This is sort of a generic overview of what I would be submitting to happen to about 2030-2035, arranged sort of by topic. Of course, it doesn't take into account what other people are doing, and it assumes a lot, but consider this my "pitch" for the position. This is briefer than it should be in places, and is more "the future looks like today but different" than wacky NESer hijinks, but I'm not paid by the word and that's my campaign platform:
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DOMESTIC POLITICAL HISTORY
The basis of the Republican Party as a populist, non-policy based opposition collapsed during the wilderness years of Hillary Clinton's Presidency. Having failed in their bid to obstruct several of President Obama's objectives, and failing to capture the 2016 election (sensing success after running the same playbook from 2010 and 2012 in the 2014 midterms, the reactionary and ultraconservative elements doubled-down on the strategy in 2016 to diasterous results), the extreme elements of the party grew ever more shrill and fringe, with collapsing poll numbers accompanying them. Minor spasms of violence from deluded supporters only exacerbated this decline. The Republican Party however, did not die.
After an intense period of soul-searching that harkened back to TwenCen leaders like Eisenhower and Nixon instead of the debased name of Reagan, the Republican party slowly rebuilt itself on two pillars from its past: conservatism and defense. There was a difference in the meaning of these terms though. On defense: seizing upon the
Pentagon's assessments of global climate change and
educational underachievement as national security risks, the Republican party rebuilt its platform on major security challenges to the United States from a top-down perspective. On conservatism: recognizing the political cost of supporting regressive social policies, the party began to redefine conservative as "not progressive," and largely abandoned the field on social issues. The Republican Party effectively become a party about America and American integrity and strength, arguing that strong collective security (for whatever definition of secuirty, on all fronts) would make America—and its citizens—strong and prosperous, leaving them to do as they would in their personal lives.
The Democrats, meanwhile, became something of a victim of their own success. Four highly successful if tumultuous terms under a single party was a statistical anomally unseen since the days of FDR and Truman. Amplified by the first elections of a black man and a white woman to the Presidency, the pair of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were rightly seen as a turning point in American history. It was not to last. Although a former San Antonio mayor and later Governor of Texas, Julian Castro, would win the Presidency in a landslide in 2024 as the first Latino in office, completing an apparent trifecta, a lackluster performance in office combined with the Republican resurgence would cap off Democratic dominance in 2028. Amusingly, the series of firsts would not end with the Democratic streak: President Hung Ba Le, former US Navy Admiral who rose to fame during the various PacRim Crises, would go down in history as the first Asian-American President, thanks in no small part due to a Democratic move to allow non-nativeborn citizens to ascend to the Presidency (brought about after discussions involving the incorporation of Puerto Rico as a state).
In the insuing years the pattern reverted to form, with the Presidency and the Congress changing hands fluidly as it had in the latter half of the TwenCen. Much as the Republicans had realigned to a more focused and directed policy, so too did the Democrats, settling solidly on a bottom-up perspective: high quality of life for citizens would result in the success of the nation as a whole. Both Democrats and Republicans tend to run with their own particular suites of government platforms with differing foci. The days of talk of government reduction or dismantlement are long dead.
Reforms in immigration, education, healthcare, transport, social security, and drug reform (see below) undertaken during the Democratic Years, albeit generally piecemeal and spread out over time, have generally taken to being called the New New Deal or New Deal 2.0 in aggregate. As a result of these policies (and continued immigration), America remains dynamic
in a greying world and although its population is
not booming as much as some have predicted from promoting attracting the best and brightest, it is nonetheless seeing positive growth on most key metrics. With the growing threat of climate change, there is some talk of
current and former US territory incorporating as a new state, dubbed by some as "Pacifica."
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FOREIGN POLITICAL HISTORY
The United States remained the world's premiere power throughout the early 21st century, to the costernation and surprise of many a naysayer.A wide variety of assertions, like
the PRC's $123 trillion economy,
proved false and the
BRICS did not unseat the Western world's dominance American power
was not displaced worldwide by cheap Chinese credit or investment. Deep structural problems remained and continued to plague would-be aspirants to global leadership.
