It is now December 31, 2030, and the end of the third World War is nowhere in sight. It came upon us unexpectedly, without warning, like a thief in the night. America spent the second half of the twentieth century fighting a war without bullets and preparing for a worse war with bullets. We thought we won the first, and that the second wouldn’t come, but it did come. It was just a few decades late.

It started, perhaps fittingly, in a manner similar to the First World War fought over a century earlier. Then, as now, the war started with an assassin’s bullet. This time, the victim was a prominent Russian politician, one of the few respected in the circles of both President Putin and in the capitals of western Europe. He was shot in a restaurant in Moscow, by a man who claimed to be a Ukrainian from the eastern half of the country where a civil war had been raging for ten years. Given subsequent events, it isn’t surprising nobody knows much about the man. Maybe he really was a Ukrainian agent. Maybe he was just some crazy who lost everything in the civil war. There’s a large minority in our own government that swears the man was a Russian agent Putin used to create a pretext for invasion. I don’t know, and we probably won’t know until after the war’s over, if ever, but three days later, the Russian army, which had maintained an intermittent presence on Ukraine’s eastern and northern border for most of the civil war, launched an all out assault. The Ukrainian forces were prepared, but overmatched. Everyone knew that Ukraine joining NATO was Putin’s red line, so despite Ukraine’s repeated asks, membership was never extended. In truth, nobody in Europe wanted to fight Putin over Ukraine, a country with little strategic or economic value to the Germans and Frenchmen that ran the EU. Moreover although Europe, and the world, had made great strides in renewable energy over the past half decade. Solar and wind power were better and more cost effective than ever, but the reliability issue never could be fully overcome, so Germany’s cities still depended on Russian natural gas to keep the lights on when the sun didn’t shine and the wind didn’t blow. Ukraine fell, and NATO did nothing in the immediate aftermath but issue some strongly worded condemnations.

It was an ugly choice, but history is filled with ugly choices. Still, the leaders of the world couldn’t be seen to be doing ‘nothing’, so an aging President Biden, perhaps remembering the more united, more civil world of his youth, proposed to cut off all trade with Russia besides humanitarian aid. Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, however, made that proposal a non-starter. Biden was furious, and the establishment was nervous. Biden had again faced a difficult primary season against a wave of opponents running to his left in 2024, winning the nomination with the lowest margin in history for a sitting US President. He then barely defeated Donald Trump in what was easily the ugliest, most vicious election in US history. It was widely believed that anyone other than Trump himself would have beaten an unpopular and visibly aging Uncle Joe. Trump’s bombast, crude language, and unpredictability remained a liability, but a new and ambitious crop of younger and more energetic Republicans had married traditional small government conservatism and nationalist flag waving with an anti-elite populism and a growing resentment of wealth inequality and the increasingly political behavior of multinational megacorporations to produce a new party populist/nationalist party who already had a stranglehold on middle America that the Democrats had little prospect of breaking. There were even small signs that Republicans were beginning to grow inexplicably more popular with the minority voters upon which the Democratic Party was now entirely dependent. The Democrats were now the last establishment party, and there were rumblings of a new Socialist party forming out of the radical younger members of Congress. War with Russia was not popular with either left wing Democrats or Republicans, so the prospect of a unilateral assault, even drone strikes and cruise missiles, was deemed impractical. Still, Biden and his backers felt they had to do something to avoid losing all credibility entirely, so with the support of a few opportunistic allies, notably Turkey, Hungary, and Poland, who despite belonging to the EU, paid little heed to dictates from Brussels. The US with its allies closed the Black Sea straits and blockaded Russian ports on it’s Baltic and Pacific coasts.

That, unfortunately, caused the rest of the dominos to fall. The blockade, combined with the dissolution of NATO, required a massive redistribution of American’s military and naval assets, and while the US military was still easily the largest and most powerful in the world, was no longer quite the juggernaut that was able to fight and win wars in two hemispheres at the same time. They had the best planes, the best tanks, the best ships, and the best trained soldiers but the best things are also the most expensive, so despite how advanced and awesome they were, there weren’t enough of them. The blockade stretched the US thin to the point of breaking, and another erstwhile challenger seized an opportunity.

