War III).
Even as early as 2019 and 2020, quantum mechanics-based solutions were proposed to the general relativity problem of physics as both a Grand Unifying Theory and a fifth fundamental force in particle physics, primarily through entropy's connection to both quantum mechanics and gravity.
These studies were naturally for scientific and research applications. But, following the moratorium period and the Climate Singularity Crisis of the late 2030's, the old Cold War mentality from the 20th century had reemerged, in a 1920's economy. Precursors of the scientific advancements seen in the latter half of the 21st century would begin so early, but due to the CSC economy a unified, thermodynamic supersymmetrical Q-field permeating all quantum fields would not be discovered until the formation of a crack team of scientists led by Dr. Alvin Schwartz, who had initially been attempting to disprove string and M-theories, in addition to developing FTL communication technology and weaponized black holes would go on to do so in a mid-2080s program.
The wave-function collapse was discovered to extend beyond the quantum realm in regions of high gravity and/or sufficient velocity to produce a form of phase gravity thermodynamics later discovered to be what antigravity and dark matter consisted of (in the form of quantum negative pressure), and it was this trans-quantum-astronomical nature of thermodynamics that led to it commonly becoming accepted as the fifth fundamental force post-2079. This in turn expanded upon the quantum computation technology of the mid-21st century into quantum tunneling, in addition to zero-point interaction with the Q-field and further application and understanding of zero-point power and artificial gravity as a whole.
But perhaps most striking was the aspect of its similarity with a forgotten 2020 experiment proposed as early as 2016 that proved the existence of "another universe" where time flows backwards in the form of antimatter, violating causality (and thus, the speed of light). The ability to generate antimatter via time and sound crystals, combined with the tendency for matter to behave as a wave until it is observed, led to many isolated-entropy experiments coupling quantum tunneling with zero-point powered warp drive prototypes - the most infamous of which being the 2081 equilibrium materialization experiment involving a quantum time crystal (this would lead to the penultimate FTL 2089 experiment involving a micro-black hole).
Trans-human Era (2131–present)[]
Colonization of Luna, Venus and Mars[]
The International Spaceflight Initiative (ISI), established in 2199 between India, the International State and joined by APTO and the American States in 2200, became the first global space agency in human history
Beginning in the late-1960's, humans would begin setting foot upon other worlds in the solar system. From then on, into the 2010's, 2020's 2030's, 40's, and 50's humans would venture back to the Moon since their last journey in 1976, with no soft landings occurring between then and 2013, 2019, 2020, 2023, 2029 and 2036. Humans would return to the moon in 2029 and Mars in 2037, with the United States returning to Venus in the 2030's - their first since 1978 - marking the first time humans had made any form of contact with the planet since the US and USSR missions between 1966 and 1985.
For most of the first-half of the 21st century humans would periodically visit their Moon, Venus and Mars, however between 2048 and 2046 a series of terraforming missions were undertaken on Venus on Mars, involving the calculated bombardment of the planets with hundreds of meteorites flown into orbit on rockets, and deployed into the atmosphere. From 2047 and 2048 to 2051 and 2052 Venus and Mars were entirely unsafe for humans to even walk on, however, beginning in 2059 a migration boom would unfold, with the first six Martian colonies established between 2054 and 2056, representing 51 individuals altogether. This would grow to 68 with the first children born on Mars, and another 49 would arrive in 2055 and 2056, and yet another 200 in 2063 to 2065.
The Martian population would crest over 1,000 by the early 2070's, and near 2,000 by the late-2080's. By this time, work was almost complete on a Venusian and Martian project that had begun in the 2050's - Cythera and Ares Landing Habitats, two O'Neill cylinders attached to a 56,000-floor space elevator on both Venus and Mars respectively in which thousands were flocking to primarily from China, Arabia, India, West Africa, Ethiopia, Brazil, France, Spain, Australia, Korea, Colombia, Greece, England, Venezuela and Mexico-U.S. every year. By 2100 the Venusian and Martian populations had swelled to almost 20,000 and 15,000 a piece, with the rate of migration accelerating with each passing decade.
