The End of the American Century: 2025 - 2051
The Interstellar Age, S01E01
Earth’s First World War ended with an armistice.
In 1918, the Central Powers - the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires - exhausted after four years of total war, sued for peace. The Entente Powers - by then consisting chiefly of the British and French Empires, and the United States - tantalizingly close to total victory, but nearly as exhausted, accepted.
The peace treaties signed the following year ended the war, but solved few of the issues that had started it. People would call the unprecedentedly devastating conflict “The War to End All Wars,” the name more a plea than a belief. Some saw things more clearly. After the treaty was signed, the supreme commander of the Entente armies, Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, said “This is not peace. It is a twenty-year armistice.”
Foch was right on the money. The treaty, the alliances, and the international organizations created in the aftermath of the First World War utterly failed to prevent the outbreak of another conflict in 1939 - one that would prove to be far more devastating and bloody than its predecessor, or any other war in history up to that point.
Earth’s Second World War ended with the destruction of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The victory of the United Nations - chiefly the United States of America, the British Empire, and the Russian-dominated Soviet Union - over these genocidal neo-imperialist powers in 1945 was so total, that even learned men dared to hope that this time, things might be different. This time, perhaps, a lasting peace could be forged.
But while peace and cooperation was the genuine hope of the United States, which by then had emerged as the world’s foremost military and economic power, other powers were less convinced. Their British and French allies were uneven in their commitment to decolonization, another fervent American desire; the French in particular would fight a number of bloody local conflicts in a vain effort to cling to their collapsing empire.
More importantly, peace was not a dream the Soviet Union shared. By 1949, if not earlier, the USSR and the USA were locked in a so-called Cold War, vying with one another in the political and economic realms to determine which ideology - communism or liberal-democratic capitalism - would dominate the world. While the superpowers’ mutual possession of nuclear weapons largely prevented direct military confrontation, numerous “proxy wars” flared, in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and dozens of other places.
Earth’s Cold War ended with collapse.
After decades of low-level conflict and several terrifying nuclear near-misses, the internal and external strain finally proved too much for the strong but brittle totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. Its European empire of communist satellite states crumbled in 1989, and the USSR itself fell apart following a failed military coup in 1991.
The sudden Soviet collapse left the United States with no credible rival. The rules-based international order the Americans and their allies in NATO had been building since 1945 - free trade, freedom of navigation, international law, and protection of sovereignty, all backed up by US military and economic might - now expanded to cover the whole of the world.
Small local wars still erupted throughout the 1990’s - some involving the United States directly - but the era of horrifically destructive great-power conflict seemed to be over. Some theorized about the coming “end of history,” in which liberal democracy might spread across the globe, ensuring the end of violent competition between states for all time.
As before, though, these proved mere pleas; and as before, they went unanswered. The unipolar American world barely survived the turn of the millennium. A number of factors contributed to the surprising decline in relative American power: their poorly planned war in Iraq from 2003 - 2015; the 2008 financial crisis; incoherent foreign policies articulated by successive presidential administrations, from 2004 - 2028; the COVID-19 pandemic, and the economic, social, and domestic political consequences it brought; and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Over this same period, the relative economic and military power of the People’s Republic of China was increasing. The Chinese Communist Party had survived the collapse of their Soviet comrades/rivals through a surprising combination of ruthless crackdowns on domestic dissent and a liberalization of their economy. Early on in the latter process, many Western observers hoped that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization, as it had in Europe and elsewhere over the previous two centuries.
By the dawn of the 2020’s, those hopes had been decisively dashed. The CCP under Xi Jinping proved committed to doubling down on totalitarianism, suppressing all political dissent, using new technologies to engineer social conformity, and pursuing an aggressive and revanchist foreign policy.
Hopes that the post-Soviet Russian Federation would embrace democracy and become a responsible stakeholder in the international order proved similarly unfounded. The election of Vladimir Putin in 2000 presaged an eventual return to authoritarianism and a revisionist and belligerent foreign policy: Russia engaged in a brutal counterinsurgency in Chechnya until 2009, invaded Georgia in 2008, and launched an unconventional war against Ukraine in 2014, seizing the Crimea and stoking a civil war in the country’s Russian-speaking eastern regions.