The US had thought itself prepared for the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. After all, the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, had at various times over the past seven decades declared their determination to reunite the democratic island with the mainland, peacefully if possible but by force if necessary. China, and Asia generally, had been the focus of US military focus for most of the previous fifteen years. President Trump is generally credited with turning American policy against China, but smart minds at the Pentagon and within the military industrial complex had recognized the threat years earlier with President Obama’s widely ridiculed ‘pivot to Asia’ shifting of American military assets in that direction. Trump simply did what he was best at, and aimed the public’s anger in that direction, to the consternation of the business establishment, who would have preferred to engage the Chinese quietly, and more importantly, profitably. Once the coronavirus emerged from a Wuhan wet market (or research lab, if you prefer that theory, there was never an investigation so nobody knows for sure), the writing on the wall was written in bold flashing letters for all the world to see. China and America would be enemies, and both sides acted accordingly. It wasn’t quite like the first cold war, but it was something approaching that, with both sides slowly piling up tariffs, sanctions, and angry words. Robust trade had persisted through the first half of the 2020s, but behind the scenes, supply chains were shifting, factories were being built elsewhere, and business leaders on both sides of the Pacific were conceding to the inevitable. Any trade that could be remotely connected to national defense, AI, or chip technology had long ago been halted by the Trump and Biden administrations, and the rest of the business world was slowly conceding that politics ultimately trumped profits, and the risk was no longer worth taking. In the summer of 2024, a housing bubble in the Chinese market burst and rocked their economy. America could have intervened to stop the crisis in a similar manner to how the Chinese intervened in the 2008 housing crisis to shore up the world economy at that time. Unfortunately, America was in no mood to do favors for the CCP, and President Biden, facing opposition from human rights groups on the left and America first populists on the right, did nothing. The Chinese economy crashed, and the world definitely felt it, as the NYSE recorded it’s largest drop by percentage since 2008, but the American economy had changed a lot over the last five years. They had, at great cost in terms of inflation, diversified their supply chains and introduced more resilience. The American government performed their usual song and dance of unemployment benefits and stimulus packages, and the caravan moved on. 

To say the Chinese were not amused would be an understatement. Leaving our proverbial fly open to blockade the Russians was, in hindsight, a colossally foolish move, but the rationale was that leaving Russia unchallenged might embolden China or others in the future, and that with the economy in shambles, President Xi would have his hands full just trying to cover his own butt. In hindsight, we underestimated the sway he had over his government and his people. When the moment came, he acted decisively.

The United States had prepared Taiwan and its people as best it could against a larger and fanatically determined foe, but China had prepared and planned well. The invasion came approximately two months after the initial assassination, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Now, the harried American President faced a hopeless dilemma. Abandoning Ukraine was one thing, but Taiwan was another entirely. With the largest semiconductor manufacturing plants, a significant share of the world’s total, America could not simple whistle along and pretend nothing important happened. China in control of Taiwan meant a substantial loss of technology that might well enable the Chinese to win the technology arms race that had begun to unfold. Losing Taiwan would be a hard blow to recover from. Biden was already facing backlash over the unpopular Russian blockade and the fall of NATO. Now, he had to endure smug I-told-you-so’s from hawks in both the opposition party and his own who had been beating the drums on China for most of the past decade. Still, both his own party and the opposition were sharply divided on the issue of what to do about the matter or whether to declare war. Biden, despite intense pressure from Pentagon brass and tech moguls, hesitated and left the matter to Congress. Congress, being Congress, dithered and debated for nearly a week before the decision was taken out of their hands entirely when Japan, whose own islands were under threat, Australia, which had endured the brunt of Chinese economic warfare for years and grown more openly hawkish, and India, which had benefitted greatly from shifting supply chains and could not stand by while China closed its vital trade route to Japan and the US, jointly declared war and pointedly asked the Americans for formal support. With three fourths of the so called Quad alliance, and most of their remaining relevant allies on board, the President and Congressional leaders called a closed door emergency meeting and emerged with a consensus. The next day, for the first time since 1941, the United States formally, and completely, went to war.