To be sure, the PRC was the first and foremost of America's partners, rivals, and sometimes-enemy during the period. But it didn't go
as predicted, because
the truth of a situation is often hard to discern, and a
number of misunderstandings colored the perceptions of the relationship. The US pursued its Pivot to Asia and doctrines of AirSea Battle and continued to press for the
uniform interpreation to UNCLOS in the and continued to build ties with regional partners, including South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and ASEAN through a variety of mechanisms including civilan ones such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and through military readiness and training exercises. Although there were a number of scares over inconsequential rocks such as the Spratleys and Senkakus, the Indian and Pacific saw a continued but gradual transfer and buildup of assets, eventually accounting for some 70-75% of US Navy and Marine assets under a watchful peace.
(At the risk of making a lot of suppositions about what the PRC player wants to do, I feel it important to point out the reality on the ground in so far as is prudent to the US. I haven't gotten into domestic trouble, social issues, environmental degredation, and academic/innovation issues. The PRC player is going to have a hard time.)
Despite leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, the US did not leave the Middle East or Indian Ocean area in any appreciable way, although its modus operandi did change. The Syrian Civil War was played out as several sides pursuing their interests by proxy, with the US directly supporting the rebels and
pushing the Saudi Arabians to back the rebels. That war would ultimately reach a bloody conclusion with Assad holed up in Alawite majority areas on the coast and the Sunnis in control elsewhere, with Iranian interests considerably weakened and Hezbollah discredited in the eyes of many. Iran itself proved a tougher nut to crack, although increasing pressure sanctions under resolute insistence Iran not be allowed nuclear weapons ultimately proved economically untennable for the regime there. In the various uphevals that followed, such as revived Kurdish nationalism, the US opted for a more behind-the-scenes approach. Ties with Israel remained on-again, off-again, although rumors circulated that President Clinton had privately threatened to axe all foreign aid if Israel did not stop making provocative moves in Gaza and the West Bank. A small shadow war raged in Yemen for awhile. In the subcontinent, America tried to woo India while at the same time half-heartedly trying to pass Pakistan off to the PRC, not that they wanted it either—in either event, relations with Pakistan chilled as those with India warmed, although the Indians always kept their distance. USN and USAF became ever more present sights within the Indian Ocean at large in various capacities, and Diego Garcia remained a key hub along with Ramstein and Guam.
The Pivot to Asia, although it did not signal the death knell for NATO, did signal its effective deprioritiziation. The
relationship had already been called into question during the first term of President Obama, and as the experiences in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria showed, NATO without US guidance was effectively dead in the water. Coupled with a consistent European refusal to spend at mandated defense levels, especially during the dark days of austerity, and a lack of an identified threat, the US let NATO's priority slip. Although the organization was not disbanded (particularly in light of continued failures by the EU to organize a Rapid Reaction Force), the US consolidated facilities and forces on the continent until eventually it retained a few scattered stations and its main hub in the region, Ramstein AB, Germany, which was simply too useful to the US and brought in too much commerce for Germany to be shut down. The US continued to coordinate with NATO members in terms of exercises, policy, equipment, and occasional facility use, but its occupying presence since 1945 was largely gone, as was the Two Ocean policy the US Navy had adopted since the dawn of the TwenCen: the oceans in question were now the Pacific and Indian, with the Atlantic merely something to patrol.
US treatment of Africa and Latin America remained much as it had for the past hundred years, involving mostly quiet backroom work with governments and foreign aid grants. There were notable exceptions, however, particularly in Mexico with the peak of the War on Drugs, and a final renormalization with Cuba after the death of the Castros and the establishment of a transitional government in 2019. The United States still very much sees itself as the underwriter, guarantor, and beneficiary of an integrated global economy and international political system, having built and maintained the status quo for almost 100 years.
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HISTORY OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM
As indicated by President Obama in May, 2013, the "perpetual" war on terror would essentially be concluded with the quintessential destruction and disruption of Al Qaeda. Guantanamo was shut down and the prisoners transfered elsewhere to no ill effect despite much screaming to the contrary. Although terrorist attacks and responses against them would continue and the United States would never return to a pre-9/11 environment, these military strikes ultimately transitioned through the shadow world of covert operations into paramilitary law enforcement operations largely overseen through law-enforcement agencies (i.e., the FBI, DHS, etc.) and conducted through international agencies (esp. INTERPOL), with terrorism being regarded as a high risk crime. Utilization of military assets in the conflict became rarer and was eventually generally reserved for imminent-threat situations, although the data collection mechanisms implemented to assist in such matters, such as PRISM and the older ECHELON network did not disappear. During the 2020s there was a notable uptick in domestic violence due to ever worsening far-right extremism that was reminiscent of events from the late 1980s and mid-1990s, although this has died down back to background noise.