In the 2130's through 2150's, Ares Landing would become a hotspot of tourism, with the view over the Martian horizon dubbed a '$1,000,000 view' to any who were able to witness it. By this time the Martian had reached 50,000 on the surface, and nearly 30,000 on Ares Landing and nearly 100,000 living on the surface and Ares Landing each by the 2150's. With each passing year, whatever the Martian migration rate, Cythera on Venus was constantly almost twice that rate. Nearly 300,000 lived on and around Mars by the late-2160's, and over 1.5 million on and around Venus. By the mid-2180's these figures had doubled when combining the birth rate and migration rate, with over 3 million on and around Venus and 1.1 million on and around Mars. Whatever the population of Mars was the Asteroid Belt and Ganymede/Jupiter's Moons were roughly 17% and 40-45% of that, and even less made it out beyond that, the population consisting almost entirely of transhumans and AI.
Jovian Moons colonization[]
Martian Republics[]
By 2067, a mere three decades after the first dozen humans to set foot on the red planet, the Martian population was 632 last census (projected to expand exponentially and surpass 1,000 in the next decade) - with Kepler City and Elysium alone home to 316 and 158 a piece - and over a dozen different countries and distinct cultures and systems of government - the latter still bearing many of its Earthling rituals and continuing to do so well into the 22nd and 23rd Centuries. Likewise, Martian culture began to flourish on Earth, particularly in Europe, Arabia and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.
The Martian economy was still small, and primarily concentrated in the regions under UN administration; Terra and the Elysian Territories headquartered in Kepler and Elysium respectively. The two city-states and their territory would eventually come to blows, much to the chagrin of the UN, several times over policy and ideology differences. The Elysians were far more conciliatory and multicultural in their approach to cultural integration, while the Terrans were far more territorial and ideological - believing that strict adherence to Earthling ways and cultural preservation would provide the competition needed to advance Martian ascendance in humanity's interplanetary age.
Elysian-Terran relations would give rise to a multipolar geopolitics of the red planet in its first decades under human occupation, with the ecological and progressive politics of Elysium providing more than a challenge to the industrial-utilitarian Terran-Martians of Kepler, North and South Rome and the aforementioned Capital State of Terra - from which Kepler had partial autonomy. These disagreements were always political and fought in the battlefield of finances and import-export quarrels over Earthling resources, corporations and public support. All of this would change in 2068, as the old habits and patterns of their Earthling forerunners would show their stubborn stranglehold resurfacing on a new world and a new war.
Martian Civil War (2068–2069)[]
Elysium and her allies in Hellas and Hesperia knew that their best chance of getting a leg up over their Terran competitors was through supporting the growing secessionist fervor in Kepler City proper - home to a vast majority of the Terran population. Coordinated bombings in Hesperia, Arcadia and Olympus kill 4, and incite uproar against Elysium. Despite the initial UN backing of the Terrans, a century later information would come out to the public that the bombings may have been the first instance of off-world terrorism, and Elysium was entirely unconnected to the bombings. Nonetheless, an interplanetary-international counterattack orchestrated by the United Nations in coalition with seven Martian Republics - Arcadia, Amazon, Olympus, Terra, North and South Rome spearheaded by Kepler City - would cripple the Elysian economy and kill 8 people over the course of eight months, with the coalition forces sustaining only a single casualty.
The bombing that would claim 4 would forever change the entirety of the Martian society and economy - however. Tensions would remain and accelerate between Elysium and Hesperia, the latter of which sustained two of those casualties. Although conflicts would become more commonplace in the cosmos into the 2100's and 2200's, the small-scale, low-intensity Martian Civil War would bestow upon the red planet a dark reputation that would paradoxically accelerate interest and tourism, with Mars experiencing an average tourism rate of nearly 1 million at peak tourism season by 2200. With its various competing factions and occasional violent skirmishes, the Martians would gain a reputation for being confrontational, although Terran AI Minister Dox would correctly remark "The amount of wars Mars has had in my lifetime I could count on one hand, if I had hands. Earth is the planet most known for its wars, not Mars"
Martian America[]
Space exploration in the 22nd century[]
Built in 2118, the Atlantis space habitat would house 4.2 million people and AI by the 2200s
October 31, 2000, was the last time all of humanity was together on Earth. Since then there was always at least one person in space, with that number set to multiply many times over in the next two centuries. By 2200 AD, 25,896,573 humans and AI lived and worked in space, with 2/3rds of that living in Earth's Orbit and on and around Earth's Moon. First colonized in the 2050s, Earth's Moon was home to a permanent population of just over 11 million, with just over 2 million of that living on Selene station, first built in the 2120s. Six major space habitats existed in Earth's Orbit by 2200, the oldest being Voyager station and Pioneer station, first built in the late 2020s. Axiom-II was launched in 2031, to replace the ailing International Space Station. It would maintain a constant presence of 36-24 people aboard, the second-largest of its time, behind Voyager which could house up to 400 passengers. Axiom-II would be partially deorbited in the late 2090's.