Both Russia and China actively sought to encourage American and broader Western decline during this period by engaging in information operations to undermine Western unity, cultural and political institutions, and international engagement. Notably, Russia attempted to influence several US and European elections, as well as supporting far-right political parties and social movements. China, on the other hand, sought to increase support for far-left political and cultural movements in the West, and to subtly influence Western culture through business relationships, as well as attempting to influence elections in Australia and other Western-leaning Southeast Asian countries.
In the field of international relations, the first stage of this process culminated in two conflicts: the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, beginning in 2022; and the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis in 2029, which culminated in the First Sino-American War.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was prompted by a perceived weakness in Western and US foreign policy, and a belief on the part of President Putin that the time had come to capitalize on two decades of efforts to undermine Western unity. The Russians also believed that their forces would easily sweep aside the Ukrainian military as they had in Crimea in 2014, and that the Ukrainian people would welcome the return of Russian rule, despite the centuries of oppression and occasional genocide they had suffered under the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
All these assumptions proved false. Putin’s gamble backfired, increasing Western unity, however temporarily - while the Ukrainian military proved to have made significant advancements since 2014, and the Ukrainian people had no interest in submitting to Russian rule. Provided with Western weapons and ammunition, Ukraine mounted a surprisingly skillful and determined defense, frustrating Russian hopes for a quick victory, and forcing the war into a protracted, bloody, attritional struggle.
The Russo-Ukrainian War ended with an armistice in 2026, which against all pre-war projections preserved Ukrainian sovereignty. But as in 1919, this armistice did not resolve the underlying issues. Russia, humbled by its failure to conquer Ukraine, remained uninterested in liberalization, and committed to overturning the US-led international order - though now, it would do so largely as the junior partner in an alliance with China.
The PRC made its own attempt to upend the international order by force at the end of the 2020’s. Taiwan had long been a thorn in the side of the PRC; the island nation had been independent from China since 1949, and democratic since the 1990’s. Part of the CCP’s iron-fisted hold over its population rested on the assertion that the Chinese as a people and a culture were unsuited to democracy, and furthermore, that democracy in general inevitably led to chaos and dissolution.
Taiwan was a living refutation of those arguments: a thriving, vibrant, Chinese democracy just a hundred miles from the PRC’s coast. Its mere existence was a threat to Communist power.
Two presidential elections in 2028 were the immediate triggers for war. In that year, Taiwan elected an openly separatist candidate, prepared to formally assert the island’s permanent independence from China for the first time; while yet another bitterly contested US federal election brought yet another administration openly skeptical of foreign entanglements into office. On the domestic front, China faced looming economic and demographic crises. The combination of all these factors led the CCP to determine that the balance of relative power was as good as it was likely to get.
Like Russia’s in Ukraine, this gamble failed, with disastrous short-term consequences for China. However, the long-term effects on the United States and the Western bloc were even more ruinous.
After months of military posturing and escalating threats, the Fourth Taiwan Strait crisis began when the PLA Navy “quarantined” the island nation, ostensibly to stop American, Japanese, and Australian arms deliveries which China claimed were intended for offensive purposes. In reality, the blockade was an attempt to starve Taiwan into submission, force the resignation of its separatist presidential administration, sever its ties with the United States, and put it on a path to “reunification” with the PRC.
The United States and its allies responded by calling the blockade illegal, and attempting to run through it with unarmed, neutral-flagged ships carrying only food and medical supplies. PLAN ships stopped and seized several of these vessels, claiming to find hidden weapons stockpiles aboard. Western commentators insisted the evidence of these weapons provided by the PLA was AI-generated; nevertheless, the PLA warned that any future attempts to breach the quarantine would be met with force.
In response, Taiwan’s allies attempted a repeat of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift, dropping supplies onto the island nation. Since the entire country could not be supplied in this way, many observers saw the airlift as primarily an attempt to call the PLA’s bluff. If so, it was a failure. The PLA Air Force’s blockade squadrons began claiming that the unarmed cargo planes were attempting to ram their fighter planes, and “responded” by shooting them down.