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HISTORY OF THE WAR ON DRUGS
The War on Drugs, declared by President Nixon in 1971, took longer to end. The slow spread of marijuana decriminalization that occurred during the second term of President Obama continued under Hillary Clinton, and this combined with continued increases in the sophistication of major drug cartels and criminal organizations and the resultant violence finally reached a crescendo in 2026. With the increasing involvement of many assets primarily employed in tracking terrorists in anti-drug trafficking activities and with political support flagging, something had to give. Citing both the violence and the distorting effect the war had caused to the criminal justice system and American society at large, President Clinton called on Congress to take immediate action. In 2027, 56 years after it began, the War on Drugs ended with the decriminalization and regulation for possession of most previously controlled substances. The majority of these wound up being treated by the government as a source of revenue. The so-called prison-industrial complex did not go without a fight in Washington, but was ultimately the sacrifice on the alter to statistics and productivity. The follow-on effects are still rippling through society, but have yet to cause the kind of civilizational apocalypse that was feared for so long.
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TECHNOLOGICAL/CAPABILITY HISTORY
Ray Kurzweil's Singularity never came. Maybe it will eventually, but if it is then the predictive software isn't talking. Strong Artificial Intelligence proved harder to implement than predicted, with both bottom-up and top-down approaches stalling out; weak AI of some kind or another is ubiquitous and useful, but hardly plotting a revolution against its masters. The holy grail of nanotechnology—and the fear of gray goo—never really panned out as predicted; nanotech is a booming business, but reconciling "wet" and "dry" and self-replication and programming remain tremendous computational problems. Computers: Moore's Law finally died down and electronics hit hard physical limits around 2030, and the industry immediately exploded into specialty modules to tackle particular sorts of problems; optical computing, quantum computing, DNA computing. Cloud computing was the real innovation: instead of trying to cram as much power into a mobile device as possible, mobile devices instead could share time as terminal spokes on large, local (or distant) hubs that crunched the numbers. This was only possible with the rise of truly high-bandwidth networks. Cybernetics, at first crude but functional, and then increasingly chic, became normative. People weren't (generally) cutting their limbs off for enhancements, but they were getting implants to do this or that—mostly trivial things. Mind-machine interfaces are still developing, and software and privacy concerns are a big deal. Genetic-engineering is limited but around to stay. Longevity always seems right around the corner but it's generally accepted that the breakeven point is soon or has already arrived. The theory of the mind is likewise close, but a bit elusive. It's not quite cyberpunk, really more post-cyberpunk plus a little bit of biopunk, minus almost all the -punk. William Gibson would hate it.
As mentioned, America invested in a digital and later optical backbone system. High-speed rail and revitalized infrastructure were implemented in fits and starts but generally got done. The US played around with the idea of the LHC upgrade into the HL-LHC before restarting construction on the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. The US didn't return to the table on ITER or DEMO because it viewed them as no longer necessary (see below). American academia lead the field much as it had since WWII in many different fields. A consortium of American corporations occasionally goes out to lasso asteroids. NASA put Americans out maneuvering around asteroids themselves in 2024 and is gearing up for a Mars mission with some corporate backing by 2032. There's talk of putting together a space elevator on Jarvis Island. (And elsewhere, but this one would be purely American-owned and controlled.) But the fun stuff, as it tended to, fell out of the military-industrial complex.
