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QuantumBranching — Sans Ryan

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Published: 2018-12-11 16:12:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 40192; Favourites: 108; Downloads: 181
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Description OK, an updated version of a world in which Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan dies before he becomes *J*A*C*K *R*Y*A*N and things go often pear-shaped. (And yes, there are still too many Nazis, but lets just say they're there to balance out the Islamic terror fantasies a bit.)

It is 2018, and a grim-looking prospect for Christmas and the New Year.

Since the 1980s, terrorism has been an existential threat to meet the expectations of the most motivated internet ranter. There have been multiple nuclear and bioterrorism attacks, the worst of which – the brainchild of Deep Greens of the “we must thin the human population” school – ended up killing over a hundred million people worldwide with mutated ebola. Neo-Nazi, Islamicist, hardline Maoist and Christian Dominionist terrorist groups are all active worldwide.

Not that international relationships are particularly pleasant either. The USSR and the US almost nuked each other out of existence in 1991 as a result of a nuclear terror attack on Denver, Colorado (the US ended up backing down when the USSR demonstrated superior anti-missile tech by shooting down the US “tit for tat” nuclear missile).

The Soviet Union collapsed as OTL, its triumphs – killing a Pope, keeping their latest high tech weapons out of US hands, making the US back down in ’91, etc. – having done exactly nothing to keep its economy from going to shit. Indeed, all that spending on new ABM systems and stealth submarines helped tank the economy faster: the Evil Empire lasted just one year longer than OTL, falling apart in ’92 when things reached the “troops shooting food rioters in the streets” level of bad. The best that could be said was that national pride was a bit less dented than OTL - Andrey Ily'ch Narmonov, the last General Secretary of the USSR, is remembered as a man who gave the US a good slap across the face when it was going hysterical, rather than a western stooge who gave away the farm.

 Japan and India came under the control of anti-US nationalist hardliner groups in the 1990s, and there is a US-Japanese war in 1995. Japanese secretive building of their own nuclear missiles turns out to be insufficient to deter the US from putting a stranglehold on the Japanese home islands, and Japanese leader Hiroshi Goto is assassinated by the same Zaibatsu cabal that put him into power before he can indulge in any From Hell’s Heart Stabbyness or any shattering of millions of jewels. (The Chinese, who had secretively backed the Japanese in hopes of exactly that outcome, were disappointed.)

In 1996, after the war ends, a Japanese pilot embittered by the death of his son and brother and second cousin once removed in the war flies his plane into the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress, taking out most of the US federal government. Iran took advantage of this distraction to take over Iraq (the OTL first Iraq war still took place and Iraq wasn’t in a good position to defend itself, especially after Saddam was assassinated).

Iran then overreached itself, using bioterrorism as part of a plan to distract the US from an Iranian invasion of Saudi Arabia. They also assassinated the new, waaaay down the line of succession temporary President of the US (thus leading to the US going quickly from its first Mormon president to its first gay president). Unfortunately, this simply led to the US developing a Terrible Resolve and an invasion of Iran which involved the tactical use of nuclear weapons (the US, after all, having been the target of WMDs itself both by Iran and others, felt that taboo had been thoroughly broken).

Iraq was liberated from Iranian control, and since the Iranians had already wiped out the former Sunni government and military leadership, the US found it simplest to work with the Shias which the Iranians had promoted, although they did work out a deal to keep the Kurds autonomous. A Sunni revolt against Shi’a oppression broke out within a few years, leading the US to divert some troops from Iran back to Iraq.

 The occupation of Iran would require the reinstatement of the draft and would last fifteen years. When the US forcibly removed Ayatollah Mahmoud Hajji Daryaei from power, they weren’t satisfied with that: the Return of Militarist Japan “proved” that not doing a thorough jobs of removing the Old Guard from power would come back to haunt you. A full occupation, with all the accompanying ghastly grim gore you’d expect, followed, and dragged on year after year as the US tried to find someone, anyone, who could take the reins of Iran as a democratic leader without immediately being condemned by all and sundry as a US stooge and traitor. It took in the end over a million and a half troops to finally stabilize things at a “low murmur of terrorism” level, and the US finally found a democratic politician who clearly disliked the US enough to hand power over to without him being torn to pieces the moment US forces left. [1]

And then the Eco-terrorists struck.

