Over the course of this year, my posts here on The
Archdruid Report have tried to outline the trajectory of America’s
global empire and explore the reasons why that trajectory will likely come to a
sudden stop in the near future. To bring the issue down out of the realm of
abstraction and put them in the context of history as lived, I’ve returned to
the toolkit of narrative fiction, and this and the next four posts will sketch
out a scenario of American imperial defeat and collapse. The narrative takes
place at some unspecified point in the next two decades; it’s probably
necessary to say outright that is not how I think the end of America’s empire
will happen, simply one way that it could
happen—and thus a model that may help expose some of the vulnerabilities of the
self-proclaimed hyperpower currently tottering toward history’s compost bin.
—for
more failed end time prophecies, see my book Apocalypse
Not
*********
The news of the latest Tanzanian deepwater oil discovery
broke on an otherwise sleepy Saturday in March. Thirty years before, a find of
the same size might have gotten two column inches somewhere in the back pages
of a few newspapers of record, but this was not thirty years ago. In a world starved for oil, what might once
have been considered a modest find earned banner headlines.
It certainly loomed large in the East Wing of the White
House, where the president and his advisers held a hastily called meeting that
evening. “The Chinese already have it
wrapped up,” said the Secretary of Energy. “Tanzania’s in their pocket, and
there are CNOOC people—” CNOOC was the
Chinese National Overseas Oil Corporation, the state-owned firm that
spearheaded China’s quest for foreign oil.
“—all over the place on site and in Dar es Salaam.”
“Is it close enough to Kenyan waters—”
“Not a chance, Mr. President. It’s 200 nautical miles away
from the disputed zone, and that last clash with the Tanzanians isn’t something
Nairobi wants to repeat.”
“Dammit, we need that oil.”
The president turned and walked over to the window.
He was right, of course, and “we” didn’t just refer to the
United States. Jameson Weed won the White House the previous November with a
campaign focused with laser intensity on getting the US out of its long and
worsening economic slump. Winning the
country a bigger share of imported oil was the key to making good on that
promise, but that was easier said than done; behind what was left of the polite
fiction of a free market in petroleum, most oil that crossed national borders
did so according to political deals between producer countries and those
consuming countries strong and wealthy enough to compete. These days, more often than not, the US lost
out—and the impact of that reality on Weed’s upcoming reelection campaign was
very much on the minds of everyone in the room.
“There’s one option,” said the president’s national security
adviser. “Regime change.”
President Weed turned back from the window to face the
others. The Secretary of Defense cleared his throat. “Sooner or later,” he said,
“the Chinese are going to stand and fight.”
The national security adviser gave him a contemptuous look.
“They don’t dare,” she said. “They know who’s boss, and it’s too far from their
borders for their force projection capacity, anyway. They’ll back down the way they did in Gabon.”
The president glanced from one to the other. “It’s an option,” he said. “I want a detailed
plan on my desk in two weeks.”
* * *
Regime change wasn’t as simple as it used to be. That was the sum of scores of conversations
in meeting rooms in the Pentagon and the CIA headquarters in Langley as the
plan came together. Gone were the easy days of the “color revolutions,” when a
few billion dollars funneled through Company-owned NGOs could buy a mass
uprising and panic an unprepared government into collapse. The second generation strategies that worked
so well in Libya and half a dozen other places—backing the manufactured
uprising with mercenaries, special forces, and a no-fly zone—stopped working in
turn once target governments figured out how to fight it effectively. Now it usually took ground troops backed up
by air power to finish the job of replacing an unfriendly government with a
compliant one.
Still, it was a familiar job by this point, and the
officials in charge got the plan put together in well under the two weeks the
president had given them. A few days later, when it came back signed and
approved, the wheels started turning. Money flowed to CIA front organizations
all over East Africa; Company assets in Tanzania began recruiting the
ambitious, the dissatisfied, and the idealistic to staff the cadres that would
organize and lead the uprising; elsewhere, mercenaries were hired and the usual
propaganda mills went into action. The
government of Kenya, the nearest American client state, was browbeaten into
accepting American troops on its border with Tanzania, and a third carrier
strike group was mobilized and sent on its way to join the two already within
range.
It took only a few weeks for the government of Tanzania to
figure out that its recent good luck had put it in the crosshairs of American
power. One afternoon in early May, after
a detailed briefing from his intelligence chief, the president of Tanzania
summoned the Chinese ambassador to a secret meeting, and told him bluntly, “If
you abandon us now we are lost.” The ambassador promised only to relay the
message to Beijing, but he did so within minutes of returning to the Chinese
embassy, and included a detailed and urgent commentary of his own.
Three days later, a dozen men sat down around a table in a
conference room in Beijing. A staff member poured tea and disappeared. After an hour’s discussion, one of the men at
the meeting said, “What is it that the Americans say? ‘Draw a line in the
sand?’ I propose that this is the time
and place to do that.”
A quiet murmur of agreement went around the table. In the
days that followed, a different set of officials drew up a very different set
of plans.
* * *
The port at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital and biggest
city, was a busy place, thronged with oil tankers carrying black gold to China
and its allies, and container ships bringing goods of every description, mostly
from China, for the booming Tanzanian economy.
