NationStates

In The Supreme A.I alt-canon, the US simply suffered a second great-depression due to the late-stage neoliberal decay of the US economy along with a sharp deterioration in race relations, a weakening of social cohesion and a rise in white-supremacist terrorism, all fueled by white paranoia and disenfranchisement among the white population created by poor economic conditions on the people from decades of neoliberal trickle-down economics and corporate monopolization along with the privatization of healthcare & education and reduced spending on social security, thus radicalizing white americans into white-supremacists that blame all the problems on immigrants, people-of-color, and made-up boogeymen such as 'cultural-marxists' and 'liberal commie-socialist-nazi globalists' and all them meaningless buzzwords rather than actually hunting down the actual source of the issue (late-stage capitalism, neoliberal decay, Republican Party, the evangelical right, the Alt-Right). In the end, following a devastating global recession that affects most of the western world, the US becomes an isolationist husk of its former self under an evangelical far-right regime, a broken divided police-state that faces daily protests and gun violence along with numerous counts of racial violence among the different racial groups. The ruling regime in the US yearns for the 'good ol' days' by invoking a romanticized imagery of the old days in America; a period where black people were either locked up in chains or segregated from the white population, a period where indigenous Native Americans were purposefully massacred by colonial settlers under the judeo-christian fantasy of 'Manifest Destiny' and the flimsy pseudoscience of 'racial-realism', a period where women were treated as second-class citizens and obedient house-drones, a period in which a group of foreign settlers revolted against the British Empire so they can take land for themselves instead in the name of 'freedom & liberty' (that's only given to the white settlers and not to anyone such as black slaves).

In this alt-canon, The Kangmukeli and the political-hardline establishment of Zhouran have designated this new USA as an 'international pariah state' and thus have placed extreme heavy sanctions on the already-weakened US. With the US no longer a superpower, Zhouran becomes the world's sole superpower with the world's largest economy. By the end of the 1970s, the Zhouranese economy became the second-largest in the world and during the start of the 1980s the country had been described as the world's third superpower; a non-aligned powerful alternative to both the US and the former Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended and the USSR collapsed in 1991, Zhouran and the US became the two remaining superpowers for the remainder of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century, although America's economic crisis was simply the result of America choking itself slowly to death with a rope for several decades. With the US experiencing intense unrest and an economy in shambles, the path to hyperpowerdom opens for the People's Republic of Zhouran while the US retreats into isolationism as US troops overseas are brought back home and US influence abroad wanes, however with Zhouran being the sole superpower this has led to increased competition and rivalry with a rising China, with many analysts in Zhouran and abroad fearing of a potential cold war brewing between the two Asian socialist giants.

The alt-canon is simply a work of fiction but the backstory is based on observation of current trends in the west, particularly the US...