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by Reverend Norv » Sun Oct 26, 2025 8:01 am
Orostan wrote:Unfortunately, I cannot participate in this RP due to some real life problems cropping up.
by Sao Nova Europa » Tue Oct 28, 2025 11:44 am
Reverend Norv wrote:Orostan wrote:Unfortunately, I cannot participate in this RP due to some real life problems cropping up.
If Orostan is out, I'd be happy to take on the USA - I should have some extra time this week, so I can finally try to finish the app that died on the vine in the last iteration of this concept. It would be a switch from an extremely cynical vision of American power to an extremely idealistic one, but it seems like we are still early enough in this game for folks to adjust.
by Dragos Bee » Fri Oct 31, 2025 12:44 am
Reverend Norv wrote:Orostan wrote:Unfortunately, I cannot participate in this RP due to some real life problems cropping up.
If Orostan is out, I'd be happy to take on the USA - I should have some extra time this week, so I can finally try to finish the app that died on the vine in the last iteration of this concept. It would be a switch from an extremely cynical vision of American power to an extremely idealistic one, but it seems like we are still early enough in this game for folks to adjust.
by Dragos Bee » Fri Oct 31, 2025 12:47 am
APPLICATION
NS Name: Dragos Bee
RP Name: Kingdom of the Mapuche
Flag:
Capital:
Peruenco
Territory:
Population: 24,000,000, from an initial population of 800,000 back in 1930, where the first census was held.
Official Language(s): Mapuche, Spanish, Welsh, Hebrew.
Type of Government: Constitutional Monarchy
Head of State: Queen Millaray 'The Weaver' (Weaving is highly respected in Mapuche Culture).
Head of Government: Prime Minister Antiman
Legislature (the name of your national legislature): The Mapuche King/Queen's Assembly.
Legislative Houses (if your legislature is bicameral): N/A; we are Unicameral.
Party in Power: Mapuche Center Party
National Issues:
The Foriegn 'Homelands' - The Welsh in Patagonia were allowed autonomy and even privileges in exchange for staying and providing their expertise to the Mapuche Kingdom. While these privileges have been eroded in recent years, the Welsh still maintain a good amount of economic strength that has been seized on by certain demagogues as a reason to agitate against 'continuing white supremacy'.
Not just that, but a substantial amount of land in the east and south was ceded to the World Zionist Congress, gaining the latter's support but in exchange causing a surge of non-native immigration into those areas that has threatened the Mapuche's demographic hold over an area they have only liberated little more than a century ago.
This, in turn has made the Jews a target by Mapuche extremists... But the situation is different as the Jews have their own private military forces and many of them work as 'volunteer soldiers' alongside the Mapuche's own armies, nany of whom have learned to admire them...
A Newborn Nation - In the lands which the Mapuche hold as their own, young men and women have challenged old traditions, insisting on new, more modern values. Democracy, liberalism, and free markets merge with more authoritarian ideologies like Socialism and Fascism (with Whites replaced by Mapuche), providing a heady mix of intellectual ferment that has resulted in at least one student uprising in the past century...
Warding off the Reconquista - The Mapuche have roused the resentment of Chile and Argentina (or their counterparts in this universe), who initially refused to recognize the liberation of their ancestral territory and some of them still seek to return it to their yoke. Thus, as the Mapuche grow stronger, deterring the nearby nations from an invasion has taken up a large portion of its national project.
Public Goals: Survive and Thrive.
Private Goals: Keep the International Rules-based Order alive to create a political and diplomatic climate that will punish strong nations openly invading weak ones.
GDP (nominal): $800,000,000
Currency: Mapuche Peso
Economic System: Mixed Economy
Defense Budget (USD): $24,000,000
Alliance(s): United Nations-equivalent, NATO-equivalent, Non-Aligned Movement-equivalent.
Military: The Mapuche Armed Forces are oriented around defense and mobility, with heavy investment in mountaineers, armored vehicles, light artillery and airpower to the detirement of their navy and heavy artillery. A third focus is also their widespread use of 'Volunteer Soldiers' to work around the international bans on mercenary activity. These troops go around the world, fighting for both state actors allied with the Mapuche Kingdom, non-state actors with compatible ideologies (and rich natural resources), and International Institutions when they needed "peacekeepers".
The Mapuche Army is composed of 222,000 men (and an increasing number of women who defy cultural norms), with 240 Tanks, 480 APCs and IFVs, 140 Rocket Artillery, 40 Self-Propelled Guns, and 250 Anti-Aircraft Artillery and 50 Tank Destroyers. Trucks, Humvees, and other vehicles make up a full 4800 in total.
The Air Force is composed of 8000 people and 80 Combat Aircraft made in America, Europe, or East Asia, 40 Light Bombers, 28 Transport Planes, and 100 Attack Helicopters.
The Navy is a mere 2000 people, not including 8000 Marines, and have only 8 Coast Guard vessels and 2 Transport Ships, plus 2 Seaplane Tenders.
5000 to 15,000-strong detachments of the Army, plus some Marines, are regularly sent to serve as 'volunteers' overseas to gain combat experience and cold hard cash...
History:The defeat of Argentina in the Cisplatine and Platine War emboldened the remaining Mapuche in Patagonia, who found themselves gathering under the influence of a chieftain named Lautaro II, who had named himself after the famous Mapuche chieftain and liberator. Lautaro II accepted help from an opportunistic Brazil, help in the form of arms and ammuition, military trainers and even volunteers, and when he launched his uprising against both Argentina and Chile, he scored unexpected success as the thunder of Mapuche Cavalry was heard all across Patagonia once more. Lautaro II also showed his gifts as a statesman during the war, punishing atrocities against civilians, treating his prisoners of war well, and offering local communities of whites the opportunity to stay with a measure of autonomy.
But by far his greatest coup was offering land to the World Zionist Congress, offering them a large portion of his 'liberated territory' for a Jewish Homeland, and their accepting said offer. This opened up access to cash and financial resources he might not otherwise have had, as well as earning a lobby for his people on the international stage.
When the Liberation War ended in 1919, Lautaro II found himself the ruler of one of the first states to throw off colonial rule on any sort of lasting basis, and he was determined to keep his new Kingdom not just free, but also prosperous. In the short term, this meant accepting informal clientage to Brazil, and joining with whoever won the equivalents of the World Wars in exchange for cash and diplomatic concessions.
After the World Wars, the Mapuche had tensions with Argentina that resulted in an invasion in the mid-1950s that the US intervened to stop; this marked the accession of the Mapuche Kingdom as a US Treaty Ally and also committed the Mapuche to a course of opposition to colonialism and, in time, a path to gradual democratization.
This resulted in the Mapuche exporting 'volunteers' to decolonization struggles worldwide in the following decades, earning cash and raw materials. Some of them, however, brought Communism over to the Mapuche Kingdom, along with other ideologies like Capitalist Minarchism. As education advanced, demands grew for the Monarchy to liberalize and democratize, leading to student uprisings in the 1960s and 1980s, as well as in 1998 and 2004.
The last two resulted in concrete steps towards the establishment of a 'True' Democracy under Queen Millaraya, granddaughter of Lautaro II. For the past twenty to twenty-four years, the Mapuche have strengthened their institutions, even as the 'question' of the Welsh and Jewish Minorities came under increasing debate.
However, enough people among all sectors of Mapuche society remain confident in their new future...
RP Example(s): viewtopic.php?p=40391030#p40391030
Do not remove - 2025RP
by Reverend Norv » Sun Nov 02, 2025 7:58 am
APPLICATION
NS Name: Norv.
RP Name: The United States of America, or U.S.A.. Usually just the United States or U.S.. Often simply America. Colloquially, Americans will sometimes call their country just the States; in political contexts, they often refer to the Union or to the Republic. In Spanish, the unofficial second language of the U.S., the country is normally called los Estados Unidos.
Flag: The flag of the United States - sometimes called Old Glory, the Flower Flag, or the Jubilee Flag - is shown at top. The fifty-two stars represent the fifty-two states of the Union. Other key symbols include the bald eagle, the national animal; the national motto, E Pluribus Unum; Lady Liberty, the most common national personification; and the iconography of broken chains. Unusually, documents are the most important national symbols: the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and the Constitution. The national anthem is America the Beautiful, though usually only the third verse is actually sung:O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Capital: The federal political capital is the National Capital Service Area, located within the state of Washington, D.C. (Douglass Commonwealth). Despite the fact that Washington is now a state like any other, it still functions as a metonym for the federal government. New York City is broadly considered the nation's economic capital, while New York and Los Angeles each claims to serve as its cultural capital.
Territory:It is best to think of American territory not as lying within a fixed border, but as defined by a gradually waning sphere of influence. The center of this sphere - de jure American territory, what postcolonial theorists call the "metropole" - consists of the fifty-two states of the Union: the "lower forty-nine," plus the states of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. This is the United States as you will find it defined on a map.
Then there are the federal territories of the United States: the Indian Territory, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Most of these are Pacific or Caribbean islands - but the Indian Territory, located between Oklahoma and Arkansas, is the last refuge of meaningful native sovereignty in North America. Washington claims that the territorial status of all these areas is temporary, and will be resolved by referenda on either independence or statehood; in the meantime, they remain only partially self-governing, under federal "supervision." Their people, however, are full American citizens, with all the rights that go with that status. On most maps, these territories are also shown as part of the U.S. - they are distinguished by Congress's insistence that this situation is temporary. The territories are supervised by the Joint Committee on Insular Affairs (except for the Indian Territory, which is supervised by the House Committee on Indian Affairs).
A step further out, one finds the Freely Associated States, or FASs. Most of these are small Pacific islands: the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Samoa, and Tuvalu. But the FASs also include Liberia and Panama - Panamanian membership was the American condition for the return of the Panama Canal - and perhaps other small states. (Players are welcome to claim membership.) The FASs are tied to the United States by a "Compact of Free Association," or CFA. The U.S. military guarantees their security, and many FASs have no armed forces of their own. In return, the FASs allow American forces to operate freely, and they lease military bases to the U.S.. Beyond this, their citizens can live, work, and study in the States on the same terms as American citizens - without being eligible for conscription. The FASs are also duty-free zones for purposes of U.S. trade; they benefit from billions in U.S. subsidies; and the U.S. administers disaster relief, postal, weather, aviation, and telecommunications services. If this is a form of colonialism, it is a remarkably altruistic one; the U.S. spends at least twice as much on the FASs as it receives back in trade or other economic value. Like the territories, the FASs are managed by the Joint Committee on Insular Affairs.