In the bustle, no one paid much attention to the arrival of a series of
plain shipping containers from Chinese ports, which were offloaded from an
assortment of ordinary container ships and trucked to half a dozen
inconspicuous warehouse districts along the coast between Dar es Salaam and the
northern port city of Tanga. CIA agents
watching for signs of a Chinese response missed them completely.
More generally, the number of container shipments to
Tanzania and half a dozen other Chinese client states in Africa ticked up
slightly—not enough to rouse suspicions, but then nobody in the US learned how
many African companies found themselves facing unexpected delays in getting the
Chinese merchandise they had ordered, so that other cargoes took the space that
would have been theirs. Nor did anyone
in the US worry much about the increased number of young Chinese men who flew
to Africa during the four months before the war began. US intelligence did notice them, and their
arrival sparked a brief debate at Langley—military observers, one faction among
US intelligence advisors insisted, there to snoop on American military
technology; military advisors, another faction claimed, there to assist the
Tanzanian army against the American forces that were already gathering in
Kenya.
Both factions were wrong.
Most of the tight-lipped young men went to ground near those same
warehouse districts between Dar es Salaam and Tanga, where the contents of
those shipping containers were assembled, tested, and readied. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, the
Peoples Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) shifted six fighter wings, equipped
with some of China’s most advanced aircraft, to Central Asian bases. The Chinese government had announced that it
would be holding joint military exercises that August with Russia, and so the
satellite photos of Chengdu J-20 fighters parked in the deserts of Turkestan
got an incurious glance or two in Langley, and went into filing cabinets.
* * *
After years of budget battles on Capitol Hill, the US
military was not quite so powerful or so swift to deploy as it had been in the
last years of the twentieth century.
Only two of the remaining eight carrier strike groups—CSGs, in naval
jargon—were on station at any time, one in the western Pacific and one
shuttling back and forth between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean;
transport was a growing challenge by sea or air, and borrowing airliners from
the civilian air fleet, a mainstay of late twentieth century Pentagon planning,
was less simple to arrange now that air travel was only for the rich
again. Still, the units assigned to the
first phase of the Tanzanian operation—the 101st Airborne, the 6th Air Cavalry,
and the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions—were used to rounding up transport in a
hurry and heading off on no notice to the far corners of the globe.
The first units of the 101st Airborne landed at Nairobi in
the middle of May, when the heavy rains were over and the first riots were
breaking out in Dar es Salaam. By the time President Weed gave his famous
speech in Kansas City on June 20, denouncing atrocities he claimed had been
committed by the Tanzanian government and proclaiming in ringing terms
America’s unstinting readiness to support the quest for freedom around the
world, all four divisions were settling into newly constructed bases in the
upland country south of Kajiado, not far from the Tanzanian border. Alongside
them, logistics staff and civilian contractors swarmed, getting ready for the
two armored divisions, on their way from Germany by ship, who would fill out the
land assault force, and the bulk of the supplies for the assault, which were on
their way by sea from Diego Garcia.
Meanwhile three CSGs, headed by the nuclear carriers USS
Ronald Reagan, USS John F. Kennedy, and USS George Washington, headed at cruising
speed toward a rendezvous point in the western Indian Ocean, where they would
meet the ships carrying the armored divisions from Germany and a dozen big
supply ships from the Maritime Prepositioning Squadron based on Diego Garcia.
Two Air Force fighter wings had already been assigned to the operation, and
would arrive just before the carriers reached operational range; they and
carrier-based planes would then take out the Tanzanian air force and flatten
military targets across the country during the two weeks the armored divisions
would need to land, join the rest of the force, and begin the ground assault.
It was a standard plan for the quick elimination of the modest military forces
of a midsized Third World country; its only weakness was that the US force was
no longer facing a midsized Third World country.
* * *
In times of peace, August and September are the peak tourist
season in East Africa; inland from the always humid coast, the climate is cool
and dry, and the wide plains of the interior are easy to travel. Since plains in cool dry weather are among
the best places on earth for an assault by tanks and attack helicopters, these
were also the months the Pentagon’s planners assigned for Operation Blazing Torch,
the liberation of Tanzania. Briefing
papers handed to President Weed in late July sketched out the final details,
and he nodded and signed off on the final orders for the invasion. The
Secretary of Defense looked on from the other side of the room with a silent
frown. He had tried several times to bring up the small but real chance that
the Chinese might retaliate, and had his advice dismissed by Weed and mocked to
his face by the president’s national security adviser and Vice President
Gurney. As soon as this thing was over, he told himself for the fifteenth time,
he would hand in his resignation.
Outside the White House windows, barely visible in the
distance, a small band of protesters kept up a desultory vigil in the
free-speech zone set aside for them. Pedestrians hurried past, ignoring the
chanted slogans and the protest signs. It was another brutally hot summer day
in Washington DC, part of the “new normal” that the media talked about when
they couldn’t avoid mentioning the shifting climate altogether. Out beyond the Beltway, half the country was
gripped by yet another savage drought; the states of Iowa and Georgia had just
suspended payment on their debts, roiling the financial markets; eyes across
the southeast turned nervously toward a tropical storm, poised off the
Windwards, that showed every sign of turning into the season’s first big
hurricane.
