Evan Woods ©2026
In the future…
The electoral system has become a dysfunctional machine, unravelled by corruption and attacks on the entities that have championed its integrity it for hundreds of years, leaving the way open to dictatorial usurpers.
The United States has finally succeeded in first distancing, then alienating its allies with an insulting militaristic foreign policy imposed by a president obssessed with personal power. Internal feuds for and against this policy, along with reactions against this new dictatorship, cause fissures in every sector of the establishment.
The splits between the president’s demands and government departments’ need for consistency widen into open sniping, edging the US towards federal shutdown and eventually leaving the national system without guidance and sruggling to maintain necessary funding. Attempts to apply constitutional rules are met with anger and ridicule. Strange other-worldly messages are posted online from an unpredictable and menacing Oval Office.
Over several months, what little social infrastructure there is stutters to a crawl, mortgage and borrowing rates rise on a wave of perceived governmental and presidential instability, the military becomes confused and hard-pressed to understand what’s happening because of federal bickering. Unemployment goes through the roof. The president forces the Texas oil fields to close down in order to drive up the price of oil and line his own pockets through market manipulation. Fuel becomes rationed, lack of communication and transportation forces towns and cities to be abandoned. Border controls falter. The dictator insists that everything is better than ever, even through the fog of a failing system.
The president targets political opponents with personal attacks and his detractors begin to suffer suspicious fatal accidents. Heavily armed security services are dispatched to protests, shootings are the inevitable result. Amid a rash of assassination attempts the Oval Office is converted into a living space surrounded by defensive barriers, the underground bunker is prepared for occupation by the president’s family and his favourite acolytes. The president’s addresses to the public become random and inexplicable.
Unprovoked, the president orders troops equipped with rocket launchers to the Canadian border south of Montreal with orders to fire in an attempt to demoralise Canada’s government and citizens with a display of power. Recognising the total insanity of the situation the army has been drawn into, the General of the Armies refuses to obey the fire orders in the knowledge that he and his troops are likely to be accused of treason. Canadian authorities risk crossing the border to arrest the crews for their own safety.
Acting on information received from an agent in Washington, Britain’s MI5 uncovers a spy ring and thwarts a plot to change the outcome of a general election, capturing the cabal responsible. Under interrogation they produce evidence that their mission was instigated by the president of the USA. Britain closes all three American embassies and has the staff arrested. Belgium deports the staff from their American embassy. In a screaming fit of anger, the president retaliates with threats of military attacks on Britain and Europe.
Internationally, the country and its leadership is deemed unreliable. The stock market panic-crashes as US debt is called in by countries unwilling to continue underwriting the risk as the value of the dollar slides and its status as reserve currency is revoked. US banks attempt to draw in domestic debts to cover the action, straining intragovernmental loans which further weakens the already reduced funds available for public spending. All medical and food aid is suspended.
Billionaires, having accurately predicted their own futures and worried about the incoherent messages emanating from the White House, have been moving their wealth overseas for some time. Fearing rioting mobs, they transfer out every remaining trillion and flee to what they hope will be anonymous lives in parts unknown. Financial institutions become irrelevant and close down. The US hovers in the jaws of banktruptcy.
Technologically the rest of the world is already moving energy production to fusion power. The persistent reliance on fossil fuels means the US had to stockpile reserves against its own internally-generated EOW situation. The barter values for oil and coal are whatever users can trade for them as the dollar is as good as useless. Nuclear power stations are scrammed and abandoned by unpaid technicians. The military takes over and declares Marshal Law.
Under a barrage of weapons fired at the White House by the disaffected army, the presidential entourage retires permanently to their bunker leaving the country effectively leaderless. International trade dribbles away to nothing. The internet within the US drops into secure scattermode.
NATO is absorbed into a rapidly built European Alliance, freeing it up to introduce a new law allowing eviction of undesirable countries and uses it to expel the United States.
A spiteful Europe is reluctant to offer help to a detested country that was once a favoured ally. The eastern bloc, reducing its pressure elsewhere to save munitions and troops for whatever comes next, watches on. A handful of Middle Eastern countries celebrate the deterioration of the USA while others busy themselves realigning with Europe, Russia and China. China is encouraged to remain neutral by a pair of US nuclear-armed submarines patrolling the East China Sea, their crews working as a rogue navy without orders. Chinese authorities cut off the US embassy’s landlines and mutes their radio and satellite transmissions. Europe and the Middle Eastern nations engage isolated US bases in discussions to stand down and with no rational contact from their homeland, one by one they aquiesce with no blood spilled.
