Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064

by Chris James

  Many ordinary Americans displayed ambivalence regarding international affairs. Nancy Strickland, a thirty-two-year-old police officer in Kansas, wrote to a friend: ‘Sure am glad Maddy’s back for a second term, but what I wanna ask her is how building all those walls to keep the sea out for the next fifty years is gonna help us here, in the middle of a drought? Pete [her partner] says the crops this year are gonna be the worse [sic] in the last ten years.’ Ms Strickland was far from alone: vast swaths of mid-western and southern states had for several years been suffering the lowest rainfall since records began. In 2020, a mere 5.587% of the mainland United States was desert; by 2060, this figure had increased to 14.013%.

  It has bearing on the narrative of the war to mention these issues. In addition to a range of domestic problems, President Coll found herself obliged to provide support to approximately two million American citizens who, unprompted, had travelled to numerous low-lying islands and regions around the world suffering inundation from rising sea levels to aid local populations. At home, millions of US citizens laboured under entirely local concerns, while many more regarded rearmament against a supposed Caliphate threat with the utmost cynicism, a mere ploy by arms manufacturers to improve their financial situation in an economy which remained obstinately stagnant.

  In October 2061, British Prime Minister Napier visited Coll in Washington. This would be their last meeting before the war. Their briefing agenda reveals the order of priorities with interesting candour. Rising sea levels and aid to low-lying countries took up a great deal of their time. The UN’s waning influence in global affairs caused both women concern, as did Somalia’s forthcoming election, which promised a majority would vote to join the Caliphate. Napier attempted to pressure Coll to intercede with a US corporation called NanoTech, which was about to sue the English government for lost profits when it adopted a law banning one of NanoTech’s nano-bot treatments for cancer sufferers.

  Napier’s aide, Crispin Webb, noted in his diary: ‘When they talked about the useless UN, the boss gave the President a history lesson. She asked Coll if she’d heard of the League of Nations. Coll tried to bluff it, but the boss saw the eye-twitch which gives everyone away when they lie. Instead of using it to embarrass the President, the boss just drew a neat comparison with the League of Nations in the 1930s, and the useless UN now. The President gave a little cough and invited the boss to see the garden. I don’t think they mentioned the potential Caliphate military threat at all today.’

  The President and the Prime Minister had much in common. Born only two years apart in the 2000s, each had a lawyer for a husband and both had two children of similar ages. The strength of their cooperation would shortly be tested to destruction.

  Prelude: The View from the East

  I. RISING EMPIRES, WANING EMPIRES

  In her 2047 book, One Hundred Years of Change: The World from 1945 to 2045, the historian Frieda Sauber says: ‘Each empire falls victim finally to the ultimate conceit: a sense that its superiority allows it to inflict its own methods of achievement on the rest of the world. “If only the savages would do things the way we do them, they too could live as well as us!” goes the cry. Thus it was with one of the shortest-lived empires in history: The United States of America. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, when at the height of its power, the US sought to export its brand of restrictive capitalist democracy to the Middle East; to tens of millions of people who had never known it, and the vast majority of whom had shown no material desire to experience it. Worse, the US did so at the point of a very powerful gun. In a few short years, with staggering political incompetence and not a little military overkill, the US succeeded in turning vast swaths of the Middle East implacably against it.’

  She goes on to describe in great depth the machinations of the United States’ two adversaries, Russia and China, and how each methodically undermined whatever changes the US sought to effect beyond its own landmass. But, as with the US overtaking the British Empire a hundred years earlier, informed observers realised that the US had already been eclipsed by China. In the thirty years between 2020 and 2050, the Chinese economy grew 576%, while that of the US expanded a mere 44%. The global economic crisis in the mid-2030s saw Beijing dump trillions of US debt bonds onto international markets, and on 1 January 2038 the Renminbi, or Chinese Yuan, replaced the US Dollar as the currency in which the worldwide price of a barrel of oil was calculated. Chinese corporations expanded deeply into Africa, where they set about relieving hunger and poverty to a degree which the West had singularly failed to do in the preceding decades. Brilliant young minds began to flock to the leading Chinese universities, untroubled by the absence of democracy. Indeed, many returned to the West extolling the virtues of a fairer, managed economy with a stable dictatorship which, unfettered by concerns of losing power at the ballot box, could plan and implement long-term social goals that improved the lot of the bulk of its citizens.

  In The Chinese Miracle, US property mogul Felton Drake summarised the prevailing mood: ‘Stability is the driving force behind sociological progress. What’s the point of changing left-wing or right-wing governments every few years, only so they can undo each other’s policies? The Chinese have shown everyone what can be achieved in a modern society without the need for frequent elections.’ This book and Drake’s high media profile were instrumental in promoting the democracies’ slow but steady extension of the periods between elections.