What followed was a flurry of mobilization laws not seen since in nearly a century. Business and financial leaders, realizing that saving what was left of the international order, and perhaps their own butts, was on the line, lined up patriotically behind the politicians and generals and declared their loyalty. Corporate taxes were raised to WWII levels. A personal wealth tax was levied on anyone with over fifty million dollars in total wealth, to pay for the war. An aging Bernie Sanders lamented ironically that he could have passed his wealth tax years ago, if only he’d been willing to go to war with half the world to do it.  Commodity prices were fixed, preparations were made to ration food, gasoline, and anything that required a microchip, (by 2025, that included most any product one could name more complicated than a screwdriver). Finally, the draft was reinstated, to the shock and horror of young adults, who thought such things consigned forever to history textbooks, and their parents, most of whom were too young to remember anything but their parents’ and grandparents’ stories of Vietnam and war protests. There wasn’t a huge need for so called ‘grunts’ as in previous conflicts. War wasn’t fought that way anymore, and America’s military brass, used to an effective, almost mercenary volunteer force, were uncomfortable with the effectiveness and ability of conscript soldiers. So, in the end, most of the draftees never even came under fire, serving instead as medics, technicians, drivers, sailors, computer specialists, radar operators, etc. America’s high tech force requires a lot of people behind the scenes to run efficiently, and fully mobilized against a near equal foe, it required a lot more.

It’s still debated whether and how much Russia and China coordinated their respective strikes on Ukraine and Taiwan, another question that will have to wait for the end of the war. There had been rumblings for years about a secret or not-so-secret alliance between the two, but never anything formal. What is known is that the two nations were friendly, had demilitarized their border, and uniformly opposed America in about every international issue. Both were known enemies of the US, and neither batted an eyelid or protested the others’ actions in even a minimal way. About a week after the formal US declaration, Chinese, Russian, and Iranian delegations announced the Greater Eurasian Prosperity League. The announcement coincided with the surprise Iranian invasion of Iraq and Turkey. Pakistan and North Korea were added a few weeks later and commenced hostilities with their traditional rivals India and South Korea, respectively. The American side never adopted a formal name, but the media started calling them the Democracy Alliance, and that stuck.  The fight between the free world and the Communist, or more accurately, the totalitarian world, that three generations of Americans had thought we avoided, was on.

That was four years ago, 2026. Now it’s 2030, and the war continues with no sign of stopping. Like the First World War, most of the territorial gains by either side occurred during the first few months. South Korea is gone, though a few hundred thousand citizens and the nation’s government in exile managed to evacuate to the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The images and reports from the last days of the heroic evacuation efforts stirred patriotism in the people and solidified public support for the war. Images of an evacuation effort that easily dwarfed Dunkirk, hundreds of civilian and military ships from dozens of Alliance nations along every beach and port along the Korean coast captured the resolve of free nations and peoples to support each other in times of strife. The humanitarian effort to feed and house the refugees became a major point of political emphasis and remains so even now, though leaders, and the people themselves, are increasingly focusing on resettling the refugees as the prospect of reengaging on the Korean peninsula seems increasingly remote. With Japan’s population declining even before the war, there is a place for the refugees, historic opposition to immigration notwithstanding.

After decades of promising to do so at any cost, Xi Jinping managed to unify China by seizing Taiwan. Most of China’s military assets had been developed and deployed towards taking Taiwan and controlling the vital trade routes of the South China Sea, a task which they accomplished in the first days of the war, though the South China Sea is mostly impassable for both sides at this point. China had no good answer to American, Australian, and British submarines. Of course they mined strategic areas, but our side always seemed to find a way around to harry shipping and shoot missiles full of propaganda over the island to instigate violent resistance. The Chinese continued to lay even more mines in an expensive game of whack-a-mole that continues today.