The US Navy always had an appetite for power, and since the late 1980s had been funding
cold fusion research up until 2004. They occasionally played with it off and on, but never got anywhere with it. What did produce results was
the Polywell. After a hush-hush period from 2012-2014, the design finally managed to beat breakeven in a big way, and by 2015 USN was already quietly asking for funding to scale-up the design. They unveiled their prototype commercial-scale reactor in 2018, and although it wasn't quite ready for primetime in warships, the genie was out of the bottle. Energy-Matter Conversion Corporation was subject to a fierce bidding war by major nuclear conglomerates including Westinghouse Electric Company and Bechtel Corporation, which Bechtel eventually won. Talk immediately floated about the end of Global Climate Change but the new form of fusion was pricey and although the fuel wasn't helium-3 rare, boron-11 was still in short supply: Turkey had the look of a new resource superpower overnight, and suddenly the space program had some new objectives to reach for. It didn't save the world, but it was a way that eventually might. Inertial and magnetic fusion research continued on, including at the US's own National Ignition Facility, but with a proven solution in hand, suddenly pouring billions into blind R&D looked like a losing proposition. Fission died almost overnight, as did hydrogen fuel cells, which had never been a winning proposition anyway. Biofuels and renewables soldiered on as peak oil came and went, but miniturizing and commodifying fusion became the new holy grail.
The Navy had also been hard at work underwriting freedom of access and finding new ways to do it. Having experimented with Directed Energy Weapons since before Star Wars, US military contracters wheeled out a whirlwind of laser modules, from
FIRESTRIKE to
HELLADS to
LaWS. It was a sign of things to come, and eventually such military-grade lasers found their way onto everything from the Gerald R. Ford class supercarrier, to the
F-35 and AC-130, to ground-installations like Guam. Anti-Access Area-Denial (A2/AD) was dead by 2025: it didn't make sense to throw a million dollar missile at a target that could kill it for pennies on the kilowatt-hour. (Saturation attacks could still work, but at a mind-numbing cost).
Railguns built by General Atomics wound up being deployed on the Zumwalt class and its subsequent follow-ons. The US Navy as a whole, despite having dedicated itself to the carrier-model of fleet warfare, had always retained interest in updating the battleship, including the defunct
arsenal ship idea. With railguns providing remote bomardment capability equivalent to cruise missiles and lasers securing the sky and sea (albeit only effective at point-defense against
supercavitating torpedos), talk has resurfaced of resurrecting the battleship as a mobile area control system to compliment the Gerald R. Ford classes. So far it remains merely talk.
USAF likewise benefited from DEW advances, as well as burgeoning capabilities in the upper atmosphere and near-space. Vehicles such as the
X-37 and
X-51 paved the way for new capabilities in both regimes, that although not incorporated into the
Long Range Strike-Bomber (B-3) have supposedly been incorporated into the new secret competition for the
2037 bomber. Increasingly sophisticated fleets of drones and minor experimentation with orbital weapons (to some grumbling over the Outer Space Treaty) as well as a revitalization of something very much like the Strategic Defense Initiative have left some in Washington wondering if USAF, which is responsible for both air, space, and cyber warfare domains, might have too much on its plate, although with the ballistic missile arms of the nuclear triad on their way to obsolescence (and Global Zero still seemingly very far away), new delivery systems are a must. There are scattered reports, mostly evident through Congressional budget battles, that USAF and USN are having the National Laboratories investigate the possibility of yet another set of reliable replacement nuclear warheads—an open question is whether these would have fission primaries...
The Army and USMC experienced significant drawdowns in the years after Iraq and Afghanistan and although they did quite well in Pentagon politics during the reign of AirSea Battle, the 2020s saw them focus on improving flexibility and portability for the various brushfire conflicts and peacekeeping operations that they were routinely deployed to. In the realm of infantry technology, caseless
LSAT guns were a step forward for the infantryman, to eventually be augmented with
ETC pulse technology at every caliber and scale. The M1A3, some 15 tons lighter than the M1A2, wound up featuring an ETC gun, while plans for its replacement likely call for a railgun with a dedicated reactor. The appropriation of
explosively pumped flux compression generators has seen the rise of man-portable DEWs, although by their nature they tend to be disposable and single-shot, or of a limited number of uses.
Powered armor derived from early, clunky XOS, HULC, and BLEEX prototypes is still in the teething stages, although electromuscle and various material sciences technologies mean it's beginning to see widespread deployment to combat units. Auxilliary units remain largely "soft-skinned," although personal protection standards have significantly improved. Communication and coordination envisioned by precursor programs like
Land Warrior and
Future Force Warrior have become ubiquitous.