Although the plan to multiple the effect of the disease through faked inoculations proved ludicrously impossible to carry out in a world so “inoculated” with paranoia, the Ebola plague of 2000 (sometimes referred to as “the Red Death” – whether this originated with a Poe fan or not is unknown) swept across the globe, with the heaviest casualties in poor, crowded countries with weak medical institutions, destabilizing already weak states and precipitating more chaos. Osama Bin Laden’s strangely out of place attack on the US in 2001 was considered more “insult added to injury” than anything else at this point, although the US used some of the massive forces holding down Iran to move in and flatten the Taliban as a demonstration of their new “zero tolerance for terrorist refuges” policy (nuclear-armed states excepted).

(Environmentalist became so strongly identified with insane anti-human ideals that the Sierra Club almost went out of business, and PETA was outright classified as a terrorist organization, much to the pleasure of some pet owners. It has also been a serious burden on those trying to get people to take global warming seriously).

China would try to overcome economic woes by invading Russia in 2002 and annexing a large chunk of Siberia. The only reason this has not led to a strong US-Russian anti-Chinese alliances is that as of 2018, Russia is being led by a psychopath.

There are further terrorist attacks on the US in 2006 and 2007, with one group of Islamicists infiltrating through Mexico to attack malls in border cities, and another one setting off a nuclear device “liberated” from Pakistan’s nuclear program in an underground nuclear waste disposal site. Their plan to poison the western US’s water table turned out to be based on deeply bogus science, but this all was unpleasant enough to make building a Wall a deeply bi-partisan proposition by 2008, although nobody was dumb enough to think the Mexicans would pay for it.

The US’s tracing back of the nuclear device to Pakistan led to the discovery of a corrupt general with terrorist allies. The Pakistani nuclear program went up in smoke – shortly after the Pakistanis began shuffling their feet at demands for full US access. This is a cooperative effort at this point between the US, India and NotYeltsin, absolutely nobody wanting to see Pakistan’s warheads in terrorist hands. Alas, such cooperative attitudes prove short-lived.

The US, still transitioning from Middle East occupation (troop withdrawals began in 2007, but Iran isn’t fully evacuated till 2012) loses a 2009 fight with China, which annexes Taiwan, thanks to superior Chinese electronic warfare.

Hardliner Valeri Volodin, who is basically who Putin fantasizes himself as, comes to power in Russia in 2010. His main desires are to rebuild the old Soviet empire and totally fuck over China: he’s happy to see the US suffer too, but is willing to let them be if they don’t stop him from Making Russia Great Again. Over the next few years, he will stage the Russian re-annexation of Belarus, Lithuania, the Crimea, and the Donbass, and clash with the US in stealth warfare and espionage games over the fate of the remaining Baltic States and Georgia.

A new wave of eco-terrorist attacks against oil and gas facilities, which pushes up the price of said commodities, turn out to have been Russian-backed. Relations go even more sour, and a bloody split takes place in the green-extremist circles, between those who think “tactical alliances” with the Russians in OK, those violently resentful of being used, and those who refuse to believe the green-extremist movement was actually used and this is all US government propaganda. Being anti-carbon gets even harder. (Global warming is finally acceptable in 2018 as a subject of discussion, but is pretty much always discussed in terms of its effects on human well-being and prosperity, never its damage to the wild environment.)

A wave of deaths, assassinations and arrests hit the US military and espionage forces abroad starting in 2016, as a Romanian hacker makes big bucks off of a stolen US intelligence database. An effort by a Saudi technocrat to draw the US back into the Middle East quagmire fails, since by this point even with no Jack Ryan the US is getting wise to this sort of shit, is deeply paranoid, and really really don’t want to invade the area again. The new “reformist” Saudi prince performs the traditional act of giving the overlord the criminal’s head and has the technocrat quietly “short while trying to escape”, but the US-Saudi relationship, already strained, became even more shaky.

The Middle East as a whole is messed up, but in different ways than OTL. Syria like OTL has seen destabilization, but a heavier Russian intervention has managed to contain the damage, comparatively speaking. The US, after sending troops into Iraq the third time, pulled out to deal with the fallout of the plague of ’00, accepting the division of the country into a Sunni north and Shi’a south, plus a Kurdish “safety zone” with open borders to the Kurdish “safety zone” previously established in Iran (Turkey, still considered a reliable US ally at the time, was vehemently opposed to their union as an independent Kurdistan, as some proposed). US troops continue to maintain a Cordon Sanitaire between north and south: since 2012, when north Iraq went genuinely Islamofascist, US forces have built up considerably, not just due to north Iraq going genuinely islamofascist, but due to perceived increasing unreliability of Turkey and post-occupation Iran as allies. All the oil lying to the south requires a vigorous front defense (offense?)