Of the allied nations that weren’t immediately overrun, perhaps none has suffered so much as Japan. With their entire nation in range of Chinese missiles, their goal from the start was one of survival. That was the reason they declared war in the first place. They viewed the acquisition of Taiwan as the first domino in a chain that would end with complete Chinese domination of the region. Unwilling to accept a subservient position to China, they fight on in the face of daily threat. It isn’t that missile defense systems don’t work. They have worked, much better than anyone had any right to expect. In the first few weeks, only a few missiles got through. Unfortunately, the Chinese changed tactics, firing hundreds of missiles at a time towards a single target. It’s simple math, the missile defense systems could only intercept so many before they were overwhelmed. We responded with more missile defense, but the Chinese are always building more missiles, and it became a battle of resources and manufacturing as wars often do. We’ve had to play catchup there, and we have, but not quickly enough to prevent modern day Tokyo from looking like London during the Blitz.

Other allies fared better. China’s hyper-focus on Taiwan and the South China Sea left them underprepared elsewhere. America’s navy might not be able to come close to mainland China, but with Australia and Britain, they still control the rest of the ocean. The Indian military enjoyed great success early in the war over the Pakistani military, largely owing to complete air and naval superiority in that theater. The planes and missiles we couldn’t use against China pounded the Pakistani forces into submission early in the war. Iran tried to send aid but was largely ineffective for the same reason. China attempted to send troops across their mountainous border with India, but they proved less experienced in alpine warfare, and when they made any progress, heavy airstrikes pushed them back. After a few months of that, the Chinese again changed tactics, staging a coup in Rangoon and establishing a friendly government in Burma to attack India from the West. That, too, had limited success. India’s total population was already nearly as large as China’s before the war, and it is much younger. By that point in the war, India’s army was even larger than that of the US, and they enjoyed superior numbers in nearly every engagement. In fact, they’re making some progress back into Burma at this point. That’s the likeliest, and probably the only, way we’ll ever be able to take the war directly to the Chinese mainland at this point.

Unfortunately, that’s about the only success the alliance has had. The Middle East is a quagmire that the alliance has largely avoided. Iran’s fomenting of various terrorist groups went deeper than we knew. The governments of friendly Middle East nations were on shaky ground to start with. With just a little push, most of them fell. The few who didn’t maintain a studious and strict neutrality, and they guard their borders well. Most of the region though is now in a state of low grade violent civil war. Nobody’s really in charge and the religious fanatics do all kinds of horrible things but nobody does anything about it because there are more important strategic priorities. Turkey was immediately beset on two fronts, Russia in the north and Iran in the East. The Turkish front, as it’s now called, was and is where most American ground forces were deployed. That said, half the country was lost before we could get all our forces deployed. Ankara fell within the year, and American and Turkish forces were pushed back within a few hundred miles of the straits. Hold the straits, has been the ‘must win’ for for the Alliance campaign to this point. To that end, America managed to persuade Greece to leave the EU. Being close to the fighting, they appreciated the threat of Russia, and many remained embittered about austerity measures imposed on the state after its economic crisis.

America’s few European allies achieved mixed results. Poland, seemingly against all odds, has managed to hold out, though they owe much of that to American air support, and tacit support from some of their fearful neighbors who remained in the EU. It’s also a fact that Russia, from the beginning, focused most of its power south. They have to spend several divisions just dealing with guerilla warfare in eastern Ukraine, at least that’s the rumor.  Hungary was losing until a popular coup unseated their President. The new government left the war quickly afterward, amidst accusations that Russia instigated the coup itself. Russia refrained from attacking the EU itself, but is instead using the Europeans’ now total energy dependence to influence decision makers, with some results. That the EU could join the Russians is every Alliance general’s, and much of the public’s greatest fear. Four years ago, I would have thought it impossible, but people underestimated how much, after dominating much of European politics for decades, anti-American sentiment had built up over the years. With no more NATO, people started expressing that sentiment with a great deal of vigor.  If the EU joins the war, holding the Black Sea Straits will be untenable. We’ll be pressed just to hold the straits of Gibraltar. Thankfully, the EU itself is as divided as it ever was, despite rumblings from Brussels. Though Western Europe has turned decidedly pro-Russia, the Eastern European nations that remember the Iron Curtain think differently. As much talk as there is of Brussels siding with the Russians, there’s probably just as much, if not more talk of the union breaking in half or dissolving entirely.