In 2057 the hulking Lodestar station was launched, able to house a whopping 18,764 people which consisted primarily of space tourists. In 2089, making use of the first space elevator over Japan, Gaia was launched, beginning construction in the 2050s. It would house a permanent habitat roughly 400 km above the Earth's surface of around 800,000 civilians. This would be surpassed in 2118, when the American States launched the Atlantis habitat. At around 162 km in length by 27.3 km in diameter - or 4,430 square km - Atlantis was a nation-state unto itself, housing 4.2 million and Atlantopolis - a city of 2.6 million, around 950-1,200 km above the Earth's surface, Atlantis was tethered to a space elevator with loci in San Francisco, Mexico City and Ober Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Built with much help from the Lunar industry, Gaia and Atlantis would face significant territorial claims from the Moon Lobby by the late-2160s, early-2170s, with Lunar claims extending from between 50 and 200 km on Atlantean territory, and up to 12 on Gaian territory.
Interior of an Atlantean-class O'Neill cylinder, Selena in Lunar orbit, c. 2200
By 2200, 10.1 million humans and AI lived beyond the Moon, with 8 million of those people living on Venus and Mars, 5.88 million on and around Venus and 2.2 million on and around Mars. Less than 500,000 humans and transhumans had been beyond the Jovian Moons by the 2200s, with the largest demographics beyond the Asteroid Belt being AI and transhumans that had been genetically enhanced to live in those environments. The population of the Asteroid Belt was over 370,000, with 254,000 on Ceres and Pallas, most of them on Ceres. The Axis of Martian Republics and the Jovian Union shared competing claims over Pallas and Vesta, and the fate of over 100,000 humans and AI were on the line by the 2190s and it could affect Jovian-Martian relations for decades if not centuries to come.
Jovian Union[]
By the 2200s the Jovians were on the 4th and 5th generations of transhuman, with their oldest generations still alive at nearly a century old in their eldest. Founded in 2141 from a population of around 250,000 transhumans on Ganymede, biological Jovians had exploded to a population of over 2 million by 2200, with the 1.14 million spread across the moons of Jupiter and the almost-600,000 on Earth being the largest concentrations of Jovian population. With a population of over 896,000, Ganymede was the most populous and most politically and economically powerful of Jupiter's moons, with a population exceeding that of all the other moons combined multiplied many times over. Although Jupiter had over 110 moons only around 16% (18 moons) had been colonized by transhumans.
Titan Corporation[]
Asteroid claims[]
In March 2187, a questionable referendum on Palladian and Vestan citizenship passed making the asteroids member-states of the Jovian Union. The referendum was immediately called into question by Martian and certain Vestan authorities, and a crisis would begin to unfold in Martian-Jovian relations as both nations exerted competing claims over the asteroids and other portions of the asteroid belt. This would escalate into a hot war in the 2190's with Jovian and Martian drones and AI exchanging fire with one another in 2193 and 2194 at the edge of Belt Space.
Solar Cold War (2131–present)[]
Jovian–Martian War[]
Jovian Eurasia[]
Moon Lobby[]
Martian-Lunar enclaves[]
Pan-Lunar terrorism[]
Collective Asteroid Treaty Organization (CATO)[]
Most of the American fleet and support forces en route to defend Atlantis from Lunar forces, c. 2212
First established with the Armstrong Treaty drafted in August 2149 and ratified in January 2153 as the Armstrong-Asteroids Treaty is a collective and mutual defense intergovernmental organization headquartered in Beijing, China of the Asia-Pacific Treaty Organization - the inspiration for the alliance along with NATO - with the goal of peace and security while preventing interplanetary conflict in the 22nd century. The original signatories to the treaty are Mars - seeking to prevent another interplanetary Martian War - along with Venus, Earth and its moon. Although there would be more conflicts on the Red Planet, the organization would - for the most part - succeed in its mission to prevent interplanetary conflict in cis-Asteroid space.