A step further out from that, one finds the U.S. alliance system. These countries are quite free and sovereign, not U.S. territory in any ordinary sense - except, of course, that most of them provide military bases for the United States Armed Forces, which are pledged by treaty to protect them. The more than 700 U.S. military bases scattered around the world mostly owe their existence to this alliance network. Some partnerships are bilateral, based on a "special relationship" with particular countries. Others are multilateral: like the Chinese-led East Asia Treaty Organization (of which the U.S. is a full member), or the Atlantic Treaty Organization - which is the main vector for American influence in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. These countries serve to extend the diplomatic, logistical, military, and covert reach of the U.S. government around the globe. But though they may substantially rely on American forces for their defense, American allies are not mere puppets, and the U.S. is generally careful to treat them as equal partners. American relations with, and operations involving, the nation's treaty allies are coordinated by the Joint Select Committee for Global Security.
A step further out still, and one finds the shadowy penumbra of American "territory": the private holdings of U.S. corporations. These range from rubber plantations in Liberia to oilfields in Arabia to factories in China. These holdings are not formally U.S. territory, not even in the limited sense of a leased military base. But they can reach enormous size, and are sometimes de facto self-governing: corporate security guards replace police, and corporate benefits matter more than government welfare. As a result, for better or worse, the influence of American business is at least as globally dispersed as the influence of the U.S. government; and sometimes it can be a challenge - both for foreigners, and for Americans - to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Population: There are approximately 340 million United States citizens and permanent residents - including the populations of the insular territories and the Indian Territory. Approximately 11 million more people live in the Freely Associated States. (N.B.: this figure may need to be revised upward if other players are interested in adding to the number of FASs.) There are also between 10 and 12 million short-term or undocumented immigrants in the United States, approximately half of whom have pending or accepted applications for guest worker or Temporary Protected status.
Official Language(s): The United States has no formal national language, though more than twenty states have adopted English as their official language. Spanish is a co-official language in New Mexico (along with Navajo and Pueblo), and it is the official language of Puerto Rico. Hawaiian is an official language of the state of Hawaii; Alaska has recognized 20 native languages as co-official; French is co-official in Maine and Louisiana. Federal law requires all official proceedings and documents to be made available in both English and Spanish, but encourages state and local governments to go further: in California, for example, official documents are published in Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Persian, Russian, Vietnamese, and Thai. In the insular territories, Samoan, Chamorro, and Carolinian have official status alongside English. Cherokee, Choctaw, and Muscogee are official languages in the Indian Territory.Know each quiet act of dignity
Is that which fortifies
The soul of a nation
That never dies
Type of Government:The United States is among the world's oldest and most successful democratic republics: the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, and it has been a prototype for dozens of other republics around the globe. But it has also evolved, steadily and continuously, and often based on unspoken norms rather than constitutional amendments. From 1868 onward, the role of the American president has sharply diminished, and the power of Congress has greatly increased. As a result, the balance of power between three coequal branches has been replaced by a parliamentary system in all but name.~The Federal System~
The United States remains a federal system: a sovereign union of sovereign states. Under the Tenth Amendment, any powers that the Constitution does not expressly assign to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the people. For this reason, state and local governments exercise by far the greatest influence over most Americans' daily lives: local police enforce state criminal codes, local school boards and state education departments run schools, states maintain and plan their own local roads and light rail systems, states license professions and issue construction permits, and so on. For the average American, most of the policy issues about which he cares most are within the jurisdiction of the states. The principle of subsidiarity is deeply embedded in American political life: there is a broadly shared belief that public business should be conducted at the lowest level that permits both fairness and efficiency. Thus, even federal programs are often implemented by state officials, who are better acquainted with local conditions. This principle is also at work in Congress's administration of federal territories: although the territories are not constitutionally entitled to administer themselves, they have always had at least as much autonomy as states, simply because Washington normally prefers to leave them to their own devices. The Joint Committee on Insular Affairs takes a similar attitude toward the Freely Associated States: providing federal services and funding as required by the Compact, but otherwise avoiding interference in the domestic business of the FASs.
The main exception to this rule is found in the system of federal supervision - also known simply as Reconstruction. The Sixteenth Amendment (1874) requires the federal government to take affirmative steps to secure the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) - that is, the privileges and immunities of citizenship, and the equal protection of the law - to all American citizens. It effectively gives Congress a perpetual duty to protect Americans' civil rights. Therefore, whenever those rights are violated, Congress not only can but must preempt the authority of state governments, and directly administer whatever state agencies are necessary to protect the rights of citizens. After the Civil War, the states of the former Confederacy were federally supervised for a century, and Congress controlled everything from land and inheritance laws to election law. Since the 1960s, the extent of federal involvement has both diminished and expanded: most governmental functions in the South have returned to state control, but Congress has extended Reconstruction to northern and western states - mostly big cities - in an effort to address structural inequalities in health, housing, and education. But if Reconstruction tilts the federal balance of power decisively toward Washington, it is also a limited tool: because federal supervision can be used only to protect civil rights, and not for any other political priority.~The Congress~
Since the impeachment of President Johnson in 1868, a norm has evolved that the President serves at the pleasure of Congress; and whenever a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate can be persuaded that he is a failure, he will promptly be removed. For this reason, impeachment has come to serve effectively as a vote of no confidence, and the president has become merely a ceremonial head of state - not a truly coequal power. Congress, therefore, is by far the most powerful branch of the American government.
Congress remains bicameral. The 435 members of the House of Representatives are elected from equipopulational constituencies for two-year terms; the 104 members of the Senate are elected, two from each state, for six-year terms. Election laws are set by the states, albeit frequently under federal supervision to protect voting rights. Most states use some form of multi-winner proportional representation for House elections, and ranked-choice voting for the Senate. Elections are largely publicly funded, and corporate political spending is forbidden - but there are few limits on individual political spending, and so the wealthiest Americans still have a disproportionate influence on the composition of Congress.
In practice, Congress governs the country mostly by committee: because the whole legislature cannot vote on every action that needs to be taken, it uses parliamentary procedure to delegate. Thus, "select committees" responsible for foreign affairs and disaster relief and military operations - issues requiring swift and decisive action - have acquired the power to act on behalf of Congress as a whole: they make policy by "resolution" rather than by formal statute. Other committees, responsible for complex but not urgent questions, each draft a section of Congress's biannual omnibus bill; Congress then staples all the sections together and passes the entire bill into law, including each committee's agenda. Some committees - and, therefore, some authorities - are exclusive to one house or the other: the House Ways and Means Committee, for example, drafts the budget, while the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry writes the Farm Bill. But most committees - especially select committees - are joint in nature, with members from both the House and Senate.
Because committees run the government, the power to appoint legislators to committees is the power to control policy. This power is held by the Speaker of the House, who appoints all House members to their committees, and by the Senate Majority Leader, who appoints members of Senate committees. When the Senate and House are controlled by different parties, the Speaker of the House tends to dominate: because all members of joint committees, including Senators, require the consent of the Speaker in order to serve. Thus, the Speaker not only directly controls the House committees, but she also indirectly controls the joint committees, which wield the most important powers of government. But this does not entirely cure the dysfunction of having, for example, an agricultural policy set by a Republican Senate committee that is at cross purposes with an environmental policy set by a Radical House committee. Unified control of Congress is indispensable for efficient government.
Although the president is formally responsible for executing the laws, in practice Congress has acquired its own executive bureaucracy: the Congressional Administrative Service, or CAS. It is a professional civil service, whose members can be fired only for cause and are expected to remain rigorously apolitical. The president has delegated much of his executive authority to CAS (mostly because any president who refused to do so would be immediately impeached). CAS therefore acts with the president's executive authority, but its various departments report to congressional committees: the Medicare Services Administration, for example, reports to the Joint Committee on Health, and works to implement that committee's agenda. CAS also serves as the practical link between Congress and the states, assisting and supervising state administration of federally funded programs. Finally, CAS includes one quite special department: the Congressional Supervisory Service, more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau. The Bureau's core function is to mointor states' compliance with the Fourteenth Amendment; but in the service of this function, it has acquired extensive powers of physical, electronic, and digital surveillance. It is Congress' primary weapon against domestic extremism, and plays an important role in monitoring foreign misinformation and propaganda.
Beyond this, Congress has deliberately set certain agencies outside its own control, in order to prevent political interference. These include the Federal Elections Commission, the Federal Reserve System, the United States Information Service, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among others. Civil servants working in these independent agencies are also members of the Congressional Administrative Service, but they do not report to any Congressional committee. Rather, they nominate their own directors from within their own ranks, and the Senate need only confirm them; therefore, they are effectively self-governing. Some, like the Federal Reserve, even have their own sources of funding, which Congress has excluded from the conventional federal budget. The goal is to place those forms of public power most prone to political abuse - monetary policy, election administration, censorship, propaganda, and so on - outside the reach of political actors. Independent agencies play a vital role in the nation's stable, consistent governance.~The Federal Judiciary~
With the president reduced largely to a figurehead, it is the federal courts' power of judicial review that serves as the main check on Congress (and, together with Congress's power of federal supervision, on state governments as well). The federal courts can strike down any action of the Congressional Administrative Service as inconsistent with statute, and they can also void any federal or state statute that conflicts with the Constitution. The court system is an appellate hierarchy: cases are tried in the district courts and appealed to the circuit courts. Circuit court rulings can in turn be appealed to the Supreme Court, but only with that Court's own consent - it controls its docket. In principle, all federal judges - including Supreme Court justices - are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. In practice, the Judicial Nominations Act of 1947 requires the President to nominate judges from a list of lawyers supplied by the American Bar Association. Thus, it is really the legal profession itself that controls judicial appointments, and the President and Senate can only choose judges who already possess the support of the country's lawyers.
The mainstream constitutional theory that American courts apply is civic republicanism. American jurists believe that the Reconstruction amendments fundamentally rewrote the Constitution - they often call the period from 1865 to 1875 the "Second Founding" - to prioritize a vision of equal, participatory citizenship. Freedom, in this sense, is not the right to be left alone. Rather, liberty means non-domination: the right to have a say. Just as the slave has no say in anything that happens to him, the citizen must have a say in everything that happens to him. He may still be taxed, conscripted, or imprisoned - but not unless he has first had the chance to vote, or demonstrate for peace, or defend himself in court. And this chance to participate cannot be merely symbolic: it must be real and practical, with the power truly to change outcomes.
For this reason, the Fourteenth Amendment's "privileges and immunities of citizenship" are understood to include everything necessary for full political participation. This includes freedom of speech and assembly, of course, but it also includes the right to shelter and work and basic sustenance - because a truly destitute citizen cannot participate equally in the public business. The Sixteenth Amendment requires Congress to ensure that these privileges and immunities are actually provided, and for this reason the federal government is constitutionally obliged to provide public welfare; this is why the U.S. is sometimes described as constitutionally, and not merely politically, a social-democratic state. Likewise, the courts have interpreted the Sixteenth Amendment to require the federal government to curb those forms of private power that render citizens helpless or dependent, because such domination makes truly free political participation impossible; therefore, the U.S.'s strong labor unions and antitrust laws are a constitutional imperative, not a policy choice.
