You bet on the weak horse or the strong horse--Osama Bin Laden.
President Rainbow Landers (his parents were hippies) was the last American president. In some timelines his World Apology Tour was read as enlightenment and generosity, but in this one it was seen as weakness and naivete. When his agent, a supposedly tough woman, offered the Russians a 'reset button' and then mistranslated the word, the Russians giggled. And Boris Ivanov, former head of the world's premier spy agency, the KGB, plotted.
The cell nature of the terrorist networks is the only thing that saved the world.
The terrorist group Rage of Martyrs sent a dozen imams to various airplanes with full media coverage and loudly announced plans by their 'peaceful political action wing', the Martyr Council which donated to the Republicans and the Democrats to stage a 'protest against profiling and racism'.
Never mind that several of the imams were Caucasian, and two were Filipino. Racism was the cry of the day.
So the airlines let the robed imams on board without a scene and congratulated themselves on skillfully defusing a PR crisis/provocation.
Meanwhile, the more secretive of the two terror groups had begun their assault the day before. Judenrein Palestine (whose motto was "Israel does not exist. Push the Jews into the sea.") had unleashed a bioweapon attack on four large American cities. No one knew it but Judenrein Palestine.
The Blue Death it was called because the new virus had the tendency to cause pneumonia and then choking to death. Happily it was not as effective as planned, nor as contagious.
The dozen imams all cried 'Allahu Akbar' and pulled the switch hidden in their beards. BOOM. Well, most of them. Two bombs did not go off because of faulty wiring. And one did not go off because a five year old girl asked her mom 'why is that man chewing on a wire in his mouth?' At which point, mom put two and two together, and decided that she could be sued into oblivion and painted as a racist jerk of the first water only if she and her daughter were alive. She jerked the wire free and strangled the imam with a seat belt.
The ROM attack shut down all the flights in the US for several days and any transport at all was now subject to roadblocks and checks. This allowed the US authorities the time to realize that JP had bioweaponed them. And it kept the savage Blue Death relatively confined.
Which means that the US lost seventy million from the attack, but it did not spread worldwide. French and German fighter jets shot down fleeing 747s who had left from La Guardia. But that did not take long to stop such efforts. The West and East Coast were death zones. Pretty much everyone north of South Carolina and east of the Appalachians died in plague, water loss, starvation, massive fires, and cannibal gangs. The same happened to those south of Seattle and west of the Sierra Nevadas.
Mexican army forces machine gunned illegal aliens seeking to escape back home and Texan illegal immigrants as well without discrimination. The Rio Grande flowed red with blood for four days.
In the rest of the nation the big cities emptied out, taking the plague with them, and descending on the country side like locusts. Savage wars broke out as ranchers shot Denver City residents and between Detroit and Chicago, pretty much most of the Midwest was a smoke plume of destruction.
Florida had mass die-offs of old people as medicine trucks did not come.
Some parts of the nation survived fairly well. Which meant only one in three people died.
No one in the US had the ability or the desire to be 'the world's policeman'.
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There was dancing in the streets in some places. In the banlieus of Paris they danced. In Palestine, they danced. In Tehran, a visibly moved Iranian dictator cried in joy on TV.
The residents of the banlieus around Paris are unassimilated, young, often vicious, Muslim, hate the French...They decided to enact the third round of 'burn the cars'. The French blinked. Just for one day. The shock was too much. It was quite understandable. But in this new world without America, the margin of error was a lot smaller.
The riot turned into a revolution in the space of five hours. Weakness before thuggery encourages thuggery. By three days later, the Islamic Republic of Gaul was the second Islamic nuclear power after Pakistan.
As this happened, the US forces at Ramstein in Germany made the only call they could. They called the leader of Germany and made a deal. Suddenly Germany's rather pathetic military might jumped a hundred fold, and a bunch of American soldiers got dual citizenship.
Encouraged by this, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Saudis, and the Iranians decide that the time to get rid of the "Jewish Problem" was now. Unfortunately for them they had become used to playing a rigged deck. The US and the world had always held the Israelis back. And the US had always rearmed the Israelis. Now the Israelis knew that their own native arm companies were not enough, and the US president refused to take their calls.
One day of heavy fighting with kill rates of two hundred Arabs and Persians vs. a single IDF soldier were not enough. So the Israeli's called Beijing and made a deal. Nuclear fire blossomed over the armies of genocide. The Israelis had finally launched after so much provocation.
And then the Israelis moved in, and right behind them came Chinese technical advisers (a mix of soldiers and workers). The oil fields were reopened with Israelis 'face' (because there simply were not enough Jews to do all the work. Its a rather small country.) on it, and Chinese 'aid' for work and some security, and Arab and Persian grunts told what to do and how to do it at the point of a weapon. The Israeli Protectorate looked as if it would stabilize the Mid-east by way of an Uzi pointed at anyone who objected.
Unfortunately, the exultant Gaullic Muslims could not let that stand. And happily enough from their view, they too had nukes. Tel Aviv dissappeared. Jerusalem was spared a direct strike although one landed near it. The Gaullics had also coerced and encouraged the Pakistanis to join in. About seven or eight nukes did for the Protectorate and the Chinese Restraint Force (a Chinese Army parked near its border as a polite threat...obey the Israelis or meet the Han.)
When Pakistan launched, a terrified India launched as well on Pakistan because they thought it was at them. The Pakistanis were able to get off one nuke at India before India wiped them out. New Delhi is gone.
At this point China is furious, and its scared because it really, really needed that oil. India is reeling in agony, and its terrified of China but its probably the only power left on the planet that could actually stop China....except for the US Navy.
Except the last orders of the US President were 'do nothing. We are no longer the world's policeman' to the Navy.
There is a very good possibility that India and China are going to go toe to toe, and nuke each other.
Some people argue that this will lead to nuclear winter.
Meanwhile, a 'German' tank force has launched an attack on the 'Islamic' nukes, and Berlin is leveleld by a counterstrike, but the 'German' tank force then took Paris. Men in Bonn are asking themselves...what raw supplies do we need to take? What do we need to hold to be safe? Some of them advocate a Fifth Reich covering Europe, not based on death camps, but using national socialism.
Others point out the problem of the banlieus with the dark-skinned Muslims who resist authority. Plans for work camps are quietly reopened...
The West and East Coast were death zones.
This might be the only way the scenario works, but it's also an "oops it backfired" scenario. Urban zones are the strongly Democratic areas; rural zones are the strongly Republican ones. Mass deaths in the coastal cities means that the Democrats lose their power base and the Republicans rise to power fairly quickly--maybe not a couple months, but certainly a couple years.
And the presumably Democratic President will know this, and will have to start redefining himself and his entire party if he is to have any hope of maintaining power. That means catering to the Hawks and so shifting his party strongly to the right, launching a significant military response against the terrorists and all their allies.
This becomes more essential if The President dies in this attack; whoever succeeds him is going to want to appear to be the Leader American Needs™, and that means being the Hawk who can bring force to bear in response to the attack.
Not sure how you handle that.
--M. J. Young
I was thinking of a total collapse of the USA, and an end to overseas actions. There are polities which survive, but most are smaller than the size of a state.