The situation quickly escalated from there; claiming they had already been attacked, the PLAN and PLAAF launched a full-scale attack on the USN ships in the region. Despite being prepared for the attack, the USN took heavy losses, including two of its newest class of aircraft carriers, the Gerald R. Ford and the John F. Kennedy, to relatively cheap Chinese missiles and drones. The US Navy’s retreat from the South China Sea paved the way for a planned PLA invasion of Taiwan.
This invasion, too, proved to be a disaster. US and allied air assets continued to battle with the PLAAF in the skies throughout the region, preventing them from directly interdicting the Chinese amphibious force. However, the PLAAF was itself too occupied with the air battle to provide close support to their naval and ground forces, leaving sea and land-based weapons to attempt to suppress the Taiwanese defenses.
In a reversal of the humiliating USN defeat of the previous month, the PLAN’s invasion fleet suffered devastating losses as it crossed the Taiwan Strait - once again, primarily to cheap air and sea drones, and even to man-portable missiles as they closed in on the Taiwanese shore. Nonetheless, the PLA were able to establish several small beachheads around Tainan and Kaohsiung.
Attempts to reinforce and resupply the beachheads by sea suffered heavy losses, as the mobile, numerous, and low-cost anti-ship weapons targeting them proved impossible to suppress without air supremacy. Similarly, attempts to resupply by air were blasted out of the sky by planes and missiles based in Taiwan, Japan, and Guam. The beachheads soon began to run low on ammunition, allowing the Taiwanese Army to overrun and destroy them in turn. Finally, the beachhead at Tainan surrendered rather than face destruction, a humiliating defeat for the PLA.
The decisive failure of the amphibious attack left the combatants facing a stalemate. The USN’s Fifth Fleet had been effectively destroyed; the Americans could not simply feed more extremely expensive fleet assets into the theater to be sunk, without significant upgrades to their capabilities. Without control of the sea, large-scale allied troop deployments to Taiwan would not be possible, and it was clear that an invasion of mainland China would only entangle the allies in an unwinnable quagmire.
On the other hand, the PLAN’s limited sealift capacity had been virtually annihilated in the failed attempts to reinforce the amphibious beachheads. Losses among the PLAN warships attempting to maintain the blockade after the shooting war began were similarly heavy. It would take years to rebuild the sealift and naval forces necessary to attempt another invasion of the island, while it was doubtful a missile-based exclusion zone blockade would be sufficient to force Taiwan’s surrender, particularly with the island’s morale soaring after defeating the invasion forces.
Only one choice remained open to the combatants: continue the attritional air war, firing medium and long-range missiles at one another, all the while building up their military-industrial bases for a massive, but likely inconclusive, second confrontation - all while hoping to avoid escalation to a nuclear apocalypse - or, conclude an armistice that effectively restored the status quo ante bellum, allowing them to lick their wounds, both literal and reputational.
They chose the armistice. A global conflagration was averted, without resolving any of the underlying issues which had led to the clash. Both the United States and the PRC had been humiliated - though as the still-premiere world power, the blow to US military prestige was the more severe, as were the domestic political consequences.
The new presidential administration, while it had honored its commitments to defend Taiwan, saw in the debacle no reason to revise its pre-election skepticism of international engagement. What the inconclusive war demanded was a massive reorganization of US naval power, and a redoubling of political efforts to build and maintain alliances against the PRC. Instead, the new president preferred to call the war a Pyrrhic victory, and turn inward.
This American withdrawal convinced the Chinese, not without merit, that despite the clear defeat of their invasion, the long-term strategic picture remained positive - provided that the coming demographic and economic catastrophes could be avoided. A prospect that the failed war had, paradoxically, made more likely; suddenly, the political will existed on the Politburo to make sweeping changes that would never have been countenanced by the Xi-led party orthodoxy of the 2020’s. But with Xi ousted after the failed invasion, things were about to change in Communist China - and the effects would be felt around the world for decades to come.
The Sino-American War of 2029 capped off a decade of diplomatic, cultural, economic, and political chaos. The dawn of the next decade saw a world far less safe, secure, and happy than it had been ten years earlier. The West, in particular, had suffered a loss of cohesion, wealth, and faith, and seemed poised to slide further into decay in the 2030’s.