By hounding Congress to keep the promises made at the Second Founding, the courts have played a crucial role in America's long march toward social and economic justice. Where that march remains incomplete, though, the fault also lies with civic republican jurisprudence. Because American courts place such importance on equal citizenship, they have been slow to recognize the rights of noncitizens, and willing to countenance a variety of abuses toward foreigners and the undocumented.~The Presidency~
What then remains of the American presidency? Little practical power, that is sure. The president's role as the executive has mostly been transferred to the Congressional Administrative Service; his powers of foreign relations and judicial appointment have gone to congressional committees and the American Bar Association, respectively. His veto power remains, but to exercise it is an invitation to impeachment, and no president in sixty years has actually vetoed a bill. His status as commander-in-chief is but a theoretical one; the Joint Armed Services Select Committee actually controls the military on a day-to-day basis.
As a result, the president is really a ceremonial head of state: a kind of republican constitutional monarch. He serves two main purposes, which are in some tension with each other. First, he represents the nation: visiting disaster-struck areas, presenting civilian and military awards, calling attention to social ills, and so on. Second, because the president remains popularly elected, presidential elections have symbolic and political importance: they send a message about how the American people understand themselves and their values, and about how they want to be seen by the world. Thus, presidential elections serve as a valuable political safety valve: they divert the public's appetite for symbolic and cultural conflict, and this allows Congress - where the real power lies - to prioritize data and detail and compromise.
Head of State: The President of the United States is Jackson Callaghan. Elected in 2024 amid a sharp public backlash to illegal immigration, President Callaghan was previously an officer in the National Guard, a Republican congressman from Arizona, and a frequent conservative contributor to the "big three" news networks authorized by the Federal Communications Commission. His career really took off in the social media age, however, when he switched to the Democratic Party and began posting videos on Facebook and Twitter expressing the kind of incendiary opinions that the FCC would never allow on the television airwaves. By 2022, he was popular enough to win the Democratic nomination for president. He won a plurality of the popular vote and twenty states, with the others split between the Republicans and Radicals. Though effectively powerless, Callaghan has a reliable talent for provoking controversy and embarrassing the United States abroad. Still, mainstream members of Congress can comfort themselves that Callaghan's election is proof that the presidential "safety valve" is working as intended: Americans can make the powerless presidency the locus of their appetite for culture wars and symbolic gestures, and leave the legislature to get on with the business of running the country.
Head of Government: The Speaker of the House of Representatives directly controls appointments to House committees, and indirectly controls appointments to joint Congressional committees, and is therefore by a considerable margin the most powerful person in the American government - the real "Leader of the Free World." The current Speaker is Dr. Catherine Griffiths, of the Radical Party. Born into a coal-mining family in Kentucky, Dr. Griffiths volunteered for overseas duty during her conscript service and was wounded in Somalia in 1991. She then obtained a degree in economics from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Yale, and became a staff advisor to Radicals on the Joint Select Committee for Global Security. In 2000 she was elected to the House in her own right, from the safe Radical state of Massachusetts, and she has held her seat ever since. She became the House Majority Whip in 2008, and was primarily responsible for shepherding Speaker Obama's legislative agenda to passage. In 2020, the Radicals regained their majority after a four-year hiatus, and Dr. Griffiths was elected Speaker by her colleagues. She launched a new agenda - the "Covenant with Tomorrow" - intended to prepare the United States for a transition to a fully renewable and largely AI-driven economy. Dr. Griffiths has held on to the Speakership ever since, though her majority shrank to three seats after the 2024 election, and she must contend with an uneasy Radical-Republican "abolition coalition" in the Senate. Known as the consummate Washington insider, a lifelong political operative who understands every feint and trick of parliamentary procedure, Dr. Griffiths strives to be exactly what the world needs from America: a steady hand on the tiller of a global colossus, at a time of profound uncertainty and change.
Legislature: The United States Congress: the most important and active branch of the federal government, which has achieved the remarkable feat of leading the United States to the pinnacle of global power through that most maligned of all decision-making processes - government by committee.
Legislative Houses: The lower house, of 435 representatives elected for two-year terms from equipopulational constituencies, is the House of Representatives. The upper house, of 104 senators - two from each state - is the Senate. Each house is divided into committees which control certain areas of public policy. The most important authorities are entrusted to joint committees of members from both houses. Membership on these joint committees requires the consent of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, which makes the Speaker the de facto head of government of the United States.
Party in Power: The Radical Party controls the House, and therefore the Speakership, and therefore the most important levers of power in Congress. The Senate has no majority party, and so the Radicals and Republicans have formed their traditional "Abolition Coalition" in order to deny the Democrats access to power. The current Senate Majority Leader is Samuel Curtis, Republican of South Dakota. There are three major parties in the United States, and two minor ones; because most states use proportional representation for House elections, minor parties are better-represented in the House than in the Senate.National Issues:
- The Radical Party: Formed from the social-democratic wing of the Old Republican Party after the Woodall Crisis of 1877, the Radicals' traditional base is the unionized white working class and ethnic minorities; these voters made the Radicals the "natural governing party" of the United States for most of the twentieth century. The party retains a kind of revolutionary consciousness: for Radicals, Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms are a blueprint for a better world, universally true and very nearly sacred. The party is broadly social-democratic in its economics, and supports strong labor unions and aggressive antitrust enforcement. On religious issues, it is traditionalist, though not fiercely so; it opposed gay marriage, and many Radicals still have doubts about abortion rights. The Catholic Workers Movement exercises a strong influence on Radical positions in this regard. On racial issues, it is progressive: partly because race-conscious measures are mostly aimed at increasing minority representation in white-collar fields, and are therefore irrelevant to most white union workers. But on immigration, the Radicals are restrictionist: fearing that an influx of undocumented workers will undercut native-born wages. On foreign policy, the party is broadly hawkish and liberal-interventionist: it is the party of military force, regime change, alliances - and investment in the developing world. All of this flows from the Radicals' fundamental faith in their ideals - they are committed to a universal cause, not merely their own interests. They currently control the House, and therefore the most important levers of power in the U.S. government - albeit only by three seats.
- The Republican Party: Formed from the moderate and conservative wing of the Old Republican Party after the Woodall Crisis of 1877, the Republicans' traditional base is the northern and western white petit bourgeoisie - both urban and rural, and including many farmers. It broadly favors lower taxes, reduced regulation, and a more employer-friendly labor policy. On religious issues, it is more secular, and is traditionally supportive of abortion rights and the LGBT community. On racial issues, it is moderate: although it has always supported a civic republican vision of citizenship, it is mostly opposed to race-conscious measures like affirmative action. But on immigration, it tends to support an expanded guest worker program. On foreign policy, it tends to be less aggressive than the Radical Party; it seeks to uphold America's role in the world, but it is dubious about both humanitarian intervention and regime change. When neither the Republicans or the Radicals hold a majority in the House or Senate, they consistently share power - the "Abolition Coalition" - in order to keep the Democrats out of power. This coalition currently controls the Senate.
- The Democratic Party: The party of Dixie. It is the party of treason, in the eyes of most Americans; but in the eyes of about a third of the country, it is the party of dignity, and they will never vote for anyone else. Its base is Southern whites: a category that has expanded as poor Southerners migrated to the Southwest or Midwest, but retained their Democratic loyalties, and passed that allegiance on to their descendants. A minority of Southern whites has always identified with the Radical Party instead, and the primary determinant of this loyalty is union membership: union workers are much more likely to be Radicals than they are to be Democrats. The Democratic Party is fundamentally revisionist. It is opposed to the Union's civic-republican tradition, and committed to a classical liberalism defined by the right to be left alone - which can be a license to oppress others without interference from the state. Thus, it favors low taxes and the dismantling of the welfare state; it opposes abortion rights, gay marriage, transgender acceptance, and affirmative action; and it seeks a complete or near-complete ban on immigration. On foreign policy, the Democrats are mostly isolationist and protectionist; they blame the U.S.A.'s supposed friends overseas for the loss of American jobs. They currently control the ceremonial presidency of the United States, but they have never controlled either house of Congress: whenever the Democrats win a plurality, the Republicans and Radicals form an "Abolition Coalition" to keep them out of power. Many Americans suspect them of complicity with the Ku Klux Klan, or of acting as useful idiots for foreign powers. It is widely - and correctly - assumed that the Freedmen's Bureau regularly surveils Democratic politicians.
- The Socialist Party: The Socialists are one of the U.S.A.'s two minor parties - they normally hold only a few dozen seats in the House - but they can be important kingmakers in coalition negotiations. They draw their support from young, working-class voters - mostly in the service industries - who feel that America's Radical-aligned labor unions have failed to represent them. They are a straightforwardly left-wing party, still committed in theory to a syndicalist revolution and an end to private ownership of the means of production; they have recently argued that only such a radical transition can defeat market forces that offshore U.S. manufacturing jobs. On religious issues and racial issues alike, the party is firmly progressive: disdaining all appeals to the Yankee tradition of Christian abolitionism, and calling for open borders or quasi-open borders in the name of fellowship with all the workers of the world. On foreign policy, the party calls for an end to the Cold War, and rapprochement with socialist powers. They have often been reluctant coalition partners with the Radicals, and have relentlessly tried to pull the larger party to the left.
- The Libertarian Party: The second of the U.S.A.'s two minor parties, the Libertarians usually hold about a dozen House seats - mostly from states in the West and the Rocky Mountains. Though the party is often maligned as an auxiliary to the Democrats, Libertarian politics is based less on racial animus, and more on a hostility to government in its entirety. Their base is mostly ranchers and business owners, including some of Silicon Valley's greatest billionaires, and they are ideologically consistent: opposed to high taxes, government regulation, military spending, foreign interventionism, and nearly every other form of government action. They have found common cause with the Socialists in their enthusiasm for relaxed immigration enforcement, and with the Republicans in their opposition to overseas wars. They rarely form durable coalitions with any of the major parties, because they tend to feel that this would compromise their integrity. The Libertarian Party is significant less because of the seats that it wins, and more because its loyalists are among America's last persuadable voters: they can swing for the Radicals, Republicans, or Democrats depending on how well a campaign is run.