US relations with south Iraq are strange and often contradictory. Although a long-term US ally and the main US military base in the area, the US generally detests the near-theocratic regime the Shia’s have put in place, while the Iraqi Shi’as consider the Americans a corrupting influence. Although there is still some gratitude for the US role in their independence and the gifting of Iraq with a big chunk of Arab-speaking Iran, most blame the US for the division of Iraq and continued poor relations with the Republic of Iran: still, surrounded by hostile neighbors, they need the US to stay, so they remain locked in a love-hate embrace of mutual necessity.  And that’s not even bringing up the long, sordid history of Iraqis helping Iranian rebels against the US while their government pretended not to know about it and the US pretended they didn’t know they knew so they wouldn’t have to militarily occupy Iraq.

There is more respect for Iran, in spite of their long history of bloody struggle. The first Prime Minister of post-occupation Iran at least genuinely believed in democracy, and although he often ascended to soaring heights in denouncing the US, he didn’t support terrorism or push for avenging the losses of the war, instead doing his best to establish democratic institutions and build up the economy. Unfortunately, he didn’t live very long, and the current Prime Minister of Iran has been using cozying up to various extremist elements in attempts to increase his political power and keep control over his office. There have been various “incidents” of Iranian violating the autonomous Kurdish zone, testing US resolve to defend the area, whose inhabitants, he claims, yearn for full reincorporation with Iran. This will probably not end well (see below). Still, Iran isn’t allied to any of the US’s enemies, and actually cooperates with it in helping keep Sunni fanatics firmly squished, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In 2018 Turkey, under a fascistic-Islamicist regime combining the worst elements of OTLs Turkish leader and his chief opponents, is steadily moving away from the US and contemplating a Russian alliance of convenience. The US’s lack of cooperation in suppressing the latest Kurd uprising is not helping at all. But then the US has too many years invested in protecting the “Kurdish security zones” to allow Turkey to bomb and cross the border in pursuit of terrorist groups.

Israel temporarily suffered from a Ghandi-type problem, with a peaceful protest movement dedicated to seek martyrdom while being strictly non-violent focusing much hostile attention on the country. Unfortunately, aside from making the Israelis look bad, the movement didn’t yield much in the way of results, since the concessions the Israelis were willing to make always stopped well short of what most Palestinians would find acceptable, and the men of blood eventually returned to prominence, much to Israeli relief.

With Israel not behaving worse than OTL (indeed, generally less brutally: Rabin avoiding assassination had some positive results, although not enough to generate an independent Palestine, even a rump one), the US-Israeli relationship remains strong: with Islamic terrorism being much more broadly seen as an existential threat, harsh Israeli measures to defend themselves are seen in a more positive light, and the US and European left are rather less critical. One difference is that in this world Israel is open about the fact it has a nuclear arsenal: indeed, it has made quite clear its ability to devastate the middle east if attacked.

Saudis still Saudis. House of Saud still a bag of assholes.

China is not a happy camper. It’s a much better armed country than OTL, but overall it lags behind our China in GDP. Territorial expansion and increased influence by means fair or foul abroad have not compensated for an end to “most favorable” trade status with the US and elsewhere in the wake of the south China sea war, and the military buildups since the early nineties have also been a drag on the economy. Efforts to grow the internal market and create the educational system necessary for a genuine high-tech superpower have lagged (not to mention many Party men have questioned the value of creating a vast new population of highly educated young people when it is unclear if there will be appropriate jobs for them). The economy is expanding, but the true boom times of the To Get Rich is Glorious days seem to have departed, perhaps not to return. Japan, India and Russia have joined forces to contain further Chinese expansion, a goal pursued by the US as well, although separately: many Chinese greatly fear a triple anti-Chinese alliance may become a quadruple one, and consider a reconciliation with the US a top priority, seeing Volodin an excellent scare-figure than can drawn Washington and Beijing together. (And then there are hardliners who see the way forward in further expansion, in bringing the economy of Asia as a whole under Chinese dominance, and wiping the Japanese off the face of the earth. Fortunately, unlike Russia – or OTL China, for that matter – China is still run by elite consensus rather than one-man rule).