  Russia, meanwhile, produced a string of progressively thuggish, dictatorial leaders whose pragmatism in both domestic and global affairs was unencumbered by morality. In his book The 2036 Financial Crisis: Winners and Losers, Aiden Horrocks notes that Russian citizens were among the greatest sufferers of their leaders’ venality: while a protected elite enjoyed the revenues from the country’s natural resources in the Arctic, most saw their standard of living drop to levels not seen since the 1930s. Nevertheless, Horrocks said: ‘… with Chinese support, Russia maintained the shrewdest manoeuvring, especially in Middle-Eastern affairs. President Maklakov took great satisfaction from establishing pockets of stability in countries such as Iran, Syria and Iraq, in the process highlighting to the world that America and its allies had lost the little credibility they retained in the region. What will ultimately happen in these countries remains to be seen.’

  Horrocks wrote those words in 2042, the year in which the Caliphate came into existence and these countries, whose names are all but forgotten today, ceased to exist. The Caliphate’s first steps were to sever as many ties to the outside world as possible. For example, as the countries it subsumed disappeared from the map, the Caliphate rejected repeated invitations to join the UN and other global forums. Quickly it established its defining characteristic: isolation. Anyone was free to enter the Caliphate, but few ever found they could leave it. Elaborate digital jamming technology prevented communication for the vast majority of Caliphate subjects, rendering modern civilian mobile communications devices redundant. The Caliphate established secure, encrypted communications for its rapidly expanding network of majlis, or district overseers. For much of the following two decades, the rest of the world relied on stragglers, satellites, and the Russian and Chinese Foreign Ministries.

  David Benn in The Rise of the New Persian Caliphate says of this period: ‘Although it seemed remarkable to citizens of the open societies in the West, the New Persian Caliphate was a product of two highly controlled, centralised cultures - Russia and China - which, it has to be said with worthy intentions, attempted to bring peace and stability to a region of the world that had suffered bloodshed for decades. Their only mistake was to fail to foresee that their child would grow into a bloodthirsty adolescent intent on avenging centuries-old insults, and settling scores in a manner which would make the twentieth century’s World Wars appear honourable affairs.’

  Despite the trace of hyperbole, Benn is correct. As the Caliphate absorbed more territory, contradictory information emerged: the regime undoubtedly used th
e strictest interpretation of the Quran and sharia law, but most ‘provinces’ could be led either by a Sunni or Shia. While the nascent Caliphate instigated isolation from the rest of the world for its peoples, its rulers utilised all means available to get the measure of their enemies. Within a few years, outsiders could only reach the Caliphate’s ports, which acted as the hubs of its exports and imports: mostly oil to China, while in return China supplied the Caliphate with all of the raw materials it could not produce itself.

  In the ten years from 2049 to 2059, some ninety-five investigative journalists from the US and Europe are known to have entered Caliphate territory. Only one ever returned. Ghatis Rafiq was a third-generation English Muslim who worked for The Guardian media outlet. In his 2057 book, Inside the New Caliphate, he describes his six months of adventures, first in Baghdad Province, on to Tehran Province, then finally in Basra Province. Among the drama and narrow escapes, Rafiq makes some salient observations: ‘… then I saw a depth of wisdom in the old village headman’s eyes. Abruptly, he stopped talking about Allah and infidels. He pointed around the barren landscape and said: “Look at those old women mending clothes. Look at the young children, playing. I am their headman, and my first duty is to protect them from violence, if I can. This is what the new order gives us. We abide by their laws, and they give us peace. Only in peace can we gather enough to feed everyone in the village.” It struck me as a remarkably pragmatic view, out of place in this new society which put adherence to sharia law above all else.’

  Here, then, is an important clue to how the Caliphate expanded so rapidly. At the local level, it could guarantee security and safety to villages and towns, dependant only on their acceptance of the Caliphate’s strict laws. While there can be no doubt of the Caliphate’s murderous barbarism to those whom it considered unbelievers, its ability to protect localised populations soon caused a material shift in its image in the Arabic world. Indeed, such did its popularity grow that the assimilation of the last portion of Saudi Arabia merely required the execution of the Saud royal family and a few thousand of their followers, who singularly failed to see which way the wind had begun to blow.

  From the beginning, the only authorised information to come out of the Caliphate emerged from its Ministry of Information, first based in Baghdad then subsequently relocated to Tehran. Through a number of spokesmen, each Caliph made his pronouncements, most of which hold no value to the historian, any more so than Soviet displays of ‘perfect towns’ or Nazi proclamations on the relocation of Jews. Of greater significance are the diplomatic fusillades which the West exchanged with Moscow and Beijing. These contain the material indications of the democracies’ waning authority as China’s ability to project its political power globally increased.

  The American diplomat and political scientist Preston Grant became one of the leading proponents of realpolitik. Born in 2007 into a scion of a wealthy Wisconsin real estate family, he enjoyed a successful political career and served as Secretary of State in Phelps’ Republican Administration from 2051 to 2056. When Democrat Coll took office, she convinced him to remain in a supporting role, as over the years he had travelled to Moscow and Beijing hundreds of times and had become familiar with the leaders of both countries.

  Grant published three books, the last of which underscored with surprising frankness the problems facing the NATO allies. In Night Flight to Beijing, he criticised members of the English government: ‘… [Foreign Secretary] Blackwood was pissed I wouldn’t take him with me. He kept acting like he could make a difference to the negotiations. I told him the English needed to take a back seat on this one. Hell, Chinese corporations owned over half of his country’s energy production, including all of its nuclear plants, controlled nearly all of its banks and hospitals, and with Chinese individuals owned something like three-quarters of all the real estate in London. To the Chinese government, the whole of the British Isles was just another pseudo-vassal state, like Nigeria or Zambia. But Blackwood didn’t get it.’