Public Goals:
- The Indispensable Nation: For well over half a century, the United States has been the lynchpin of global order. It is the largest military power on Earth; the U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency; the U.S. Navy guarantees free trade and free navigation on all five oceans. Whenever anything goes wrong, for anyone, anywhere in the world, the first question is: "What will the Americans do?" And this is not without reason. Militarily, the United States remains overwhelmingly preeminent; economically, it is rivaled only by its close ally, the Republic of China. But not even the world's leading superpower can do everything, everywhere, all at once. Holding the world together is gradually bleeding America white. Her treasure and blood go to endless foreign wars; her diplomatic capital is eroded every time she makes a well-intentioned but inevitable mistake; her talk of liberty and democracy seems to provoke as many foes as it reassures friends. And yet to surrender to isolationism, as President Callaghan and the Democrats would urge, is not an option: for the Union remains a cause and not merely a country, and that cause is the fight for human freedom in every land. Whether or not it has the strength to go on, the indispensable nation must find the will to go on: because it is better for America to fail than for her to quit.
- Bring Me Your Tired, Your Poor?: After eight years of record migration, it has become impossible to deny that undocumented immigration to the United States is among the nation's most pressing challenges. Every year, nearly two million people attempt to enter the United States illegally: either overstaying their visas, risking the dangerous journey across the southern border, or arriving by boat or ship along the coast. Many are fleeing persecution; some simply seek opportunity, like generations of immigrants before them. But the lived experience of mass migration - hundreds of foreigners simply appearing in a town, without explanation or justification - is panic-inducing for many Americans. And American blue-collar workers have reasonable fears that employers, by turning to immigrants who cannot join labor unions or demand a minimum wage, will drive wages down for everyone. The American judiciary's civic-republican jurisprudence is deeply focused on the privileges and immunities of citizenship, and so has little to say about the rights of noncitizens; and in this legal vacuum, the issue of immigration invites radical solutions. From xenophobic Democrats demanding mass deportations (which would crash the American economy) to socialists calling for open borders (which would also crash the American economy), no issue is so divisive and dangerous to the body politic as this one.
- "O I'm a Good Old Rebel": 161 years after the fall of the Confederacy, 104 years after federal troops withdrew from the first Southern state, and 58 years after the first Reconstruction programs in Chicago and Los Angeles, the United States still has not laid to rest the ghost of white supremacy. Reconstruction has been remarkably effective at erasing racial gaps in wealth and education, but that progress has not brought racial harmony. The Democratic Party remains the voice of Southern white identity. That identity - and its resentments - have spread: Southern white workers migrated to factories across the countries, and passed on their values to their children and grandchildren. With them spread the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations, which continue to target African-Americans and other ethnic and religious minorities. In Alabama and Mississippi, it is still not unusual to see Army conscripts protecting polling places every November; in Cincinnati just last month, a Special Intervention Unit of the Freedmen's Bureau raided a Klan safe house and shot dead six terrorists. All the real achievements of Reconstruction have only fanned the flame of white grievance, and so racial violence dwells in the shadow of racial justice. It is a problem that plagues the Union still.
- "One Useless Man Is a Disgrace, Two Become a Lawfirm, and Three or More Become a Congress": It is hard to imagine a more unlikely success in the history of human governance than the de facto parliamentary system that evolved in America after the Civil War. It is, quite literally, a government by committee - and not even by one committee, but by dozens, which Congressional leaders must herd toward some kind of common purpose. This is possible, barely, with a strong Speaker of the House and unified single-party control of both houses of Congress. But with a weak Speaker, or a divided Congress, the system is a recipe for chaos: House and Senate committees work at cross purposes on programs that are at best wasteful and duplicative, and at worst wholly incompatible. In 2026, the system functions neither at its best nor at its worst: Dr. Griffiths is a highly competent and effective Speaker, and while the Radicals control only the House, the "Abolition Coalition" in the Senate can usually find a modicum of common ground with House leadership. But with every election, America runs the risk of a truly divided Congress, and of the governmental paralysis that would likely result.
Private Goals: The public goals of the U.S. are quite sincerely held, and for the most part, America's private goals do not contradict them. Rather, these objectives are the necessary corollaries of Congress's public ambitions - the less savory conditions that must be met in order for America's leaders to achieve their aims.
- The World's Watchman: The United States believes in rules, and rules are only real if they apply to everybody. Freedom of navigation, guranteed by the U.S. Navy; free trade, mediated by international agreements and mediation; economic globalization, facilitated by the dollar's role as the global reserve currency; a worldwide minimum standard of human rights, violations of which trigger an organized international response. Washington wants nothing less than to impose order on history - to constrain all human events within the limits of what is legitimate, reasonable, legal. This is the essence of the vaunted "liberal world order" about which American legislators and staffers speak so much, and which the United States has spent so much blood and treasure in attempting to enforce. Even now, the vast power of the United States is bent primarily toward this goal: not to force the nations of the world into obedience to Washington, but to make a single set of rules and norms the unexamined, naturally assumed foundation of all world affairs.
- Bury the Twentieth Century: The great challenge to this project is the failed ideologies of the twentieth century: communism, fascism, naked imperialism. From London to Tokyo, these ideologies categorically refuse to recognize any constraint on national policy save power alone. Nations who follow such twisted ideals refuse to play by America's rules. These states also know, for the most part, that they cannot challenge the United States directly; but each of them in its own way frays the fabric of the liberal global order, as a pack of hounds hold a bear at bay. For its part, the United States is constantly seeking ways to undermine and divide and destabilize and ultimately destroy these regimes. One cannot live and let live with lawlessness. And though Washington is rarely willing to risk open confrontation and nuclear armageddon, it is determined to accelerate the progress of tyrannical regimes toward what must be, in the eyes of Congress, their inevitable fate: a final collapse from within.
- Reconstruction: Reconstruction is many things: a system of military occupation that governed the South in the late nineteenth century; an expression of Congress's 16th Amendment duty to uphold civil rights; a project of securing equal citizenship by correcting historical wrongs. Perhaps most fundamentally, it is a national narrative: a belief that the United States was founded in sin, but redeemed by the Civil War, and that the sacred mission of government is to complete that redemption by erasing the lingering inequalities left over from slavery. Americans may disagree about how to pursue that mission, or about how close the country has come to accomplishing it. But only a minority would deny either the legitimacy or the profound importance of Reconstruction as an overarching project. The most important domestic-policy goal of the Republic, then, is to secure truly equal citizenship for all: to ensure that all Americans, regardless of race or creed, have equal access to the privileges and immunities necessary for their full political participation.
- The Hour of Decision: The most perceptive thinkers in Congress agree that the twenty-first century represents a civilizational hinge point, an hour of decision of the sort that comes once in a millennium. Humanity faces two existential challenges: climate change and artificial intelligence. The United States is determined to lead on both issues - not just in order to ensure a future for humanity, but in order to define that future in terms of humane and democratic values. The U.S. hosts an annual World Climate Conference in Chicago, and it has made climate policy a central part of its diplomacy: every U.S. embassy has an office of environmental coordination, which offers the host nation technical and financial support for projects intended to reduce emissions. The U.S. also attempts to lead by example: a web of nuclear power plants, offshore wind farms, and California solar arrays have supplanted its legacy coal industry, though natural gas remains an important fossil fuel. And a carbon cap-and-trade system means that the most efficient and dynamic businesses in America are also the greenest. For A.I., on the other hand - which was first invented by U.S. companies in Silicon Valley - Congress has sought to embrace technology's potential while mitigating its risks. The Senate Committee on Education has funded new degree programs at American universities, intended to prepare for a future where most work is done by A.I under human supervision. Congress has required commercial A.I.s to pass increasingly rigorous "anti-sandbagging" tests, intended to ensure the A.I.s are not deceiving users. And the Joint Committee on Civil Rights has recently tasked the Freedmen's Bureau with deciding if and when an A.I. is sufficiently sentient that use of it violates the Thirteenth Amendment - the prohibition on slavery. Abroad, Congress has sought to tightly control the spread of A.I. technology: both in order to prevent it falling into the hands of America's rivals, and to avoid an A.I. arms race with otherwise friendly states like China. The long-term goal is spectacular in its ambition: to save the planet for future generations, and to usher in a new era of unprecedented leisure and prosperity.
- The Final Frontier: Congress mostly understands that American global leadership relies just as much on stories as on money or power. Money can buy loyalty; power can coerce obedience; but to win admiration, you have to do something worth admiring. That is why Speaker Griffiths has made NASA and space exploration once again a priority for the U.S.: in space, America becomes not just a nation like others, but the representative of all mankind. A manned mission to Mars is expected this year, and a permanent space station around the moon by 2030. The U.S. has been careful to treat its space program as an international project: one astronaut on every NASA crew is usually a foreigner. And Congress values the space program not only for what it may one day achieve, but also for the message that it sends to the world in the present - that America seeks not to dominate, but to lead humanity into a new and wider universe of possibility.
Do not remove - 2025RP
- Hold the Line: The liberal international order benefits many countries; often, small democracies gain even more from it than great powers. But no one except the United States has the strength and the commitment to uphold a rules-based order around the globe. Thus, for everyone's good, America must remain the world's preeminent superpower. To yield that spot, even to a relative friend like China, would mean the end of a particular vision of international order, and calamity for all who rely upon it. So the U.S. will not surrender any of its sources of international control: not its trillion-dollar military machine, not the dollar's role as the global reserve currency, not the complex web of treaty alliances that seeks to encircle America's adversaries. The moment is too dangerous for America to give away any of her power - not when she might need every ounce of her might, in order to save the world.
- To Win Without Fighting: But here lies a paradox: global power can be maintained best when it is least visible. Nobody likes a bully. For the U.S. to swagger, coerce, act unilaterally - this only breeds the kind of resentment that will surely erode U.S. influence. Real victory lies in defeating one's enemies without alienating one's allies. So even as Dr. Griffiths speaks in ringing tones of American global leadership, when it comes time for the U.S. to act for real, she is careful to seek consensus and to move as part of a coalition. This is true when it comes to the use of military force, but also when it comes to economic sanctions or environmental treaties or human rights policy. The ends of U.S. policy are public, but the means are often oblique, and this obliqueness serves an end of a different kind: the goal of making American power as unobnoxious as possible - and, therefore, as legitimate as possible - to the rest of the world.
- An Invisible Empire: American global influence is at least as much a product of private power as of public power: American companies own mines, factories, refineries, and investments on every continent. American movies and music are a key soft-power asset. And so American influence and prosperity require an interconnected world: when countries become more open to foreign investment and media, it is the United States that stands to benefit most. Many of the more technical, less obvious vectors of American power - from the Voice of America to the Development Finance Corporation - are therefore bent toward creating a more open world: a world where no country can seal itself off from Steven Spielberg, Taylor Swift - or J.P. Morgan Chase.
by Reverend Norv » Sun Nov 02, 2025 7:59 am
APPLICATION
NS Name: Norv.Each generation from the plains to distant shore
With the gifts they were given
Were determined
To leave more
GDP (nominal): $27.72 trillion: the world's largest economy by a considerable margin, and growing by 2.5 to 3 percent per year.