China is looking for allies abroad, in Asia and elsewhere, benefitting from fear of Russia and hostility to US power, and as OTL is increasingly influential in Africa. China is also trying to detatch India from its Russian and Japanese allies, suggesting a “united continental Asia” and investing in the Indian economy: the Indians are being a bit coy (they don’t trust the Chinese. Very few nations trust any former enemies in this world), and China letting India know by back channels that it is no longer supporting Maoist rebels in India probably has done more harm than good (“look, let’s be friends! I’ve even stopped punching you in the groin!”)

Volodin would also like an alliance with the US, or at least an apocalyptic US-Chinese war he can stay out of. He suffers from conflicting goals: while he very much wants to liberate eastern Siberia from the Chinese, any genuine cooperation with the US is badly hampered by his monomaniacal determination to rebuild Russia into a new USSR, and eventually regaining the Ukraine isn’t really negotiable. But he’s willing to lie a lot in the short and medium term. He’s unfortunately also a bit of a megalomaniac, all too fond of his role as a master manipulator and fond of Brilliant Plots while seemingly incapable of grasping the concept of blowback. Unfortunately, he really is a master manipulator, so his plots span the globe and when things inevitably blow up in his face at some point, it might take everyone else out as well.

The Japanese relationship with the US is in bad shape still, and there is no pan-pacific trade alliance to be had, although wartime trade and technology embargoes have been relaxed. Relationships remain prickly, and any politician who allowed Japanese business and capital full access to US assets (buying up parts of New York, say) still would be in danger of being crucified by the political opposition. Japan is not allowed to have any space or ICMB capacity, but it has been getting around that by hiring Russian rockets to put satellites, etc. in space, and that Japan retains “bomb in the basement” or even actual functioning warheads remains widely suspected. The economy is not much worse than OTL, indeed stronger in some fields (loss of access to a lot of US tech and some European stuff has led Japan to develop high-tech manufacturing capacities it lacks OTL, for one thing, and it has been getting around limitations on its military by focusing on maximal bang for the buck tech), but the population crunch remains severe in spite all sorts of intrusive legal strategies to increase reproduction (the Bachelor and Bachelorette Taxes are only one of the best known), given that Japan is even more allergic to the notion of dirty foreigners polluting their soil than OTL.

With concerns about security, terrorism, and scary brown people, it is unsurprising that right-wing wackery is doing even better than OTL, although the existence of a genuine Fascist International of sorts (these people network)is scary enough that right-wingers generally try to put a bit of distance between themselves and out-and-out Nazis, although their policies may not greatly differ. As OTL, there is fascist activity in Eastern Europe and things have come to a head with the election of an actual fascist in Italy, although he lacks the votes in Parliament to put through much of his program (anti-Fascist activity OTOH is strong in the UK and France, where it is generally felt that this is an existential crisis for the very existence of any real unified “Europe”). Fascistic groups haven’t been very successful politically in Germany, but are prominent in terrorist acts, blackmail, etc. (There is some doubts about letting the Federation of Croatia and Bosnia into the EU [2]: sure, all that shouting about “fascists” on the part of the Serbs and their Russian sponsors is propaganda, but there have been some … political peculiarities).

Brazil and the Philippines are not run by right-wing freaks in this world (although Brazil’s left-wing government is showing some disturbingly authoritarian tendencies) but Bolivia, Argentina and Turkey are. Japan has it’s neo-fascists, but the corporations which are the real rulers of modern Japan keep them on a fairly tight leash and don’t let them run the show. Then there’s the Neo-Boer revolt in South Africa, which claims it is exercising its right to self-determination and carving out a homeland for itself. Although supported by right-wing white groups worldwide, there is some sympathy for it, with the South African government having begun to drift into Mugabwe-ish large scale dispossession of white farmers and land owners before the rebellion broke out: admittedly, it would help their case if they weren’t trying so hard to take over important gold and diamond mines and so darn enthusiastic about expelling blacks from their “national” territory.

