Imagine for a moment that it is the sooner-than-you-think future. China is richer and more powerful than America. They have also, by some dastardly means just short of war, managed to partition Alaska into two halves. (Presumably this happened because Sarah Palin wasn’t around to keep an eye on the Bering Strait.) America’s largest state is now split in two along a disputed and heavily armed border, and though the United States plainly considers this illegal and says so at every opportunity, the wider world derides it, subtly and less so, as a petty concern.
Add to that perpetual spring of outrage and humiliation an outright war in Mexico. Some other foreign power, for the sake of argument let’s say that it’s the European Union, is involved in a long and fruitless guerilla war there. And while the United States is nominally allied with them, it isn’t participating directly. Despite that, the war frequently spills over the border, causing havoc in the Southwest and turning a long and rugged swath of the country into a festering wound.
For years, the Europeans have been operating covertly in parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to attack what they say are Mexican guerillas who’ve fled over the border. In the process they routinely kill American citizens with airstrikes, totaling several thousand per year. They call these things accidents and offer apologies and compensation, but entire families have been wiped out. Cookie baking grandmas, working fathers, and their bubbly cheerleader daughters all dead because a single European pushed a button. Worse, these civilian deaths at the hands of an allied foreign power show no sign of slowing down, much less stopping.
The Europeans have promised to be out in a few years, once their puppet government in Mexico is stable enough to withstand the drug cartels that were the original rationale for their invasion. But progress is slow, and the new Mexican government is likely to be weak and corrupt. The European withdrawal seems unlikely to end the fighting, just European participation in it. Once they leave, Mexico is set to remain a collapsed and volatile country that will cause all kinds of headaches for America and her citizens.
Then just recently, EU gunships fired on an American border post near Douglas, Arizona, killing two dozen soldiers. The post was marked on EU maps, but the Europeans bombarded it from the air for two hours, claiming they took fire from the location. The American soldiers had strict orders not to fire, and the local commanders are swearing that they didn’t loose a shot. The Europeans offer a “full investigation”, but that’s a phrase that has lost all meaning after years of dead civilians.
How do you feel?
