A Historian Writes...

With hindsight, it is easy to overestimate the importance of the U.S. presidential election of 2004. The closeness of the vote on this occasion frequently leads historians to speak of the result as a “turning-point”, ignoring the equally close contests in 2000 and 2008, not to mention such pivotal events as the assassination of Vice-President Schwarzenegger in December 2013.

If the re-election of George W. Bush for his second term as President has a significance in terms of global history, it is that this, far more than his original accession to power, was the point when certain facts became clear to the traditional allies of the U.S.A. Namely, that not only was the behemothic American hegemony finally at the beginning of its long and agonising decline, but that it was determined to take as much of the rest of the world with it as possible.

Without the draconian restrictions on individuals' rights to freedom of movement, association and speech imposed during Bush II's first and second terms, it is difficult to imagine the American public tolerating the atrocities which would later be inflicted on the Constitution, particularly the abolition of the two-term limit which enabled incumbent Cal Douglas to have the Senate declare him President and Commander-in-Chief for life on 16 March 2041. Certainly the Bush administration's legacy included the makings of a totalitarian infrastructure which Douglas was readily able to devote to his “Bible First” agenda. Douglas's early Bible Education legislation, the Salvation Camps and ultimately the mercifully thwarted Armageddon Program, would all have been impossible without the legacy of the Bush administrations.

This legacy also included the network of large-scale overseas protectorates which the United States had been accumulating since the earliest years of the twenty-first century. Most of these puppet states were inspired at some time or other to follow the lead of Britain and Israel and to petition for full status as members of the Union, but America's overseas dominance had been increasingly matched by a virulent xenophobia which led many of its inhabitants to consider the loyalty of San Fransicans or New Yorkers as suspect, let alone Filipinos or Iraqis.

The U.S. empire had spread itself too widely: and with the steadily swelling cultural influence of China over the rest of the globe, and the emergent superstate of Dar-El-Islam, which had after all largely defined itself by its opposition to American ideology, it was inevitable that these foreign territories would fall. What seems more surprising is the subsequent fragmentation of the United States itself, into the balkanised and often competing territories we see today.

The two coasts, always more internationally-minded than the central states, fell under the relatively benign influence of pan-Pacific China and Islamised Europe respectively, and now form moderate buffer zones between the isolationist Southern and Northern United States and the rest of the world. Texas, which had always had hankerings towards independence, and California, which at the beginning of the War in 2053 had been 62% Hispanic, became sovereign nations, a status to which both Britain and Palestine reverted.

Historically speaking, the continental United States had been one of the largest unified territories ever to have existed: its breakup was, in retrospect, inevitable. To trace the current world order back to such a minor event as the re-election of a President who was, at worst, the enthusiastic tool of those more devious and ruthless than himself, is evidently simplistic. Nonetheless, a case can be made...

[From The Road to Disunion by Dorothea Siddiq, Professor of Infidel History at Oxford University (O.U.P., 2104)]