Not that leftist terrorism isn’t an issue. The Naxalites in India, various extremist anti-capitalist groups in Europe, and then there’s the rather horrible Shining Path regime in Peru: as support drops from an increasingly embarrassed China, the regime is going on a bunker-building binge in preparation for a Capitalist Invasion, and parts of the Andes are beginning to resemble late communist Albania * 10. Volodin wants to recreate the old Soviet empire and is an admirer of Stalin, but he’s an economic pragmatist (Not that he isn’t happy to send off enemies to build roads through the Siberian Taiga) and supports terrorists left and right as convenient. The rash of anti-capitalist anarcho-terrorism starting in the US in 2011 only lasted for a couple years before largely dying out, although a few bankers got blown to bits.

The most hated left-wing terrorists are, however, eco- terrorists: although the US and USSR came within inches of nuking each other off the face of the earth, and millions died in the Russian-Chinese war, nothing had been as existentially terrifying as the modified Ebola plague of 2000, which has left people with a deep paranoia about disease in general and a deep hatred of anything resemble Deep Green philosophy. The much harder time environmentalists have in this world has, as these things do, radicalized many, and a new crop of radical green terrorists are springing up among those too young to really remember the terror of ’00. 

Islamic terrorism as a source of paranoia remains evergreen, and with an Islamicist attack on the US (with a frickin’ atomic weapon, to boot) as recently as 2007 [3] and the Sunni North Iraqi regime going Wacky Religious in 2012, it is currently the main paranoia-generator in the western world (admittedly rather more justified paranoia than OTL), although that may change if eco-terrorists get into the swing of it again. Low-level attacks continue, and the French only recently stopped a plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower. (There have also been attacks against the Chinese and the Russians, but such things are never mentioned on Chinese and Russian TV or radio or internets). After the annihilation of the Pakistani nuclear program, atomic capacity at least for now seems out of Islamicist hands, but people are still fearful of the possibility of biological attack. Afghanistan has descended into chaos again, and some are calling for an invasion of north Iraq before it does “something”, but with the Saharan crisis heating up, the US government really doesn’t want any extra commitments.

Third world chaos and instability is worse than OTL, not at all helped by the destabilizing effects of the plague, which hit third world countries lacking a developed medical system particularly hard: the Congo, Burma/Myanmar, and Zimbabwe pretty much fell to pieces, while other countries suffered from civil wars, revolts, and turns to dictatorship they did not OTL. Islamicist activity spiked, especially in the Sahel, where the Islamic Union grew from a parasite preying on the ruin of Mali to a universalist Jihadi state with ambitions to unify all Islamic north Africa under its flag, and now fully commanding the attention of military expeditionary forces from Europe, Nigeria, and now the USA.

The world economy as a whole is worse off than OTL, much of the Neo-Liberal paradigm of the post-Soviet era OTL, the gospel of open borders and globalization, having run hard into international conflict and more severe terrorist activity. Trade and technology transfers between major powers, or at least between China, Japan, Russia, and much of the Islamic world, is heavily hampered by legal barriers, and international travel is even more troublesome for people coming to and fro the US OTL, and a lot more so for other countries which OTL still offer a relatively relaxed airport regime. There has been something of a Keynsian multiplier effect from non-OTL military buildups and the development of new technologies.

 The Ebola Plague has had both negative and positive effects on the development of biotech. The need for developing more effective defenses against biological attack (and in some places, developing more effective biological attacks: China’s probably going to end up overrun by zombies or something) has driven heavy investment in genetic engineering, new antibiotics, gene therapy, etc., but it has also made government control and supervision much more onerous. No biotech companies are allowed the sort of freedom that the Horizon Corporation had to develop the bioweapon used by the eco-terrorists. All bio-tech companies are either run by governments or as “close partnerships” with the government, and even the US embeds spies within any company it does not fully control as a matter of course. Many entrepreneurs that otherwise might go into the biotech field are discouraged by the notion of the government constantly breathing down their necks.

Government health agencies are more influential, with the CDC being a much more muscular organization while the World Health Organization is also a lot beefier – if, like every other international organization, hampered by the atmosphere of distrust between the major powers aside from the US and Europe.  (There are of course, this being the Clancy-verse, people within both organization plotting to use these enhanced powers for sinister purposes: fortunately, they remain currently fairly ineffectual).

Remember, people who aren’t vaccinating are helping the terrorists!

One might say the world is globally more divided but also in some places more regionally united. The US and Europe are more closely tied in their ongoing struggle against various and multiple threats. Europe is more united than OTL, out of fear and hostility towards Russia and the Middle East if not for better reasons. It has responded to US pressure to build up its own military capacity, and a joint EU army, a “Eurocorps”, if you will, is a reality. France has been particularly active abroad, although some accuse it of being more concerned with strengthening its own influence in Africa than in cooperation with other European states for the good of all. There has been no Brexit, although British politicians still grumble about the sinister designs of Brussels and banana shape regulations.