In the late 2180's, Lunar territorial claims affecting nearly 2 million people in the Atlantean Station Republic would escalate into a full-blown annexation as LUN forces "Trojan Horse" their way inside the O'Neill cylinder. In a conflict that claims over 1,000 in total, mostly civilians, all of the Solar Republics save Earth condemn the LUN's tactics, damaging the E7's reputation as a neutral arbiter of interplanetary law. In what would come to be called the Atlantean–Lunar Crisis, already the conflict had become one of the deadliest in the history of space warfare, a disaster for the reputation of CATO as protecting civilian lives. Later, beginning in the Winter of 2211, an outbreak of violence would unfold once again between pro-Earth and pro-independence secessionists.
According to some sources, a SWORD team was responsible for defeating the extraterrestrial menace, albeit at the cost of their own lives.
In a conflict leading to the involvement of multiple nation-states, Atlantis would become the site of conflict once more, even deadlier than the last, in which nearly 5,000 people are killed instigated this time by dozens of sleeper cells penetrating into the habitat over the course of decades. The E7 and interplanetary support of Atlantis against the Lunar fleet is instantaneous. Sanctions are levied against the LUN and a reassessment of the CATO terms takes place. Although heavily-outnumbered, the Lunar fleet inflicts heavy casualties on Earthling forces, primarily with the assistance of an Yx starship, a terrifying mountainous instrument of trans-temporal warfare which inflicts a devastating defeat on CATO forces in the 17 February 2213 orbital attack on Patagonia, penetrating orbital defenses and killing over 100,000 people instantaneously in an explosion just shy of a teraton in yield. Another 700,000 would die in the fallout and the planet would be subjected to over a year of nuclear winter, effecting agriculture the world over.
It is unknown exactly how the Earthling fleet was able to defeat the hulking Yx warship, but most available information points to a SWORD team possibly hijacking Yx, Zetan or Programmer technology - all of which possessed time-travel qualities and features - to go back in time and defeat the ship's pilot, a disembodied Yx-controlled Jovian nervous system, thus removing the threat that the Lunar-aligned Yx warship posed to Earth's defenses. It is unknown if this exact series of events unfolded, however, as evidence still exists of an Yx attack on Earth, despite the supposed temporal methods that were used in the elimination of the Yx.
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)[]
While the earliest manifestations of the SETI program would be undertaken by Nikola Tesla at his Colorado Springs laboratory in 1899, and in the 1900's by Guglielmo Marconi, Lord Kelvin and David Peck Todd, who believed they could use radio to communicate with Martians (before Mars was revealed to be uninhabited in the following century), SETI as a concerted scientific endeavor would not begin for another several decades.
In 1960, Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake performed the first modern SETI experiment, named "Project Ozma", after the Queen of Oz in L. Frank Baum's fantasy books. Drake used a radio telescope 26 metres (85 ft) in diameter at Green Bank, West Virginia, to examine the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani near the 1.420 gigahertz marker frequency, a region of the radio spectrum dubbed the "water hole" due to its proximity to the hydrogen and hydroxyl radical spectral lines. A 400 kilohertz band around the marker frequency was scanned, using a single-channel receiver with a bandwidth of 100 hertz. He found nothing of interest.
The Ohio State SETI program gained fame on August 15, 1977, when Jerry Ehman, a project volunteer, witnessed a startlingly strong signal received by the telescope. He quickly circled the indication on a printout and scribbled the exclamation "Wow!" in the margin. Dubbed the Wow! signal, it is considered by some to be the best candidate for a radio signal from an artificial, extraterrestrial source ever discovered, until 2015 and 2017 events, in addition to 2006 studies into the Viking lander biological experiments of the late-1970's being retroactively confirmed by the Firewall Oasis AI of 2039 as intelligent life (using its superhuman intelligence and processing power to quadruple the speed and accuracy of the SETI program, accomplishing in mere months what took humanity decades (this, in turn, leads to the faith crisis of the 2040's and effectively ends the SETI program).