The Governor of Alaska, deeply troubled by debilitating political and practical knock-on effects, declares secession from the USA. Alaska joins with Canada, a country angered by years of hostile actions against it by its southern neighbour. A case is presented for Alaska to become a Canadian state to increase north America’s defensive capabilities against potential Russian invasion from across the Bering Strait.
Puerto Rico tentatively reaches out to its ancestral Europe with an appeal for a change of international status. Samoa and Hawaii rejoice in reimposing their national heritage.
The internet inside the US collapses completely, the country drops out of the world wide web and goes dark.
War breaks out between states with weaker states destroyed in the violence. The president issues kill orders to the National Guard which immediately breaks down into confused partisan factions before disbanding completely. Panicked by the president’s increasingly disturbed mental state his team and family indulge their natural tendencies to run and hide, abandoning the bunker to take their chances outside. They are pursued by a mob of citizens, captured within hours, tortured and executed.
The navy in the Pacific, operating with either very patchy, confused or no communications from the mainland, interprets its own procedures concentrating its attention outward threatening to sink any undentified vessel approaching the west coast.
Seizing the advantage Mexico retakes its old ground of southern California along with all of Arizona, New Mexico and half of Texas with ease but lacks the resources to move any further. Partisan squads defend the Texan oil fields but eventually run out of munitions and have to yield to the superior force. With all outside communications cut off and worried about the presence of the rogue nuclear subs in the East China Sea the US mission in Beijing sneaks a boat out under cover of darkness with the Ambassador on board broadcasting on a secure frequency. He manages to talk the commanders into standing down.
Without effective communication and transportation, food production breaks down and most crops wither in place. Tens of thousands of square miles of now-infertile wastelands become dotted with disease-ridden refugee camps, fed by rotting stumps of vegetation. Minor radiation leaks from shut down but untended power stations contaminate their local surroundings.
Small towns are abandoned. All major cities are speckled with the rotting corpses of people who, starving and with nothing left to live for, gave up living. Their bodies and former homes are picked over by roaming bands of desperate vagabonds.
Acknowledging the depth of trouble in the homeland, from his ship in the Pacific the Admiral of the Navy declares a pactum formalis with Hawaii, repositioning the island as its new official port and setting up office in Hilo.
The new vastly enlarged Canada succesfully defends north America from a Russian probe from the north and turns its attention to its disaster strewn southern neighbour.
A year has passed.
With the larder bare the US president, now a withered and nearly blind president-of-nothing unable to walk, drags himself hand over hand from the bunker. From behind the shattered overgrown barricades and the rubble of the White House, he screams horribly at shadows day and night, not understanding why no-one comes. The insane childlike screaming chokes to silence after a few days. No-one cares.
One hundred million have starved or died from disease or violence. The millions of survivors no longer care about nationality. The United States of America has been driven into the ground by its dictatorship and no longer matters, too far down the road to barbarism. The USA’s northern neighbour, along with European aid forces swoop unopposed to absorb the scraps into a new Atlantic Consortia formed of the enlarged Canadian state with Europe and Britain.
Russia, alarmed at what is perceived as a major escalation of western powers, prepares for a nuclear first strike but the old order is violently overthrown when moderate generals detonate a small thermobaric bomb destroying half the Kremlin and killing all those inside. They believe one madness is one too many and that the new Consortia will be less antagonistic as it consolidates than the old USA. Taking a realistic view of the future, the new Russian leadership exercises caution and diplomacy under the promise of the Atlantic Consortia standing down its captured mainland US nuclear threat capacity.
The new border with Mexico is agreed and ratified. With financial and technical assistance from the Consortia, a new Mexican company restarts commercial oil production in the Permian Basin, re-employing and granting Mexican nationality with all benefits to the people previously attempting to defend it.
The rebuilding and restructuring of the old USA as a democracy incorporated into the Atlantic Consortia, which now straddles half the planet, is in motion.
Debate and constructive forums between Russia, China and the Atlantic Consortia are called into action to usher in a new era of co-operation. Nations with a historical enmity to western ideals are invited to join the talks, though they have little doubt as to their positions in the new world order.
From this point forward the United States of America exists only in history.
.
Any resemblance to anyone living, dead or otherwise is purely coincidental.
Note: This story is nothing more than a work of fiction. Very unlikely to happen. Really, hardly at all. If something along these lines did happen the US doesn’t even have an empire to absorb the fall, just its own back yard and politically and financially, that might not be enough real estate to emerge from.