Currency: The United States dollar. The dollar is the unofficial global reserve currency, and plays a key role in American economic power. Most currencies have value on international markets largely to the extent that they can be traded for, or offset by, dollars. Because American sanctions cut off the flow of dollars, they therefore have a unique impact on global trade. The dollar's reserve status also means that the majority of sovereign debt is denominated in dollars. This makes the U.S. debt much more stable (because it avoids a currency crisis), and it gives foreign governments an interest in the dollar's stability (because rapid changes in its value could plunge them into a currency crisis). The dollar, in these ways and many more, is not merely a national currency; it is the common denominator of the globalized world economy.
Economic System:The United States is a social-democratic capitalist economy. Ever since Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal, Congress has taken an explicitly civic republican approach to economic policy: economic growth is not an end in itself, but a means to the end of creating a republic of free and equal citizens. The goal is a country free of economic domination and dependence, in which neither the government, nor any employer, can use economic power as a form of coercion. This is why, for example, American economic policy prioritizes homeownership and is hostile to landlords - because how can you be truly free when even your home belongs to someone else? Liberty and dignity, not wealth, is the object of American economic policymaking.
This has a variety of implications. First, it means that American law strongly protects the right of workers to organize, bargain, and strike. Within a capitalist system, strong unions are the only way to prevent the domination of workers by bosses. Nearly sixty percent of American workers are unionized; sectoral bargaining is common; workplaces can be organized easily and simply, by a single secret ballot; and closed shops are both permitted and common. (This is not thought to violate civic republican principles, because workers who opposed unionization had a fair chance to argue their side before a free election; liberty is the right to participate, not the right to reject outcomes.) Congress has delegated to the unions the power to administer a wide variety of social welfare programs for their members. This accords with American ideals of subsidiarity, and it represents an effort to avoid rendering workers dependent on government aid: rather than becoming wards of the state, they control their own welfare programs through their unions. Thus, most American workers derive their retirement pensions, family and maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, and education savings accounts from their unions: funded by contributions from the federal government, the employer, and the union itself.
The union system is backstopped by a universal welfare state. The central pillar of this system is Medicare, America's single-payer government health insurer, which covers all Americans - whether or not they belong to a union. America's health care providers, while not government employees, are reimbursed primarily by Medicare, and Medicare sets the price of care. (Private insurance is also available, and is sometimes used to cover elective care that Medicare judges to be unnecessary.) Other programs are specific to ununionized Americans, and represent a public equivalent of union-run benefits: these include Social Security pensions, family and medical leave, education savings accounts, and a Universal Basic Income sufficient to survive brief unemployment. These programs are not means-tested: they are understood as an entitlement of citizenship, not a form of charity to those in need. But they do come with strings attached. Housing benefits, for example, are not money for rent: rather, the government will literally build you a house. But you have to help, investing 400 hours of "sweat equity" into building the home. Likewise, eligibility for Universal Basic Income requires either employment, disability, or enrollment in some kind of educational or vocational program: the government will not subsidize voluntary idleness.
Here, it is worth pausing to discuss the American system of higher education: which is among the country's greatest economic assets, its engine of cutting-edge research, and a cornerstone of American prestige and influence in the world of ideas. There are 1,626 public universities in America, and 1,754 private ones. The ranks of the country's finest schools include both private universities (like Harvard) and public ones (like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Higher education in the United States is funded through a system of education savings accounts, which are run by the unions (for union families) and by the federal government (for everyone else). These accounts are opened whenever a child is born. For the next twenty years, the government pays into the account. Every public university is required to accept the balance of the account, as of the child's twentieth birthday, as full tuition for four years of college. But parents can also pay extra money into the education savings account, and the government will match those funds dollar for dollar. This allows families of relatively modest means, who are willing to invest in their children's education, to pay the higher tuition demanded by many private colleges. Education savings accounts can only be used for university tuition, but they remain with a citizen throughout his life; he can go back to school at forty, and the account will still be there to pay for it. Post-graduate education - law school, medical school, and doctoral programs - are financed differently. Many graduate students receive stipends or teaching positions; others pay their own way; others agree to work for the government for five years after finishing their degrees, in return for which Congress pays their full tuition. The result, overall, is a system in which not every university is financially available to every family; but every American can afford to go to college somewhere.
Civic republican ideals are also responsible for the American economy's distinctive structure: extremely aggressive antitrust laws prevent the monopolization of economic power in too few hands. The goal is to prevent the kind of concentration of wealth that leads inevitably to economic coercion. Unusually, antitrust laws apply not just horizontally (no one company can control too much of a market), but also vertically (a company cannot control every stage of its own supply chain). This has led to the development of a distinctively, iconically American business model: the "Main Street company," or simply the "Main Street." A traditional Main Street is a medium-sized business, with fewer than 500 employees and with revenues of less than 50 million dollars. It is hyperspecialized: the typical Main Street is a manufacturing firm that builds one particular component of an aircraft engine, or a pharmaceutical company that offers a single, constantly updated vaccine. Success thus relies on learning to be the best in the world at one particular thing, achieving great efficiency and economy of scale (because you are not trying to do anything else), and exploiting that efficiency to outcompete less specialized foreign companies. Ultimately, the goal is to corner the global market for your very specific product. The country's roughly 13 million Main Street companies explain why American manufacturing has thrived despite globalization and free trade: it relies on expertise and hyperspecialization, not low wages and mass production.
Beyond this, Main Streets are essential not just to American prosperity, but also to American life - because they are founded on relationships. They are generational: ownership passes through families, and workers' children often succeed them at the same company. Thus, although Main Streets are traditionally unionized, relationships between labor and management tend to be personal and not just economic: bosses should know the names of their workers' children. The goal is not to get rich quick - hyperspecialization makes this impossible anyway - but to achieve long-term and consistent success: to leave a company for the next generation. And, as their moniker suggests, Main Streets are the economic backbone of America's small and medium-sized towns: a Main Street usually has all its operations in a single county. The business is deeply rooted in a particular community, and it often reinvests its profits primarily into that community. Social responsibility is not optional - it is a cultural requirement for respectability.
These dynamics play out differently in each sector of the American economy. The primary sector is a good example. There, Main Streets are less common in the mining industry, where small-scale hyperspecialization is impossible. But they are quite common in agriculture, forestry, and fishing. Family farms have survived in part thanks to generous government subsidies, but also in part by adopting high technology and hyperspecialization: growing only a particular strand of carefully genetically engineered tomatoes, for example, in hothouse conditions designed to produce the best flavor. The result is a very diversified agricultural sector, with millions of farmers trying to isolate a particular market niche. But when you add all those farmers together, the result is still an agricultural colossus: the U.S. is the world's third-largest agricultural producer, and American farmers regularly produce far more food than customers - domestically or abroad - can actually consume. This overproduction is subsidized by Congress, which buys the excess to fund USAID's global food programs: the world's largest source of food aid to starving people.
The paradigmatic Main Street firm is a manufacturing company. Because of American vertical antitrust laws, the major manufacturers - Ford, Boeing, General Electric, and so on - must rely on smaller, specialized producers for components. Every modern Ford car, for example, contains thousands of parts produced not by Ford, but by a myriad of Main Street manufacturers. And it is these manufacturers, not the Fords and Boeings, that have kept the American manufacturing sector competitive: because their hyperspecialization allows them to outcompete foreign firms, and ensure that German and Chinese cars (or planes, or computers) also contain parts made on an American Main Street. As a result, manufacturing still accounts for 30 percent of America's gross domestic product. This dynamic is especially visible in three industries. In military manufacturing, where U.S. federal spending drives revenue and quality matters more than cost, the Main Streets are foundational: assembling the thousands of different components, from the pieces of an AESA radar to carbon nanotube epoxy and Luneberg lens reflectors, that Lockheed buys to build each F-35 fighter jet. In renewable energy, the Main Streets play a similar role: specializing in specific components of photovoltaic cells or wind turbines or Generation III+ nuclear reactors. Westinghouse and General Electric then take advantage of the abundance of cheap, high-quality components to assemble and sell the finished products. This is the process by which renewables in the U.S. have achieved outcompeted coal and achieved grid parity with natural gas. And perhaps the most iconic example of Main Street manufacturing prowess is the American semiconductor industry: by relying on high technology and expertly trained workers, hyperspecialized American foundries have become the basis of the supply chain not only for Silicon Valley, but for many other technology companies around the world. Semiconductors are a perfect example of the Main Street model at work: specialized expertise and decades of experience matter more than raw scale, and so a medium-sized company that does only one thing really well can become a foundational cornerstone of the world economy.
Finally, in the tertiary sector, Main Street firms remain crucial to America's intellectual-property industries. The giants of Silicon Valley - Apple, Microsoft, and so on - rely on Main Street firms not only for the semiconductors that build their devices, but also for much of their software and programming. A new iPhone, for example, is conceptualized by Apple; but its programming is designed under contract by dozens of smaller, specialized firms - and thousands more code the third-party apps that the iPhone actually runs. This is the process that has made American information technology ubiquitous around the world. It has also pushed American companies to the forefront of A.I. innovation. Few engineers understand large language models better than the workers at the specialized A.I firms that built the first examples back in 2016 - because those engineers have spent the last decade focused on nothing else. A similar dynamic prevails in the pharmaceutical industry, where large distributors rely on smaller firms to innovate and produce each highly specialized medicine or vaccine; Main Street pharmaceutical companies usually produce only a single therapy, and their business relies upon perfecting it beyond the reach of competitors. Even in Hollywood and Memphis, the capitals of the American film and television and music industries, Main Streets have a part to play: they provide the production skills, from sets and costumes to marketing and computer-generated special effects, that have helped to make American entertainment ubiquitous around the globe. Of America's major tertiary industries, only finance does not rely on the Main Street model. But even there, the model's influence is felt. Because Main Street businesses are the backbone of the American economy, Wall Street's most crucial role is reinvesting their surplus profits - both in larger, publicly traded American companies, and in overseas markets. Although the financiers grow wealthy in the process, they are ultimately middlemen for the Main Street firms driving American innovation and prosperity.Valiant battles fought together
Acts of conscience fought alone
These are the seeds
From which America has grown
Defense Budget (USD): $1 trillion, or 3.6 percent of GDP. The National Preparedness Act of 2022 requires Congress to spend at least $1 trillion on defense per year until 2030 or until the Act is repealed (whichever is sooner), in order to modernize U.S. forces for a new age of drone, cyber, and hybrid warfare against near-peer competitors.