Britain is currently under the rule of King Andrew, next in the line of succession to Charles, who was assassinated along with his wife and child in 1981. Under extra stress (like everyone else in this TL) Queen Elizabeth II passed away at the age of 90.

Northern Ireland suffered from a massive uptick in the Troubles following the assassination aforementioned and the UK response. Eventually it was discovered that the hard-Marxist ULA, not the IRA, was behind the killing, but the British were in too deep at that point to make peace with the IRA. The ULA was largely wiped out, (and Libya got bombed earlier than OTL), but the Soviets made hay keeping the conflict going and what was left of the IRA was radicalized. The political conflict spread to the US as “pro-IRA” Irish-descended politicians were attacked opportunistically (it did Teddy Kennedy’s career no good at all), and terrorist bombings and murders far beyond Ireland. Tony Blair never ascended to the Prime Minister position, having ascended explosively to the roof of a Parliament washroom in 1992. Today the IRA is largely a spent force, at the cost of billions of pounds, ten thousand more Troubles-related deaths, violent political troubles in Eire,  and a quarter of a million Catholic refugees in said country still too afraid to come home.

Latin America suffers from both right and left wing dictators and rebels, not to mention eco-terrorists in the Central American and Amazon basin jungles. The US works to keep foreign influence out of its back yard as much as possible, although China has managed to establish a new foothold in Central America. Some US nationalists call for a US annexation of vital areas. Mexico is very much under US hegemony, it’s rather poor performance in helping the US keep immigrants, terrorists, and drug dealers from leaking across the border having led to an effective US occupation of the northern borderlands. This has in some ways benefitted the Mexican government – the current president of Mexico’s effort to break the drug rings, backed by the US military, has had considerable success – but also undermined it, as many see Mexican sovereignty being sold down the river, and the rights of individual Mexican disregarded as the War on Drugs/Crime/Terror/Whatever racks up every increasing numbers of innocent bystanders. The Zapatistas are on the rise again, although the US is helping with that, too…

Nuclear weapons aren’t what they used to be, some say. The nuclear taboo has been broken multiple times at this point, and they have been used aggressively, if in limited numbers, in several conflicts. Nuclear defense systems have become fairly effective: between massive lasers, anti-missile missiles, and a growing arsenal of orbital weapons, intercepting a nuclear missile has become fairly easy, and the enemy in a conflict having atomic weapons is no longer sufficient as a deterrent. The thing is that people have been essentially been playing nuclear chicken: no power has good enough anti-missile tech to stop a genuinely all-out attack from another major power [4], especially considering things like nuclear stealth bombers, short-range attacks from nuclear subs (the US, Russia, and China all have ultra-stealthy “chain drive” subs by now), and low altitude “cruise missiles”). The trouble is that if one side makes an all-out attack, so many people are going to die regardless that there’s no point in not going for all out retaliation: MAD comes back into play. So far, conflicts have remained below the “existential fail’ degree of crisis – so far. But chemical, biological, and tactical nukes (say, cannon-fired atomic weapons or atomic mines) are now on the table, so to speak (the Russians finally stopped the Chinese advance by creating a barrier of chemical and radiological death from Mongolia to Lake Baikal, poisoning their own land for the next hundred years and seriously unnerving Chinese troops).

Things remain tense along the crumbling edges of Eastern Europe. What with wars and plague and terrorism, the expansion of NATO and the EU were slowed compared to OTL, and since Volodin came to power, he’s used every dirty trick in the book plus blunt downright threats to stop any further approach to Russia’s borders. He’s been unable to prevent the US from making a separate alliance with the Ukraine, and while no US troops are threatening Russia from Ukraine proper, the Ukrainians are armed with a lot of shiny new US equipment, and the massive US buildup in eastern Poland is ready to move into Ukraine to counter a Russian invasion as well as repel any Russian attacks on Poland. Since outright military confrontation is likely to end badly, the Ukraine seethes with Russian agents trying to destabilize the country and putting pro-Russian stooges in power.