What many perceptive observers recalled afterward was the
sullen mood that gripped the country that summer. Only the media and the most
shameless of national politicians tried to pretend that the approaching war
with Tanzania was about anything but oil; the president’s approval rating
drifted well below 25%, which was still three times that of Congress and well
above that of any credible candidate the other party had to offer; the usual
clichés spewed from the usual
pundits, but the only people who were listening were the pundits
themselves. Across the nation and across
the political spectrum, the patience of the American people was visibly running
short.
Those who were dissatisfied had plenty of reasons. The intractable economic slump that had
gripped the country since 2008 showed no sign of lifting, despite repeated
bailouts of the financial industry that were each proclaimed as the key to returning
prosperity, and repeated elections in which each candidate claimed to have
fresh new ideas and then pursued the same failed policies once in office. The fracking boom of the early twenty-teens
was practically ancient history; energy prices were high, and straggling
higher; gasoline bumped against $7 a gallon that summer before slumping most of
the way back to $6.50. None of these
things were new, but they seemed to infect the national mood more powerfully
than before. Shortly they would help
spark an explosion—but there would be other explosions first.
At the end of July, the invasion task force assembled in the
Indian Ocean almost two thousand miles east of the Kenyan coast. Fleet Admiral
Julius T. Deckmann, commanding the task force, made sure everything was in
order before giving the orders to sail west.
A career officer with half a dozen combat assignments behind him,
Deckmann had learned to trust his intuition, and his intuition told him that
something was not right. From the bridge
of the USS George Washington, his flagship, he considered the assembled fleet,
shook his head, and ordered reconnaissance drones sent up. Real-time images
from US spy satellites showed nothing out of the ordinary; data from the AWACS
plane circling high overhead confirmed that, and so did the drones, once data
started coming in from them. Deckmann’s unease remained as days passed
uneventfully and the task force neared East Africa.
The fleet reached its assigned position off the Kenyan coast
on schedule. Final news came via secure satellite link from Washington: the Air
Force fighter wings had arrived and were ready for action; the Tanzanian
Freedom Council, the puppet government-in-exile manufactured by the State
Department, had called “the nations of the world” to liberate their country, a
plea that everyone knew was directed at one nation alone; the CIA-led
mercenaries who spearheaded the second, violent phase of the uprising had
withdrawn from Dar es Salaam, leaving the local cadres to their fate, and were
moving toward the Kenyan border to open the way for the invasion. Deckmann made
sure every ship in his fleet was ready as the sun set in red haze over the
distant African coast.
Very few of those involved in the war got much sleep, that
last night before the shooting began. On the three carriers, and at two newly
constructed airfields in southern Kenya, aircrews worked through the dark hours
to get their planes ready for battle, unaware that other aircrews were doing
the same thing thousands of miles away in Central Asia. Soldiers of the two armored divisions that
had been brought down from Germany prepared for a landing in Mombasa most of
them would not live to see. In Dar es
Salaam and Nairobi, presidents met with their cabinets and then headed for
heavily guarded bunkers; elsewhere in
the world, heads of state read intelligence briefings and braced
themselves for crisis.
Two hours before the East African dawn, the waiting ended.
Two people ended it. One was Admiral Deckmann, barking out the orders that sent
the first fighter-bombers roaring off the deck of the George Washington and the
first Tomahawk cruise missiles blazing skywards. The other was an officer in a
Chinese command center deep in central Asia, who watched the planes take off
and the missiles launch, courtesy of a high-altitude observation drone—one of
three that had been following the George Washington since it went through the
Suez Canal, and were now stationed high above the fleet. As infrared images showed planes and missiles
hurtling toward Tanzania, the officer typed rapidly on a keyboard and then hit
enter twice. With the second click of
the enter key, the Chinese response began.
****************
End of the World of the Week #42
In the world of apocalyptic fantasy, an engineer’s degree is
very often a passport to success. An engineer’s training focuses on figuring
what can happen, not what did happen or will happen, and so engineers reign
supreme in many fields of rejected knowledge; from creation science through the
quest for ancient astronauts to past and present claims of imminent apocalypse,
books by retired engineers are usually the most imaginative and least inhibited
works on their eccentric subjects.
Retired electrical engineer Hugh Auchincloss Brown was a
classic of the type, and had an even more vivid imagination than most of his
peers. In his book Cataclysms of the Earth (1967), he argued
that the amount of ice at the south pole was steadily increasing, and the
excess weight would eventually cause the planet to unbalance and flip over in space,
devastating the entire surface of the globe and leaving few survivors.
Moreover, he insisted, this had happened before: the present Antarctic ice cap was “the
successor to a long lineage of glistening assassins of former civilizations on
this planet.”
Brown died in 1976, convinced to the end that the cataclysm
was already overdue and might occur at any moment. His theory found eager listeners among late
20th century fans of apocalypse, but lost market share as better measurements
made it clear that the ice cap on Antarctica is contracting, not expanding.