Alliance(s):The grand strategy of the United States relies upon alliances. Only through alliances can the U.S. establish its global leadership as legitimate, and its enemies as "rogue states"; alliances turn great-power realpolitik into international order, and place force at the service of principle. In Washington's ideal world, nearly everyone would be a U.S. ally, and a web of overlapping treaties would make war unthinkable.
Thus, the Atlantic Treaty Organization (ATO) plays a key role in U.S. policy. This is an American-led mutual defense pact of states in Europe, Africa, and the Americas; membership is open to all non-communist, non-fascist governments. It is the most important vector of American power in containing both nationalist revanchism and communist revolution.
In addition to ATO, the United States maintains a myriad of bilateral and multilateral alliances. These include the Gulf Security Conference, which organizes U.S. allies in the Middle East; and the Coordinated Committees for National Liberation, more commonly known as the Boston Group: a collection of governments-in-exile and resistance movements recognized by the United States as the legitimate national representatives of occupied peoples.
This complex web of alliances - which presents Congress with many different overlapping obligations, some of which are in tension with each other - is managed by the Joint Select Committee for Global Security. This committee of Congress is responsible for trying to prevent conflict between U.S. allies; for deciding when and where to deploy American forces; and for choosing the Republic's overarching strategic objectives. As its name suggests, the committee sees America's alliances as elements of a unified system that guarantees global order, not as discrete contracts between sovereign states. And so there is no conflict, anywhere on Earth, that does not in some way concern the Joint Select Committee for Global Security.
Military:The United States Armed Forces are a trillion-dollar military behemoth: 1.3 million active-duty military professionals, 900,000 reservists, and another 900,000 civilian support staff. In addition to these professionals, every able-bodied American performs two years of national service (usually at ages 18 and 19), and the military remains the default form of national service. The five armed forces (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space and Cyber Force) are organized under the Congressional Secretariat for Defense (CSD, or simply the "Secretariat") - a branch of the Congressional Administrative Service. The Secretariat has its headquarters at the Pentagon, the world's largest office building, across the Potomac River from the National Capital Services Area. The Secretariat answers variously to the Joint Committee on the Armed Forces (which controls recruiting/training and procurement - the "generating force") and to the Joint Select Committee for Global Security (which controls strategy and operations - the "operational force"). In concert with the Joint Chiefs of Staff - the military's seniormost officers - the Secretariat implements congressional policy across the Armed Forces. Actual military operations are usually entrusted to the combatant commands - AFRICOM, CENTCOM, EUCOM, INDOPACOM, NORTHCOM, and SOUTHCOM - each of which controls all U.S. forces assigned to a region of the world. The president remains the ceremonial commander-in-chief, but has delegated all practical control of the military to Congress.
The Armed Forces serve a variety of purposes. The United States is at scant risk of invasion, and so the U.S. military has long been expeditionary in its orientation: it is designed to project power across the world. It protects American allies, deters aggression by American adversaries, and intervenes to protect civilians or topple dictators or kill terrorists. Expeditionary operations are guided by two core strategic principles. The first is the Global Security Strategy, which is updated every year by the Joint Select Committee on Global Security, and which expresses Congress's strategic priorities: the "why" of military operations. It identifies key threats, and sets goals for variously containing, isolating, dividing, or degrading them. All non-humanitarian U.S. military operations must serve this strategy. The second core strategic principle of the Secretariat is the Powell Doctrine. Named for General Colin Powell, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the doctrine requires that all military operations must meet four criteria: the objective must be clear and attainable; the power available to achieve that objective must be overwhelming; there must be a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement; and the operation must have substantial support from American allies. If the Global Security Strategy tells the military why to act, the Powell Doctrine tells it how. Together, these two rules form the foundation of American military policy.
The expeditionary focus of the American military requires a global network of allies and bases, and so the U.S. has leased more than 700 bases around the world. Many of these come courtesy of treaty allies, and function as an extension of the American security guarantee: the presence of U.S. troops proves that to attack the host nation is to attack the United States. Others are leased from neutral countries, in exchange for cash: the U.S. is willing to pay generously, and in dollars, for the ability to position its forces near strategically vital points. All American bases include an airfield sufficient to allow the installation to be resupplied by airlift. They usually also include air defense systems and a fighter squadron, along with a ground security element from the Army or Marines. Coastal bases, which the U.S. considers to be of the greatest value, host squadrons or even whole carrier groups of the U.S. Navy. Within the base perimeter, it can sometimes be easy to forget that one has left America: bases are tidy suburban landscapes of clapboard Midwestern houses, brick office buildings, parks, and franchise restaurants. These overseas bases provide crucial benefits to the U.S.: they allow Congress to preposition and resupply its forces on every continent, greatly reducing U.S. military response times and logistical burdens. But they also provide benefits to the host nations: lease payments, security guarantees, and the presence of American troops who can train and advise the host nation's military. They are the physical manifestation of the American vision of global security through alliance and interdependence.
The U.S. Armed Forces also play a crucial role in American domestic affairs and political life. This role dates back to the Civil War: for it was the Army that saved the Union and freed the slaves, and it was the Army that occupied the South for generations thereafter in order to realize the promise of liberty. This experience introduced a new militarism into American political culture: a belief that the military was the "heart and conscience" of the country, its repository of republican virtue, and the guardian of its freedom. This is why the United States has maintained a system of universal conscription: not because the Armed Forces require conscripts in order to fill their ranks, but because military service has been enshrined as a rite of passage into full citizenship. Every American is still required to perform two years of national service - usually at ages 18 and 19, after graduating high school and before starting college. Disabled people, or conscientious objectors, can elect to serve in the National Park system or as school aides instead of in the military, but the military remains the default form of conscript duty. Ten weeks of basic training are followed by twelve weeks of advanced training in the conscript's assigned military specialization. The remaining 132 weeks are spent on active duty. Conscripts are rarely deployed overseas, but they serve a crucial role in supporting the operational force: managing paperwork, maintaining vehicles and ships, constructing infrastructure, working in hospitals. Where Reconstruction measures provoke unrest or rioting, Congress has typically used conscripts - not professional troops - to patrol the streets and restore order. But the greatest value of national service is surely cultural: it brings together Americans of all races and classes, from every corner of the country, and instills a shared commitment to a cause larger than themselves - the cause of human liberty. Not for nothing do American politicians call national service the "crucible of citizenship."
After finishing their conscript duty, Americans with a fondness for military service can choose to remain on active duty in the professional force, or to join either the Reserves or the Army National Guard. The Reserves are not a manpower reserve for the regular force; rather, they are an all-volunteer parallel military of part-time professionals, fully organized into units that mobilize and fight together. Army and Marine Corps reservists form their own brigades, which are fully equipped even in peacetime, and can deploy as soon as they are mobilized. Air Force reservists form their own squadrons, with monthly flying practice and weekly maintenance duty on permanently assigned aircraft. Navy Reserve units even have their own ships, which remain in port under conscript maintenance unless the Reserves are mobilized. Service members can spend an entire career in the Reserves: rising through the ranks, and ultimately retiring with a military pension. All military operations and exercises are designed to include Reserve units alongside active-duty troops, so the full-time professionals and their part-time counterparts regularly train together. The result is a system in which reservists do not simply backfill gaps in the active-duty force; rather, they are a true citizen army in their own right.
The other form of part-time duty in the U.S. military is the Army National Guard. This is the modern incarnation of the old state militia system, and in peacetime the Guard remains under the control of state governments: it is used for riot control, disaster relief, and other paramilitary functions. Some states still require all able-bodied citizens to join the National Guard. In others, militia service is voluntary. Regardless, in any national emergency, Congress can federalize the National Guard. It is generally reluctant to do so, however. Most Guard units are not trained or equipped to the standard of the professional force or the Reserves. They also tend to lack aircraft, drones, and other technology that federal forces take for granted. Thus, Guard units cannot integrate seamlessly into federal operations in the same way as the Reserves. For this reason, they are mostly left to the states to use for domestic purposes, and the expeditionary operations of the United States are entrusted to federal forces alone.~The United States Navy~
No branch of the U.S. military is weak, but the Navy likely plays the largest role in America's global power. It is the guarantor of the law of the sea: free navigation and free trade, upon which depends the interconnected world that Congress worked so long and hard to build. The U.S. Navy is, therefore - as it must be - a global force; and with twelve nuclear-powered supercarriers, it is the largest navy on Earth by a considerable margin. American fleets are predominately not based at home in the U.S., but are instead forward-deployed, anchored at bases around the globe. At any given moment, five of the nation's twelve carrier groups are always at sea, performing exercises or freedom-of-navigation operations or anti-piracy campaigns. As a result, on any particular day, a U.S. fleet is active in each of the Earth's five oceans. Ready to respond to any crisis, or to project power anywhere on the planet, the U.S. Navy is the single most important source of American hard power.
The Navy is divided into fleets, which are permanent headquarters responsible for operations in each region of the world; they usually form the naval element of a combatant command. Thus, the Seventh Fleet is responsible for the western Pacific; the Fifth Fleet, for operations in the waters around Arabia and East Africa; the Fourth Fleet, for the Indian Ocean; and so on. Ships are assigned to each fleet according to operational requirements, but fleet commanders - the experts most familiar with the region - retain full operational authority. Typically, one carrier group is detailed to each fleet, and serves for eighteen months before being rotated back to the United States and replaced with a different group.
The carrier strike group is the foundation of U.S. naval power. Each includes a Nimitz or Leahy-class supercarrier, supporting an airwing of 75-90 aircraft: mostly F-35C and F/A-18F fighters - some optimized for electronic warfare - together with ASW helicopters, AEW aircraft, and transport planes. The carrier is protected by a squadron of three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, one or two Virginia-class attack submarines, and sometimes a Zumwalt-class stealth cruiser. The group is supported by a Supply-class fast combat support ship, and it is usually joined by a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship that transports a full Marine Expeditionary Unit. The whole carrier group, including the airwing, is comprehensively networked using the AEGIS system: a central computerized command-and-control suite that uses every radar and sonar in the carrier group to acquire targets or burn through jamming. This is information-based warfare at its most sophisticated: by combining data from every ship and submarine and aircraft into a single networked picture, AEGIS surrounds the carrier group with a sphere of visibility - above, below, and at the waterline - within which any hostile submarine or ship, aircraft or missile, can be immediately identified and tracked and engaged. All an actual human needs to do is approve the firing solution. It is this system, designed by the best minds at Silicon Valley and constantly updated with the latest A.I,, that gives the U.S. Navy a qualitative and not just a quantitative edge over its possible foes.