One of the few sectors which gave some cause for hope - in certain quarters, at least - was technology. A new crop of so-called “transhumanist” firms appeared near the end of the 2020’s, rising corporations seeking to develop biotechnology and cybernetics for a mass market. Several of these firms attracted tens of billions in investment in 2028 & ‘29 alone, and soon began pumping out new proofs of concept that might soon revolutionize humanity’s relationship with technology.
But all was not well on this front for long. Governments in the United States, Europe, and Canada shifted further away from global engagement and trade. At home, skyrocketing tax rates, inflation of regulation, and a persisting culture of moral panic seemed calculated to drive corporate investment away.
The decisive swing came in 2032, when the United States, Canada, and the EU instituted a coordinated series of regulations called collectively the “Transatlantic Defense of Diversity Pact.” These regulations prohibited research into non-life saving genetic engineering and cybernetics technologies, on the grounds that they might be used for neo-eugenic purposes. The pact received uncommon across-the-aisle support from both social progressives and religious conservatives.
As if in response, later in that same year the first post-Xi conference of the Chinese Communist Party announced a series of sweeping changes that effectively re-liberalized the Chinese economy after nearly two decades of tightening control. The CCP would once again welcome foreign investment - in particular, investment in transhuman technologies.
Despite attractive propositions, some corporations remained wary of moving to the still nominally communist state. But two of the largest transhuman corporations in the market would ultimately take the CCP up on their offer: Vancouver’s GeneTech, specializing in genetic enhancement and modification; and Houston’s EnHuman, specializing in cybernetics and nanotechnology.
The deal they had been offered seemed too good to pass up: a tax rate of effectively zero, and complete freedom from regulation. In return, GeneTech and EnHuman would simply provide the PLA with a discounted rate on their products, and develop certain special government contracts at the CCP’s direction.
Free-market-friendly administrations came to power in Canada in 2035 and the United States in 2036, but these proved unwilling to roll back most of the still-popular anti-transhuman regulations instituted by previous governments. Lower corporate tax rates and reduced regulation in other areas were not enough to entice GeneTech and EnHuman back into the Western fold. Freedom from regulation - particularly those governing human testing - was essential, if the firms were to pursue research into their secret next-generation technologies.
Both corporations were, throughout the mid-2030’s, developing a slate of hybrid products - technologies that would be available on the commercial market, with one stated use-case, and in proprietary forms for the CCP and PLA. For example: a new series of technologies pioneered by GeneTech became available on the global mass market starting in 2036. They allowed parents to ask doctors to more accurately screen for, and carefully eliminate, congenital blindness and heart defects, Down’s Syndrome, and any number of other conditions in-utero at relatively low cost.
At the same time, the version of the technology provided to the CCP was rapidly instituted throughout China, and universally applied to all new births without the knowledge or consent of the parents - and it was used not only to eliminate congenital health issues, but traits the CCP considered “contrary to the social good,” such as homosexuality, .
Even more prevalent, and concerning, were the dual-use cybernetics developed by EnHuman. Commercial versions available in foreign markets essentially provided thought-controlled, implantable versions of formerly wearable or handheld technology. CCP versions were designed not only to provide government-sponsored media and monitored communications, but to monitor, track, and eventually, subconsciously alter the behavior of implanted citizens, to bring them more in-line with the party-approved “social good.”
Even the foreign-market versions of these technologies, though lacking the behavioral control components, were intended to serve a dual purpose: to collect intelligence on the users, and to subtly influence them via AI-tailored content delivery. Even seemingly innocuous commercial healthcare technology was designed to collect and transmit genetic information on its users to the CCP, for purposes unknown.
But the late 2030’s were not the late 2010’s. As these products began to come to market, Western observers quickly discovered the hidden protocols in the commercial tech, while whistleblowers from both GeneTech and EnHuman leaked internal documents outlining the functions of the proprietary CCP versions of the technology. A massive backlash against these products followed, with voluntary public divestment and boycotts culminating in the banning of all EnHuman and GeneTech products, and any other transhuman tech from China, in North America and the EU by 2040. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, and much of the African Union followed suit through 2041.