We thank God each day that the conflict has not gone nuclear, so far. Leaders on both sides of the conflict are mostly rational decision makers, so it is hoped that nuclear weapons will stay off the table. Both sides boldly declared early in the war that they would not be the first to engage the nuclear option. There was a scare, however, when it became clear Pakistan would fall to India. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was limited, but even the few they had could have done tremendous damage and created an environmental disaster. Modern weapons, even the weakest, of today, are far worse than Hiroshima. Fortunately, the Indian government knew the locations of the weapons sites, and American, British, and Australian special forces staged perhaps the largest covert military operation in history over the course of one night in 2027. It was a desperate move with enormous risks, but it saved countless lives on the Indian subcontinent. It may have saved us all.

At this point, nobody knows how long the war will go or what winning would even look like. The nuclear option would seem to preclude a conclusive end such as we saw in WWII. If Hitler had had the bomb before the fall of Berlin, there’s little doubt he would have used it, and I don’t imagine Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin are that much wiser and more humanitarian than Adolf, nor do I put it past the politicians in Washington to decide that rather than bow to the Orwellian technological uber-surveillance state that China has become, they’d rather rule a smoking ruin, so long as it’s free. There’s more than a few hyper-patriots out there who would agree with that sentiment. War can be ugly in that way, as some of us end up becoming much worse versions of ourselves. Still, I suppose even the darkest clouds have a silver lining. Nobody talks about polarization anymore, or red vs blue America, or rural vs. urban, or any of that. Cancel culture dried up in the face of a war against a state like China, that embodies so much of what’s wrong with censorship, and gone too, are the so-called culture wars over language or bathrooms or whatever other ridiculously trivial thing Fox News was going on about. Turns out, those issues really were first world problems, things we could afford to get angry about when there was plenty of food on the shelves, plenty of gadgets to entertain us, and plenty of politicians with no greater concern than winning the next election. The differences remain, but somehow, in the face of nuclear annihilation, whether one says Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays just doesn’t seem to matter, and when people are dying fighting governments that tell their people how and what to believe, ‘canceling’ people whose views are disliked has, well, fallen somewhat out of favor.

The only issue on everyone’s mind, quite properly, is the war, how to end it, whether to end it, and what happens after its over. Ending the war might mean accepting the status quo as far as borders are concerned, and as horrible as that is for the Ukrainians, Taiwanese, or South Koreans, that position is growing more popular all the time. There’s a growing sense that this is about the best we can get at this point. Nobody seriously believes we’re in any position to take back those territories anytime soon. With naval and air power being what it is, the opposite proposition, that the League might score a decisive victory that pushes America out of Eurasia entirely, is even more absurd. There is really no prospect of the League ever gaining naval parity, given that most of their capital ships were destroyed early in the war either by submarines, guided missiles, or high-altitude bombers. The historic military analogy of the elephant and the whale is a rather apt one for this conflict. Both sides probably realize that some sort of stalemate is inevitable and continue the fighting just to gain enough leverage for negotiating a favorable peace. Scuttlebutt around the internet is that the Chinese and Iranian regimes are ready to accept a status quo peace, but the Russians are pushing to continue the war until they can take the Black Sea straits. The hope from our side is, of course, to keep holding the line there until the League finally gives up on that objective.