Additional specialized ships can be added to the carrier groups as necessary. The highly modular Independence-class frigate, for example, can provide close-in defense against small boats and drones using a high-energy laser, or it can be refitted to function as a mine countermeasures ship. To support large-scale amphibious assaults, the Navy can turn to its twelve San Antonio-class amphibious transport docks; to provide a headquarters for land operations that remains safely afloat within the protection of an Aegis fleet, the Navy can rely on its three Blue Ridge-class amphibious command ships. And the Navy's six Lewis B. Puller-class expeditionary mobile bases are, in effect, floating ports unto themselves - which can anchor at a foreign coast, and move supplies from sea to shore sufficient to support a whole army. They are especially important for humanitarian relief operations, and allow the United States to flood aid into a country even if local port facilities have been destroyed. Finally, for operations along coastlines or rivers, the Navy maintains a fleet of armed speedboats manned by specialized combatant craft crewmen.
But American warships do not only operate as part of carrier groups. Smaller, AEGIS-networked task forces - often led by a Zumwalt-class cruiser, supported by Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Independence-class frigates - serve a crucial role in antipiracy and antismuggling operations, and are a common sight in the world's most crucial waterways: the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Malacca, the Bosphorus, the Baltic. Virginia-class attack submarines - which double as sophisticated surveillance platforms, and can insert special operators by swimmer delivery vehicle - lurk in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, where they serve as a base for covert operations against the Union's foes. And the Navy's fifteen Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines support one leg of the American "nuclear triad": a total of 300 Trident II submarine-launched nuclear missiles, each with eight independently targetable 475-kiloton warheads - enough to annihilate 2,400 major cities in an afternoon. Small wonder that even the U.S. Navy acknowledges that some wars cannot be won, and should never be fought.~The United States Army and Marine Corps~
The United States Army and Marine Corps are responsible for fighting and winning the Union's land wars. The Army is the largest of the military services, and plays an important domestic role as well as a geopolitical one. Most Americans spend their conscript service in the Army; the state militias have been formally assimilated into the Army as the National Guard; when unrest requires the deployment of troops on U.S. soil, it is exclusively the Army that answers the call. When Americans talk about military service as the crucible of republican virtue, it is largely the Army that they have in mind. But the full-time, professional side of the Army is different: this is an expeditionary force trained and equipped for overseas warfare. That description also fits the Marine Corps, and the main differences between the branches are scale and speed and specialization: the Marine Corps is smaller, generally deploys faster, and is specialized in amphibious operations. The Army, by contrast, is large and requires extensive logistics and has no single specialty - though certain Army divisions fill narrower military niches. Active-duty Army units are extensively forward-deployed: most rotate between nine months overseas and eighteen at home. Marines are aligned with the Navy, and every carrier group transports a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Therefore, both the Army and the Marines have units prepositioned and ready to respond to a crisis anywhere on Earth.
Leaving aside rear-echelon units like conscript brigades and the National Guard, the Army has twelve regular divisions and another five reserve divisions. Two of these are airborne divisions, capable of deploying entirely by parachute; they include the 82nd Airborne Division, which can deploy 15,000 troops anywhere in the world within 18 hours. Then there are two armored divisions and twelve infantry divisions (all five reserve divisions are infantry). The Army also includes the 101st Airborne Division, an air assault unit that is entirely helicopter-mounted. Every division includes a combat aviation brigade, a sustainment brigade, and three brigade combat teams (BCTs). BCTs come in three varieties: armored, mechanized, or mobile. Armored BCTs are based on tanks and infantry fighting vehicles; mechanized BCTs are based on the Stryker armored fighting vehicle; and mobile BCTs are based on utility vehicles. Each BCT is a combined-arms unit with its own artillery, reconnaissance, logistics, and medical units. Divisions are defined by their BCTs: an armored division, for example, is composed mostly of armored BCTs, while an infantry division has mostly mechanized BCTs, and an airborne or air assault division has only mobile BCTs. Because most divisions include at least two types of BCT, each division is a miniature army in its own right, with the full range of military capabilities. Thus, Army divisional commanders tend to assemble task forces from components of different BCTs, based upon the requirements of the mission at hand. Beyond these seventeen divisions, the Army also includes a number of specialized detached brigades, of which the most important are strategic air defense brigades: equipped with the Patriot and THAAD missile defense systems, they are mostly forward-deployed to defend U.S. allies from potential nuclear attack.
The Marine Corps' structure is quite different: even more than the Army, the Marines are a truly combined-arms force, and include their own air force with more than 200 F-35 stealth fighters. The basic Marine unit is the Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), a force of about 2,200 Marines that includes a ground combat element (complete with armored vehicles), an air combat element of F-35s and V-22 Ospreys, and a logistics element. Each of the Navy's twelve carrier groups transports one MEU aboard a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, and they are often the first American troops to respond on land to a crisis overseas. When the U.S. requires a greater level of amphibious power, it turns to a Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF): essentially a scaled-up MEU, with a division-sized ground combat element (about 22,000 troops, including main battle tanks); a full air wing of more than 150 aircraft; and a logistical element capable of keeping both supplied on hostile shores. The Marines have three regular MEFs, and one reserve MEF. All are rapidly deployable, capable of moving to combat anywhere in the world within five days.
The Army and Marines share fairly similar training and doctrine, which allows them to work effectively alongside each other. Both rely on extensive, continuous, career-long training: when troops are not deployed, they are on exercises. Tactics emphasize initiative and aggression, especially at lower echelons, and this is enabled by mission command: officers and NCOs are taught to understand the objective first, and then to adapt on the fly in order to achieve it. They are not shackled to a rigid operational plan. In recent decades, two innovations have revolutionized American ground warfare: the internet, and drones. A networked force equipped with hundreds of small drones can establish a crucial information advantage on the battlefield: it can see exactly where the enemy is, and share that knowledge with every friendly unit. American commanders are taught to exploit that information advantage through rapid movement and concentrated firepower: locating the enemy's weakest point and hitting it fast and hard. Information and firepower are used to preserve lives, because the American public has a fairly low tolerance for casualties suffered in expeditionary wars far from home. This accounts, too, for the willingness of U.S. forces to invest vast material and engineering resources into warfare: the Army, in particular, is capable of building a prefabricated city from scratch in a matter of weeks. It is always better to spend money than lives.
American equipment is considered among the finest in the world; although many U.S. weapons systems are somewhat dated designs, they have been continuously upgraded to keep pace with the cutting edge of military science. Heavy BCTs depend largely on the M1A2 Abrams main battle tank and the M1296 Dragoon infantry fighting vehicle. The Dragoon is a variant of the Stryker armored fighting vehicle, whose other variants - armored personnel vehicles, command vehicles, mortar carriers, etc. - form the basis of medium BCTs. Mobile BCTs mostly rely upon the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), or - in airborne or air assault units - on the lightweight Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV). Marine Expeditionary Units are based on the Amphibious Combat Vehicle. Infantry in both the Marine Corps and the Army are armed with the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle (IAR), along with various support weapons; these include the EDM4S anti-drone jammer, a crucial advantage against near-peer threats. Key artillery systems include the HIMARS - which is mostly intended for use against peer threats, where survival requires long range and high mobility - and the M777 howitzer, which is mostly used in counterinsurgency operations: its ability to fire the extended-range, GPS-guided Excalibur shell is vital in limiting collateral damage. Key aircraft include the CH-53K King Stallion helicopter, which can haul 16 tons of cargo; the UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter, whose myriad variants are the basis for most air assault operations; the V-22B Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, which extends the range of air assault operations to beyond a thousand miles; and the AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter. Finally, both the Army and the Marines have integrated drones at every level: MEUs and Army combat aviation brigades are equipped with Grey Eagle UASs, but man-portable Switchblade and Raven drones are also ubiquitous at the platoon level, used for reconnaissance and as loitering munitions. These smaller drones are all networked to each other and to the U.S. battlespace network, so that they provide visibility to the entire force and not just to their users. This networking allows U.S. drones to exhibit swarming behaviors, and the most recent versions even have a backup AI processor that can control the drone if the connection to the pilot is jammed.~The United States Air Force~
The U.S. Air Force is the best-funded of the armed forces; its budget usually is equivalent to that of the Navy and Marine Corps combined. This is appropriate to its mission, which is breathtaking in its purpose: to be able to bomb any target, at any time, anywhere on Earth. Framed less dramatically, the Air Force has four key missions: air superiority, long-distance strike, strategic airlift, and fixed-wing air support for ground operations.
In service of these missions, the Air Force relies primarily on technology. This is why its budget is so high: more than any other service, the Air Force is at the cutting edge of military science. Its training and doctrine do not emphasize old-school dogfighting; its culture is indifferent to daring and physical courage. Rather, the Air Force relies on stealth, electronic warfare, and over-the-horizon munitions. In a perfect Air Force operation, the enemy never knows the Air Force was present: because his radars were jammed or useless against F-35s, and hypersonic missiles launched from a thousand miles away killed him before he realized he was under attack.
The strategic structure of the Air Force is similar to that of the Navy. The Air Force is divided into numbered air forces, which are regionally aligned headquarters elements; they usually form the air component of a combatant command. Thus, the Fifth Air Force is responsible for the western Pacific; the Ninth Air Force, for operations in the Middle East; the Twelfth Air Force, for Latin America; and so on. Each numbered air force maintains permanent airbases within its area of operations, and Air Force wings and squadrons are assigned to these airbases as operational requirements dictate; the numbered air force commanders, as regionally aligned experts, have full operational authority over units assigned to them. Like Army brigades, Air Force deployments are rotational: nine months forward-deployed, followed by eighteen months back in the States. The constant, globally dispersed presence of U.S. airpower serves crucial military and geopolitical purposes: it protects otherwise isolated U.S. military bases from sudden attack, and it ensures that U.S. security guarantees can instantly be backed up with force.
The Air Force's actual aircraft reflect a bifurcated mission set: the Air Force must be prepared both to operate in highly contested airspace against near-peer adversaries, and to support operations in highly permissive airspace against insurgents or guerillas. In a peer conflict, the Air Force relies heavily on its more than 500 F-35A stealth fighters, and on Acolyte drones. An AI-controlled "loyal wingman" that carries its own weapons, targeting pods, and electronic warfare pods, the Acolyte doubles the F-35's jamming power and weapons accuracy, and it can also serve as a decoy to protect the fighter itself. Likewise, the B-2 stealth bomber gives the Air Force the capacity for long-range strategic bombing even in strongly denied airspace, and its Mako hypersonic missiles allow it to strike from standoff range at speeds that defeat even sophisticated enemy air defenses. In less hotly contested airspace, the Air Force is more likely to rely on older, unstealthy aircraft: especially the F-16 strike fighter, the A-10 "Warthog," the B-52 bomber, and the AC-130J gunship. The Air Force's strategic airlift mission is primarily entrusted to C-17 and C-130 transport aircraft, and KC-46 aerial refueling tankers play a key role in enabling its global range. In addition to the Acolyte, the Air Force also makes extensive use of other drones: especially the MQ-9 Reaper for precision strikes, and the RQ-180 stealth surveillance drone for reconnaissance. Notably, nearly all Air Force munitions are precision-guided: in addition to the Mako, the most important weapons include the AGM-158 JASSM and AGM-158C LRASM (stealth missiles designed to evade enemy air defenses), and the GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrator (designed to destroy hardened targets deep underground).