At the same time, however, authoritarian regimes around the world - with a greater degree of control over their domestic information spaces - eagerly rolled these technologies out to largely unsuspecting populations. The governments of Russia, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria, Myanmar, Venezuela, and a number of African and South American states that had become more economically dependent on China in the preceding decades, were keen to take advantage of the social control mechanisms these technologies provided.
As the shadows of the 2040’s lengthened, it became clear that the last two decades of Western domestic turmoil had masked the calcifying of two diametrically opposed power blocs: one based - however imperfectly - upon openness, liberal democracy, and free economies, and the other based upon closed, totalitarian principles, with population control increasingly augmented by state-of-the-art genetic and cybernetic technology.
But the intentions of the China-led bloc—which had become known colloquially as the ‘Authoritarian Axis’— for these new technologies went far beyond social engineering. The military applications of GeneTech and EnHuman’s technologies were revealed in a series of PLA exercises between 2042 and ‘43 that sent shockwaves through the West. In particular, Western intelligence focused on the mind-machine interface technology that appeared to be in use by new PLA mechanized units and Air Force pilots, vastly increasing their reaction times, shrinking decision loops, and enabling direct operator control of entire drone squadrons.
Intelligence on these exercises also indicated that some PLA infantry units had received cybernetic and CRISPR-style genetic enhancements, increasing strength, agility, perception, and pain tolerance. These revelations threw Western commands into a near panic; the implications for any future conflict in which China and its partners possessed these capabilities while the Western alliances did not were patently dire. Furthermore, aggressive Chinese posturing in the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, and along the border with India, suggested that such a conflict might be fast approaching.
These exercises finally prompted the free nations of the world to formalize an alliance that had been coalescing for some time. In 2044, concerned by the increase in PLA military capability and frustrated by the increasing influence of the CCP and its partners over the United Nations, most of the world’s major democracies signed on to the Global Democratic Alliance, a treaty organization designed to counter the Authoritarian Axis.
One of the GDA’s first collective actions was for its member nations to loosen their regulations on genetic and cybernetic enhancement. Fueled by massive government and private investment, these industries expanded rapidly, with the first Western military MMIs entering testing by 2048. Other military-grade cybernetics, enhancing perception, strength, reaction time, intelligence collection, and so on soon followed. These would doubtless prove vital, particularly for pilots and special operators, during the looming war that now seemed increasingly inevitable.
However impressive these advancements were, they could not catch up to a two decade Chinese head start in so short a time. By the end of the 2040’s, the PLA had completely reorganized itself to take full advantage of the mass production of similar or more advanced capabilities, while still possessing the manufacturing capacity to export previous-generation cybertech to its allies, especially Russia, Iran, and Pakistan.
And these Western advancements came with a cost. The odd 2030’s coalition of the progressive left and the religious right re-emerged, battling each advancement and loosening of regulations through political activism, protests, and rioting. Later evidence would show that the CCP covertly influenced and funded this movement throughout the decade, in an effort to slow down Western progress on transhuman technology, with some success.
As the decade drew to a close, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan - armed with their own cybernetically augmented special operations and mechanized units - were all telegraphing aggressive moves against their regional rivals. Meanwhile, with still-nascent mass manufacturing capacity, NATO had been struggling to equip their allies with Western variants of these technologies in an effort to deter aggression against them.
By 2050, Ukraine was heavily armed, possessing one of the largest and best-trained conventional armies in the world - but they were woefully short of cybertechnology. India had continued to toe a neutral line between the West and China, even while clearly leaning toward the former. A large and well-trained army was augmented by India’s nuclear arsenal, but its domestic cybertech industry was virtually non-existent. Of the three threatened nations, only Israel had invested heavily in its domestic cybertech. The IDF was heavily augmented by the time the pre-war crises began.
Simultaneously, the US continued to develop its more conventional weapons capabilities, including directed energy-based offensive and missile defense systems, while they and other NATO countries expanded military recruitment. Western planners only hoped it would not begin until somewhere closer to 2060, in the hope that by then the West would have caught up to their rivals in the areas that mattered.
Unfortunately, the Chinese were well aware of the fact that at the current pace, the West would eventually overtake them. And they had a plan to precipitate the confrontation sooner, while they still had the advantage.
Earth’s Third World War was about to begin - and this one would not end with an armistice.