Chapter 16: The 2060s - A Golden Decade
World War III will affirm the position of the United States as the leading international power and North America as the center of gravity of the international system. It will affirm U.S. command of space and with it, reaffirm U.S. sea lane control. It also will begin to create a pattern the U.S. would depend on in the coming decades.
U.S. strategy will have been to prevent the emergence of any regional power in Eurasia. This will force the United States into a position of constantly intervening against emerging powers, because there is, in fact, no other regional force to play them off against. As a result, the United States will be involved in a series of spoiling attacks with weak or unreliable allies fighting rising powers. The result will be continual war, frequently involving U.S. troops.
The end of the First Space War, World War III or any of the other names given to the two year conflict, will create a new reality. Neither Japan nor Turkey will be destroyed although they will remain substantial, if diminished, powers. But the Japanese will now face a united China and Korea. There will be a three way balance of power in the region that will allow any of the players to defend themselves. Turkey will face a powerful Poland, absorbing directly into a federation parts of the Polish bloc that will be occupied (Hungary) or capitulated (Romania) to the Turks. The Turks and Poles will now balance each other, with India to the east of their holdings.
The most important outcome of the war will be a treaty that formally will cede the United States exclusive rights to militarize space. Other powers will be able to use space for non-military means and subject to U.S. inspection. This will be, in fact, merely the legal recognition of a military reality. The United States will defeat Japan and Turkey in space and will not let that power slip away. The treaty will also limit the number and type of hypersonic aircraft that Turkey and Japan can have, but it will be well understood that this will be unenforceable and merely a gratuitous humiliation victors enjoy imposing on the vanquished.
Poland will have been the most bitter participant in the war. The Chinese and Koreans will feel well rid of the Japanese, who will have lost an empire but will retain their country having suffered a few thousand casualties. Japan will be facing its population problems, but that will be the price of defeat. Turkey will still be the leader of the Islamic world, governing an empire made restive by defeat. But Poland will feel cheated.
Poland will have suffered the most in the war. Its territory will have been directly invaded by Germany and Turkey, its allies occupied. Its casualties will be in the tens of thousands, the result of civilian battle casualties from ground combat—house to house fighting in which armored infantrymen are safer than civilians. Its electrical system will have been shattered and with it Poland’s economy. Its enemy, Germany, will remain to the west, however weakened, while the Turks, beaten for the moment, will remain a few hundred miles south in the Balkans and in southern Russia. The Poles will have the port of Rijeka, and bases in Western Greece to protect it from the Turks and the entrance to the Adriatic. But the Turks will be still there and European history has a long perspective. Perhaps bitterest of all, Poland will be included among nations banned from the military use of space. The United States will make no exception to that.
In fact, the United States will be most uneasy about Poland after the war. Poland will have regained the empire it had in the 17th century and added to it. It will then hold Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia, the Ukraine, the Baltics and Belarus.
Poland will create a federal system of governance for its former allies and will directly rule Belarus. It will be economically weak, badly hurt by the war, but it will have the territory and time to recover.
The defeat of France and Germany by Poland will decisively shift power in Europe to the east. In a sense, the eclipse of Atlantic Europe that began in 1945 will complete itself in 2052. Poland will be the center of gravity of Europe. The United States won’t relish the long term implications of a vigorous, self-confident Poland dominating Europe. It therefore will encourage its closest ally, Britain, which will have thrown its weight decisively into the battle in America’s darkest hour, to increase its own economic and political influence on the continent. With western Europe in demographic and economic shambles, and fearing Polish power, they will willingly organize into a bloc oddly resembling the 20th century NATO, whose task it will be to rehabilitate western Europe and block Polish movement westward into Germany, Austria or Italy. The United States won’t join but clearly will encourage the formation.
Most interestingly, the Americans will move to improve their relations with the Turks. Given the rule Britain will lay out, that nations have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, the American interest will be to support the weaker power against the stronger, in order to maintain the balance of power. Turkey, understanding the long term potential power of Poland, will happily accept closer ties with Washington as a guarantee of its long-term survival.
Needless to say, the Poles will feel utterly betrayed by the Americans. But the Americans will learn. Rushing into battle may satisfy some urge, but managing the situation so that battles either won’t occur or will be fought by others is a much better solution. In supporting Britain and Turkey, the United States will move to create a European balance of power matching the Asian. The rest of the world will represent no coherent threat to the United States and, so long as it controls space, the United States will deal with any issues there that rise to a level requiring attention.
There are no permanent solutions to geopolitical problems. The only thing permanent is geopolitics. But for the moment, as was the case in the 1920s and 1990s, there will appear to be no serious challenges facing the United States, or at least none that will pose a direct threat. The United States will have learned that security is illusory, but for the moment will luxuriate in it.
The economic expansion of the 2040s won’t be interrupted by the war, in fact, it will expand dramatically. As we have seen over the centuries the United States has historically profited from major wars. Generally speaking, the United States will be physically untouched by World War III as increases in government spending stimulate the economy. Since the U.S. fights wars through technology, any war, or anticipation of war, against other nation-states will increase government expenditures on research and development. At the end of the war, a range of new technologies will be available for commercial exploitation. So we will see in the post war world, until about 2070, a period of dramatic economic growth, as well as social transformation.