There are a few bright spots in this world, compared to OTL. A gene or two diverged from OTL, and the second Kim actually came to think of the interests of his people ahead of the interests of the Kim family, and slowly, painfully, but peacefully, Korea moved towards reunion in the later 90s and early 2000s. Korea is still struggling in 2018 with the costs of bringing North Korea “up to code”, not helped by the fact that nearly 50% of North Koreans moved south, and only by heavy bribery was the South able to keep the rest of them at home. The north-south cultural and prejudice divide is rather worse than the German “Ossie-Wessie” divide, and each side proclaims itself More Korean than You. Still, it remains a functional nation, and both groups find some unity in hating on the Japanese and making suspicious noises towards the Chinese, whose efforts to bring them into some sort of East Asian Happy Shiny Alliance are looked upon with considerable suspicion after their attacks on the US and Russia. The Yalu is increasingly fortified, and some joke the DMZ hasn’t gone away, it’s just moved north.

Other places doing better than OTL are Yemen, which has avoided civil war, Venezuela, which is doing better than Colombia nowadays, Syria, which had a less bad civil war, and Somalia, which has a unified and non-awful government in the north, and a functional if unpleasantly Islamicist government in the south, rather than a warlordy mess.

Killing John Paul II may have taken the heart out of some Poles, but did nothing to arrest the decay of the USSR. It did lead to a rather different succession of Popes, and without the long reign of John Paul II, the Catholic Church is a somewhat more liberal institution OTL: the current Pope is pondering a papal bull making married priests acceptable, as a part of getting rid of all those embarrassing pederasts in the church. (Female priests? Well, maybe in the next century).

The modern US is angry, paranoid and heavily armed. It’s poorer than OTL, as is the world as a whole after the wars and disasters of the last three decades.  Islamophobia is entirely mainstream, as is an existential outlook on the War On Terror, which is so obviously ongoing it doesn’t really have an official name. Religious apocalypticism is bubbling, and the Left Behind movies had much bigger budgets.  Curiously, a good social safety net is much less politically controversial in spite of all the right-wing elements of society, since after nuclear bombings and plagues people really feel the need for good healthcare and emergency services run by people who are actually competent rather than loyal political stooges. (There still are politicians railing that socialized healthcare is the road to Stalinism, of course).

The draft is back, and total military forces are close to three million, although at least this provides employment. Having served in "Eye-ran" is the common experience and bond of a generation of Americans. Sale of germicidal sprays and toxic cleaning chemicals are up, up, and the Japanese habit of wearing a face mask when ill has caught on in the US and almost worldwide, although it has been long enough since the Ebola “Red Death” that people aren’t much at risk of being violently assaulted for sneezing on other people. 

As mentioned, there is a growing military presence in space driven by these issues, and single stage to orbit is an everyday workhorse of the US militarized space program rather than the struggling brainchild of a brilliant techbro. The US has a genuine spaceplane, there are Shining Pebbles and sat-killer satellites waiting for the word in orbit, and bigass laser weapons aplenty. (Reagan failed to make it past one term, having health problems relating from a more serious injury during his assassination attempt. His “Star Wars” program is now seen as prophetic and visionary rather than pop cultural goofy.)

What with the Japanese collapsing the US stock market in ’95, the Chinese electronically running circles around the US navy in ’09, and a goddamn Romanian hacker making off with top secret government files in ’14, paranoia about computer security is extreme. The Internet is filled with walls and barriers and gates by our world’s standards, and is hardly neutral. Identity theft by terrorist agents is a big concern and the development of Social Media has been slowed by security concerns as well as the generally poorer economy. The fact that this may have helped keep struggling democracy afloat a bit longer in the US and elsewhere is entirely unintentional, and some authoritarian types would be kicking themselves if they knew how useful such services as Facebook could be.

The US political situation is…tense. The 2016 election was a heated one, with the Democrats for the first time in a long time putting up a genuinely left-wing candidate. Since the war with Japan over two decades ago the economy had swung violently up and down, down more often than up, and the stock market had seen so many disastrous plunges that people hardly paid attention to them anymore. (Economic volatility has made banks and financial institutions rather more cautious than OTL, and the government has been similarly concerned about keeping any dubious financial bubbles or stock market jerry rigs from being constructed. This has helped, but nuclear attacks, wars and plagues do not respond well to government regulators). OTOH, an increasing share of new earnings and productivity taken by the top 10-1%, a trend beginning in the 1970s, continued as OTL. The time when steady economic growth and a better life for your children were guaranteed to many seemed to be receding into an increasingly remote past. Many called for a new New Deal, a genuine transformation of the economy.

