Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Read Online Free Page B

tried to bluff it, but the boss saw the eye-twitch which gives everyone away when they lie.  Instead of using it to embarrass the President, the boss just drew a neat comparison with the League of Nations in the 1930s, and the useless UN now.  The President gave a little cough and invited the boss to see the garden.  I don’t think they mentioned the potential Caliphate military threat at all today.’
    The President and the Prime Minister had much in common.  Born only two years apart in the 2000s, each had a lawyer for a husband and both had two children of similar ages.  The strength of their cooperation would shortly be tested to destruction.
     

 
     
    Prelude: The View from the East
     
     
    I. RISING EMPIRES, WANING EMPIRES
     
    In her 2047 book, One Hundred Years of Change: The World from 1945 to 2045 , the historian Frieda Sauber says: ‘Each empire falls victim finally to the ultimate conceit: a sense that its superiority allows it to inflict its own methods of achievement on the rest of the world.  “If only the savages would do things the way we do them, they too could live as well as us!” goes the cry.  Thus it was with one of the shortest-lived empires in history: The United States of America.  In the first decades of the twenty-first century, when at the height of its power, the US sought to export its brand of restrictive capitalist democracy to the Middle East; to tens of millions of people who had never known it, and the vast majority of whom had shown no material desire to experience it.  Worse, the US did so at the point of a very powerful gun.  In a few short years, with staggering political incompetence and not a little military overkill, the US succeeded in turning vast swaths of the Middle East implacably against it.’
    She goes on to describe in great depth the machinations of the United States’ two adversaries, Russia and China, and how each methodically undermined whatever changes the US sought to effect beyond its own landmass.  But, as with the US overtaking the British Empire a hundred years earlier, informed observers realised that the US had already been eclipsed by China.  In the thirty years between 2020 and 2050, the Chinese economy grew 576%, while that of the US expanded a mere 44%.  The global economic crisis in the mid-2030s saw Beijing dump trillions of US debt bonds onto international markets, and on 1 January 2038 the Renminbi, or Chinese Yuan, replaced the US Dollar as the currency in which the worldwide price of a barrel of oil was calculated.  Chinese corporations expanded deeply into Africa, where they set about relieving hunger and poverty to a degree which the West had singularly failed to do in the preceding decades.  Brilliant young minds began to flock to the leading Chinese universities, untroubled by the absence of democracy.  Indeed, many returned to the West extolling the virtues of a fairer, managed economy with a stable dictatorship which, unfettered by concerns of losing power at the ballot box, could plan and implement long-term social goals that improved the lot of the bulk of its citizens.
    In The Chinese Miracle , US property mogul Felton Drake summarised the prevailing mood: ‘Stability is the driving force behind sociological progress.  What’s the point of changing left-wing or right-wing governments every few years, only so they can undo each other’s policies?  The Chinese have shown everyone what can be achieved in a modern society without the need for frequent elections.’  This book and Drake’s high media profile were instrumental in promoting the democracies’ slow but steady extension of the periods between elections.
    Russia, meanwhile, produced a string of progressively thuggish, dictatorial leaders whose pragmatism in both domestic and global affairs was unencumbered by morality.  In his book The 2036 Financial Crisis: Winners and Losers , Aiden Horrocks notes that Russian citizens were among the greatest sufferers