Given the American fifty year cycle, the war will occur right in the center of the period, about twenty years into it. That will mean that the war occurs at the point at which the American internal cycle will be at its strongest. America’s population problems, never as severe as the rest of the world’s, will be well managed through immigration and the death of the boomers, relieving the pressure of graying. The balance between capital availability and demand for products will be intact and both will grow. America will be moving into a period of dramatic economic and therefore social transformation anyway. However, as with World War II, when a major war occurs in the early to mid stages of the cycle, the cycle is kicked into overdrive as soon as the economy adjusts from the immediate dislocations of war. That means that 2055 will be a jackpot year. It will be dead in the middle of the internal cycle that begins in 2030 and right after a victorious and technologically intensive war. In every sense of the term, the 15 years after the war will be an economic and technological golden age for the United States.
The United States will drop its defense expenditures after the collapse of the Russians in the 2030s and will raise them again dramatically as the global Cold War in the 2040s intensifies. Then during the war, America will engage in extraordinary feats of both research and development, and will put those developments into production. What would have taken years to do in a peace time economy will be done in months and even weeks in the wartime urgency following the annihilation of United States space forces.
America will have developed an obsession with space. In 1941 Pearl Harbor created a state of mind in the nation, and especially the military, that argued that a devastating attack might come at any moment, certainly when least expected. That mindset governed U.S. nuclear strategy for the next fifty years. A constantly unrelenting fear of surprise attack permeated military thinking and planning. That sensibility subsided after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thanksgiving Day, 2050, revived it. Fear of surprise attack again will become a national obsession, this time focused on space. Space will then become an obsession.
The threat will be very real. Control of space means the same thing strategically as control of the sea. Pearl Harbor nearly cost the United States control of the sea in 1941. Black Thanksgiving will almost cost the United States control of space. The obsessive fear of the unexpected combined with an obsessive focus on space means that enormous amounts of money will be spent on space.
The United States is going to construct a huge infrastructure in space which will range from satellites in low earth orbit, to manned space stations in geostationary orbit, to installations on the moon and satellites orbiting the moon. Many of the systems will be robotically maintained or will be themselves robots. The advances in robotics in the previous half century will now came together in space.
Most important, there will be troops in space. Their job will be to oversee the systems, since robotics, no matter how good, are far from perfect, and this is a matter of national survival. There will be space stations commanding and managing robotic systems, and there will be a range of systems operating from the surface of the moon. U.S. Space Forces, separated from the U.S. Air Force, will become the major service in terms of budget, if not men. A range of low cost launch vehicles, many derived from commercial versions developed by entrepreneurs, will be constantly shuttling from earth to space, and between the space based platforms.
The goal of this activity will be simple. The United States will want to guarantee enough robustness, redundancy and defense in depth that no power will ever again be able to eliminate U.S. space capabilities. Second, it will want to be in a position where it can shut down any attempt by another country to gain a toe hold in space against American wishes. Finally, it will want to have massive resources—including space based weapons, from missiles to new high energy beams—to control events on the surface of the earth. The United States will understand that it won’t be able to control certain threats such as the formation of coalitions or terrorism or others of this nature, from space. But it will be able to make certain that no other nation will have the ability to impose global hegemony from space or deny the U.S. opportunity for that.
The cost for building this kind of capability will be enormous. It will have almost no political opposition, will generate huge deficits and stimulate the American economy dramatically. Like the end of World War II, fear will override caution. And like World War II, the caution will be overdone. Critics, marginal and without influence, will say it is unnecessary and that it will bankrupt America leading to a depression. In fact it will surge the economic dramatically, as deficits in American history normally do, particularly during the center of cycles when the economy is robust.
The American obsession with space will intersect another intensifying problem: energy. During the war, the United States will invest huge amounts of money to solve the problem of delivering power to the battlefield from space. It will be uneconomical, primitive and wasteful, but it will work. It will power Allied forces in Poland in the face of the Turkish-German invasion. The military will see space based power generation as a solution to its massive logistical problem on the battlefield. Particularly with the introduction of high energy beams, the delivery of electricity in large quantities to power the systems will have become a massive problem. The military will be prepared, therefore, to underwrite the development of space based power generation, as a military necessity and Congress will be prepared to pay for it. It will be one of the lessons learned from the war—and it will instill a sense of urgency into the project.
There are two other episodes in American history that are instructive here. In 1956, the United States undertook to construct the interstate highway system. Dwight Eisenhower favored it for military reasons. As a junior officer he had tried to lead a convoy across the United States - it took months. In World War II he saw how the Germans had moved entire armies from the eastern front to the west to launch the Battle of the Bulge using German autobahns. He was struck by the difficulty of military transport across the United States.
The military reasons for the interstate system were compelling. But the civilian impacts were both unexpected and unintended. By reducing the time and cost of transportation, land outside of cities became usable. A massive decentralization of cities took place, leading to suburbs and the distribution of industry outside the urban areas. The interstate system reshaped the United States. Something built for military reasons wound up having a massive civilian impact. Except for the military reasons, it might not have been built or been economically feasible. With federal funding based on a military rationale, the basic cost was underwritten.