  Grant understood that the British Isles were in an especially weak position, although to some degree all NATO members employed Chinese hardware and software in their civilian and military infrastructures. As will be shown below, in many cases these systems could be manipulated, with devastating consequences.

  The negotiations to which Grant refers concerned Chinese exports to the Caliphate; he had the unenviable task of convincing Beijing to moderate its supplies (for example, in 2045 annual Chinese steel exports to the Caliphate amounted to fifty million tonnes; by 2060, these had increased to almost two hundred million tonnes). With a pragmatism which earned him as many detractors as plaudits, Grant ‘… conceded the Taiwan issue. I wanted [Chinese Interior Minister] Xueping to agree to allow free elections on the island for a minimum one hundred years, but he insisted on a maximum of fifty years, exactly as they’d given the British for Hong Kong. I had to use the reduction in heavy metal exports to the Caliphate before I could give Taiwan up like that. I felt a complete shit, to be honest, but there was no way the US would ever go to war with China over Taiwan, and Xueping knew that. So he got the fifty-year limit on free elections in Taiwan, and we managed to get China to reduce her heavy metal exports to the Caliphate by a lousy 10%.’

  Grant and other diplomats endured many such morally dubious compromises. As Western governments analysed and tried to unpick the Chinese threads woven into their societies over the preceding decades, often they found themselves at risk of causing serious problems to their countries’ infrastructure. Grant himself appeared to despair, writing in Night Flight to Beijing: ‘For the first time in years, I reached a point where I just did not believe Washington was getting it anymore. When Madelyn [Coll] told me to push for bigger concessions concerning exports to the Caliphate, I replied, “We don’t have the leverage. They see the Caliphate as a stable political entity which works far better than anything before it.” But she only tilted her head at me and those hazel eyes narrowed in her usual considered frustration. I wanted to scream at her, at all of Washington - hadn’t they learned a damn thing since the crash twenty years ago? How could they still believe that the West wielded any significant amount of power? I’ve met so many people in my life, argued and negotiated and bartered the best terms for the US every single goddam time. And getting my chiefs to understand how little leverage we actually had was the hardest thing I ever tried.’

  Grant can be accused of being slightly churlish here: certainly a number of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 2050s did comprehend the vast shift in the global balance of power which had taken place over the preceding generation, but few could find any solution which would be acceptable to their electorates or their consciences. As the East grew in economic strength, the West saw this unwelcome development through uncomprehending eyes, understanding what the raw data announced but unable or unwilling to take the necessary steps to adjust to the new reality.

  Nevertheless, Grant deserves recognition for his tireless work to promote diplomatic solutions to trends that worried Western military and economic analysts. However, it is unlikely Grant’s continued efforts could have significantly changed the course of events. Grant was killed in July 2061, aged fifty-four, along with nine-hundred-and-twenty other people, when a disgruntled city employee tampered with the super AI managing the Los Angeles autonomous freeway system, causing pile-ups throughout the city involving over six thousand vehicles.

  II. THE THINNEST DEFENCES

  Subterfuge also played a role in the West’s pre-war efforts to pierce the impenetrable fog around the Caliphate, which resulted in yet more obfuscation. Recently released English government files detail a series of COBRA meetings which also involved the British Defence Council. The minutes of these meetings show the degree of frustration to which efforts to monitor the Caliphate were subject. Since the debacle in 2058, when the Caliphate displayed the bodies of four British Special Forces’ troops caught on a clandestine reconnaissance incursion near Tripoli, Napier had
blocked any further reckless plans to use flesh-and-blood troops. Instead, NATO maintained a permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean and the Arabian Seas, launching high-altitude ACAs to eavesdrop on Caliphate digital traffic. However, unknown to the West, those devices which survived the Caliphate’s defences for more than a few hours were being fed false data.

  At a particularly acrimonious COBRA meeting on 4 November 2061, Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury questioned the Head of MI5 on the veracity of the latter’s conclusion that nothing suggested the Caliphate was preparing for military action outside its own borders. David Perkins, a forty-five-year-old security expert, replied that all of the acquired data supported the Caliphate’s oft-repeated public position that it had no intention to expand its borders further, unless states requested to join it. Sir Terry tried to insist the data were wrong. Perkins, who with some justification considered himself a Caliphate expert, reminded Sir Terry that even if the Caliphate was lying, its direction of expansion would undoubtedly be eastwards and northwards, to absorb other Muslim contingents on the Indian subcontinent and in central Asia. Sir Terry reminded Perkins that Europe was home to millions of Muslims - might not the Caliphate wish to assimilate those as well? Perkins retorted with the well-known super-AI position: that the Caliphate had little-to-no intention of attacking Europe, and then attempted to goad Sir Terry by wondering aloud if the General thought he knew better than the most cognisant artificial intelligence yet created.