OTOH, fear and loathing of Commies remained strong, and the Reagan Boom had even more of a rosy aura over it than OTL, with the 1990s boom cut short by the war with Japan and subsequent events. The other candidate stood foresquare for capitalism, and while he was a terrible racist dick even by the somewhat grim standards of this world, and often espoused frankly fascist ideas, he was favored to win. Until evidence came to light that his campaign was receiving, through various shell companies, aid from the Russians, both financial and disinformation campaigns against his opponent.

In this world, being backed by the Russians was not forgivable, and although it was a narrow loss, he lost, and the Angry Old Socialist came to the White House. Since his inauguration things have become increasingly explosive. The conservatives in Congress and Senate have tried to block him at every turn, while he has used Presidential executive orders, signing statements, out-of-session appointments and other legally dubious maneuvers to pass his radical (well, not really, but that’s the reaction) agenda. Meanwhile, on the right many howl about a presidential dictatorship, call for the annulment of the election, and claim the entire Russian connection was actually an elaborate fraud.

They are in fact correct.

President Volodin is frustrated with the stalling of his “rebuild the USSR program”, and wants the US good and distracted. He threw his support behind the right-wing candidate without his ever knowing who was actually supporting him (he was kinda thick) precisely because Volodin wanted him to lose.

His analysts tell him that the Angry Old Socialist being elected was a good deal likelier to bring about severe social unrest. Possibly even a US civil war, although that wouldn’t be clear until the fall elections.

The Ukraine shall be Russian.

[1] The experience rendered the US so sick of occupation duties that US forces sent into Afghanistan in 2001 were replaced by whatever allied forces the US could scrape up as quickly as possible.

 [2] For various reasons, the Serbs didn’t do as well in this version of the Yugoslav civil war, but the Bosnians had an even worse time and ended having to accept a subordinate role to the Croats for sheer survival. Major powers kept getting distracted in the 90s.

[3] Fortunately with few casualties, although millions believe they will die early from radiation, in spite of government assurances otherwise.

 [4] The Chinese stacked the odds in their favor before the war of ’02 by carrying out an elaborate disinformation campaign beforehand to convince the USSR they had a lot more new-model (solid fueled, quick launch) ICBMs than they had (lots of fake launch sites and silos, trucking around empty shells of missiles, etc) to convince them their ABM system would not be enough to prevent massive damage in case of a nuclear exchange.

 

 



Related content
Comments: 12

catsmate [2022-03-02 11:31:02 +0000 UTC]

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catsmate [2022-03-02 11:28:52 +0000 UTC]

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LelouchOfTheBarBrawl [2021-10-18 19:51:07 +0000 UTC]

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LJB92 [2019-02-24 06:40:27 +0000 UTC]

What's up with Cyprus?

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adamnesico [2019-01-06 23:43:20 +0000 UTC]

I should post this in ur afrocentric scenario but I dont know if this has asystem for signal the comments in old posts so...

As you liked to make maps about alternate history books, would you do a map about the Lion's Blood? I know that is an ASB black supremacyst bullshit, but still a ucronic novel.

Or the scenario is too similar to your afrocentric scenary (wich is far more realist than that stupid novel).

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GDSPatheII [2018-12-22 23:03:12 +0000 UTC]

So does Jack Ryan before or after the Red October incident?

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Jaywell96 In reply to GDSPatheII [2023-12-25 07:09:05 +0000 UTC]

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KuboCaskett [2018-12-15 03:51:16 +0000 UTC]

What's up with the double cross symbols to indicate far-right terrorism?

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QuantumBranching In reply to KuboCaskett [2018-12-15 09:35:04 +0000 UTC]

www.magpie.ae/event/great-dict…

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paireon In reply to QuantumBranching [2018-12-17 18:15:30 +0000 UTC]

HA! I knew it!! (And posted about it, but it seems it was lost in the reupload. Oh well, such is life...)

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OttoVonSuds [2018-12-11 21:07:30 +0000 UTC]

This is GREAT.

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AbleArcher1928 [2018-12-11 18:09:33 +0000 UTC]

Looks like Robert D. Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy" come to life.

Revanchists galore!

I'll take it that Gary Hart beat George Bush in 1984 then.

By the way, what is President Wellstone's foreign policy like?

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