Even if they sign a ceasefire tomorrow, however, we’ll still be facing decades of low intensity conflict like the Cold War of the last century. There’s no going back to the way things were. The war shocked a world not at all prepared for it. People didn’t think it could happen. We thought we were better, better education, better environment, better food, better infrastructure. We had all that, yes, but it didn’t really change what we were underneath it all, people, just people. We can see, now, that we cursed our ancestors and grandparents too freely for their perceived flaws, while mostly ignoring our own. We marched in the streets for diversity and inclusion and cried against racism on one side of the world, while people on the other side were being put in concentration camps. We twiddled our thumbs while our so-called leaders cut deals with villains for the sake of their own profits, and to keep Americans distracted by cheap goods made with slave labor. We valued profits and prosperity too much, our freedom and our fellow man too little. Maybe that’s too harsh, maybe that’s just four years of war talking, but everybody’s a little harsher now. Everybody’s a little on edge. Everybody knows someone who’s served or someone who’s died. Everybody’s seen the pictures from Tokyo, from Seoul, and we all get a little angry. A lot of people, maybe most people, blame the League and its leaders for ruining the world. There’s something to be said for that, but in the end, they’re just people too. It makes me wonder if theres something in our nature, something primal that we can’t change, that pushes, prods us, coerces us to form clans, tribes, and eventually nations, then fight each other for causes small and great. Whatever it is, it’s part of the human story. We thought we could continue the story without war. We thought we could discard the uglier, less pleasant parts of human nature. We aren’t the first to think we could dream up a better world and make it happen. I doubt we’ll be the last. Previous generations were wrong, so were we, and maybe future generations will be too. I don’t know. After four years of war, I’m just hoping there are future generations.

This is one of my favorite forms of fiction, where one writes about the future in the past, from a point of view even further into the future. It’s a kind of what-if exercise. It makes a good thought experiment in that it causes the reader to think about things they maybe wouldn’t think about otherwise. It also helps remind us that our present is the future of previous generations, and that our future will also be someone else’s past. It forces a shift in perspective, something I feel is sorely lacking in our modern world. I thought about putting this disclaimer at the beginning, but I felt it rather blunted the impact, so apologies to anybody confused.

Also, for the record, I don’t believe any of this will happen. There are a couple points that will be rightly regarded as significant leaps of logic. However, the basic scenario of a simultaneous invasion of Ukraine and Taiwan has been contemplated in op-eds before, and I’m dead certain that there are people in the Pentagon being paid a lot of money to devise strategies for this and other equally improbable WW3 scenarios. It’s not likely, but it’s a non-zero probability. Whether we would go to war over either Ukraine or Taiwan is a question nobody knows the answer to, maybe not even the President. It might be something he has to decide based on the circumstances in that moment. In the case of Ukraine, I’d say no, we won’t do much, because it has significant strategic value to Russia but little to anybody else. Taiwan, however, has a complicating factor. It’s well known that around 80% of the world’s chipmaking (microchips that is) comes from a Taiwanese company, and most of their manufacturing is done right there on the island. Considering how vital a strategic resource microchips are, there’s a genuine possibility that the powers that be in the corporate world and the military industrial complex (where the real power and influence are) decide that this is a ‘crossing the Rubicon’ moment, and we have to act. Further, the tech sanctions that the Trump administration began and the Biden administration continued have greatly hampered China’s ability to manufacture it’s own chips (Taiwan has the factories, but American firms hold the design specs, patents, etc.). The US government, understandably, doesn’t want the Chinese stealing that tech the way they’ve stolen other industrial technology, because those chips are a big part of its military advantage over the rest of the world.

The main reason I think this won’t happen is because I believe that, despite their rhetoric, the Chinese will not invade Taiwan, now or ever. It would ruin their international reputation overnight. They would face some sort of sanctions over the matter that might cripple their economy. Every nation in the neighborhood would immediately feel threatened and respond with a likely military buildup, and trade repercussions. Japan, in particular, I suspect would respond very strongly. More than this, the Chinese would face the same problems as anyone else trying to occupy territory in the modern world. Guerilla warfare and terrorism are extremely effective and notoriously hard to stop. They’d be occupying Taiwan, and while that nation is very small, it’s also very densely populated, a fraction of the territory of Afghanistan or Iraq but half the population. It’s not a given that their invasion would even succeed. As any military person will tell you, amphibious landings are difficult to pull off successfully even with experienced armies, and in this case, the geography favors Taiwan. The Chinese would probably succeed eventually through sheer numbers, but the cost in blood and treasure could be very high. All these factors, combined with the ambiguity of whether the US might retaliate militarily, should, I repeat, should act as sufficient deterrence for anything more than the usual saber rattling. It would be wholly irrational, in my opinion, and a historic mistake for China to take Taiwan by force, but just because it’s irrational doesn’t mean somebody won’t do it.