But not all Air Force weapons are so precise: for the Air Force is responsible for two of the three components of America's nuclear triad. In siloes across the U.S., it maintains 150 Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each carries twelve independently targetable 350-kiloton warheads. And at any given moment, ten B-2 stealth bombers are ready for takeoff and armed with AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles - stealth weapons that each carry a 150-kiloton warhead. This nuclear arsenal, which falls to the Eighth Air Force to maintain in readiness, is the foundation of American atomic deterrence.~U.S. Special Operations Command~
The United States Special Operations Command - better known as SOCOM - is a "functional" combatant command: co-equal to the geographic combatant commands that control U.S. operations in each region of the world, but defined by its role rather than by any area of operations. It brings together all the special operations units of the U.S. military into a single organization, so that they can plan operations together and provide mutual support. With a total of 70,000 special operators from four of the six branches, it is in practice an elite combined-arms branch unto itself. Its missions cover a broad range of operations: while it is best known for daring hostage-rescue and counterterror raids, SOCOM also is the lead U.S. force for unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, and other specialized missions. It is called upon whenever Congress requires a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer. Because many of its missions are classified, and take place without overt congressional authorization or a declaration of war, SOCOM also works closely with the U.S. intelligence community: in many ways, SOCOM functions as the direct-action arm of the CIA, DIA, and other agencies. As a result, SOCOM's organizational structure is fluid: particular units, teams, or even individuals are combined into task forces as needed for any given mission.
In general, it is possible to break down SOCOM's component units into five broad categories.
- Special Mission Units (SMUs) include the Army's Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (also known as Delta Force); and the Navy SEALs, especially DEVGRU (also known as Seal Team Six). These are the premier direct-action and hostage-rescue units of the Secretariat, and arguably of the world. Most information about them is classified; they rarely wear American uniforms; most of their operations are not acknowledged by the government. But when Congress absolutely needs someone on the other side of the world dead by nightfall, nobody is better trained or equipped or skilled for the task than an SMU.
- SMUs and other special operations forces are transported to their objectives by SOCOM's aerial and maritime specialists: the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) and the Navy's Special Boat Teams. Combatant crewmen of the Special Boat Teams are expert in small-boat operations in denied environments: navigating treacherous marshes in the dark, or parachuting a rigid inflatable boat off a C-130 at 3,500 feet. The 160th SOAR is equipped with state-of-the-art helicopters, including stealth Black Hawks, and the regiment's pilots are trained to fly at very low altitudes while hugging the terrain to avoid radar detection. Together, these units ensure that SOCOM can strike into deep behind enemy lines, in denied areas where conventional units would be spotted in minutes.
- Before SOCOM operators arrive on objective, they are supported by a variety of other specialists. These include the agents of the secretive Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), whose very existence is officially denied, and who infiltrate in civilian clothes ahead of SOCOM forces to identify targets and infil/exfil options. The ISA works closely with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and ISA personnel often move back and forth between SOCOM and CIA Special Activities. To guide 160th SOAR pilots, or call in conventional Air Force air strikes, SOCOM relies on Combat Control Teams: small Air Force teams that are as capable of directing laser-guided bombs as they are of serving as air traffic controllers for an entire airport. And should SOCOM forces - or conventional troops - suffer casualties in an area too dangerous or austere for conventional MEDEVAC, Air Force pararescue jumpers - PJs - answer the call. Known within SOCOM as the bravest of the brave, their role is to infiltrate by air behind enemy lines, search for missing or wounded personnel under any conditions, provide expert emergency medicine, and then escort the casualties to safety - sometimes by air, but sometimes on foot, and sometimes for hundreds of miles. They keep the promise that the Secretariat does not leave anyone behind.
- Not every SOCOM unit stands quite so far apart from the conventional support. Some - like the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment or the Marine Corps' Raider Regiment - are larger formations of elite light infantry. They specialize in raids, airfield or port seizure, special reconnaissance, and similar missions: often in close support of conventional forces, and usually unclassified in nature. These units are often Congress's first resort when American intervention takes the form of an overt invasion: they can seize and hold key infrastructure and terrain, allowing conventional forces to flood into the country behind them. Sometimes, though, a single battalion of Rangers or Raiders is sufficient to turn the tide of a civil war, or to depose an unpopular dictator, or to transform a flagging conventional operation from a failure to a success.
- Finally, the Army provides SOCOM with a suite of units whose purpose is very different: rather than specializing in killing the enemy, they are used to strengthen American partners in skill or resolve or public legitimacy. Army Civil Affairs teams, Psychological Operations soldiers, and Special Forces detachments - the "Green Berets" - are unconventional warfare specialists: they work primarily by and through local partners. Civil Affairs units build and teach schools, practice medicine, train doctors, run public health programs, set up libraries, and so on. As armed humanitarians, they build public support and legitimacy for U.S.-aligned forces, often in close coordination with USAID. Psychological operations troops work to shape the perception of U.S. and allied operations: their work can be as broad as a social media campaign encouraging the enemy to desert, or as targeted as misleading a single enemy commander about the strength of American forces in a town. And Special Operations detachments inspire, organize, train, and lead indigenous forces into battle. Classically, their local partners are insurgents struggling to overthrow a tyrant; often, they are police or soldiers fighting to protect a democracy against terrorism or invasion. Together, these unconventional warfare units act as a force multiplier for U.S. allies. They strengthen America by strengthening her partners, with minimal risk to American lives. For that reason, they represent the most commonly used of all SOCOM's tools.
Do not remove - 2025RP
by Reverend Norv » Sun Nov 02, 2025 8:00 am
APPLICATION
NS Name: Norv.~The United States Space and Cyber Force~
The Space and Cyber Force - often just called the Cyber Force - is the new, twenty-first century branch of the Secretariat; it is sometimes called "Milpitas" by metonym. Founded in 2006 as the World Wide Web came of age, it reflects America's central role in the development of the internet: Silicon Valley, which built the internet age, also built the Cyber Force. It is based on two essential ideas: first, that cyber operations are now foundational for modern warfare; and second, that wireless communication relies on infrastructure in space. These ideas delineate the Cyber Force's institutional role. It is not responsible for all U.S. government satellites; spy and surveillance satellites, for example, are the province of the National Reconnaissance Office or the National Security Agency. Nor is it responsible for manned operations in space; those fall to NASA. But the Cyber Force is responsible for every Secretariat satellite that transmits military information. This includes the AEHF system: frequency-hopping, phased-array geostationary satellites that are the backbone of secure wireless communications for the U.S. and many of its allies. The Cyber Force is likewise responsible for the GPS satellites that allow U.S. and allied forces to navigate, and for the TRUMPET satellite network that monitors U.S. rivals and rogue states to detect ballistic missile launches. Thus, Cyber Force satellites - in coordination with Army air defense brigades and AEGIS-equipped Navy ships - generate the missile shield of each combatant command. And the Cyber Force even has its own, highly specialized kinetic capability: SM-3 missiles capable of striking enemy satellites to black out communications, navigation, and most other wireless data. Since 2008, the Cyber Force has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to destroy orbital targets.
Back on Earth, the Cyber Force has three main roles. As a military intelligence agency, it is responsible for military SIGINT and MASINT; as an offensive force, it is capable of cyberattacks against enemy military networks or civilian infrastructure; and as a "political warfare" force, it is responsible for using propaganda and disinformation to destabilize hostile regimes. Cyber troops are recruited from the best minds of Silicon Valley, and the Cyber Force works closely with California information-technology companies to develop new hacks and firewalls. In its espionage operations, it specializes in long-term, invisible infiltration: keylogging viruses, cellphone monitoring, and "Karma": a tool which can be downloaded by cloud connections, without requiring the target to click on any links. In its offensive operations, the Cyber Force has been linked to a wide array of attacks. These include brute-force DDOS; targeted worms that delete and overwrite key computers to render the whole network useless; and delayed-trigger viruses that can wait unseen in bank or electric-grid computers until they are needed. Finally, in its political operations, the Cyber Force uses both open attacks - like hacking public televisions to show politicians engaged in lies or corruption - and more subtle measures, like adjusting the algorithms of a search engine to lead the public to particular information. In one operation, it is believed to have set up a Dark Web chatroom populated by nonexistent dissidents, simply so that - when enemy cybersecurity shut the room down - the Cyber Forces could trace the hack and upload a virus to the enemy cybersecurity headquarters. Because many of its operations fall somewhere in the penumbra between peace and war, the Cyber Force is often Congress's first choice to respond to foreign provocation: it can inflict real pain with less risk of military escalation. Two decades of near-constant "hybrid operations" have produced a highly aggressive and extremely sophisticated organization.~The United States Intelligence Community~
For all its global reach and power, though, the Secretariat for Defense is often not Congress' first choice in shaping events around the world. Even the most discreet SOCOM team still represents military action, and a subtler hand is often more effective. That subtle hand of American power is the Intelligence Community: eleven agencies with a total workforce of over 850,000, coordinated by the Congressional Intelligence Staff and reporting (organizationally) to the Joint Committee on Intelligence and (operationally) to the Joint Select Committee for Global Security. The defining mission of the Intelligence Community is to collect information on foreigners: foreign governments, foreign corporations, foreign citizens, foreign terrorists. It has few limits in how it goes about this task. The Community's leading organization is the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, which is primarily responsible for human intelligence. Working mostly out of American embassies, CIA case officers recruit sources at every level, from well-placed bartenders to cabinet ministers and religious leaders. They also recruit sources within the U.S. military and foreign affairs apparatus: many Green Beret teams, USAID workers, and diplomats are quietly debriefed by the CIA at the end of each tour of duty. The largest American intelligence agency, though, is actually the National Security Agency, or NSA. This is America's signals intelligence agency, which works in close coordination with the Space and Cyber Force: the Cyber Force usually targets particular individuals for digital surveillance, while the NSA monitors whole groups and movements and regimes. For this reason, it is broadly suspected of mass surveillance of the internet activity of millions - perhaps billions - of people outside the United States - but it is forbidden by law from collecting on Americans. Smaller agencies also play key roles in the Intelligence Community; the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is a classic example. It operates America's network of dozens of spy satellites - both imaging and penetration radar - though not its SIGINT satellites, which are the province of the NSA. This "eye in the sky" is a ubiquitous asset used, in one way or another, in every military or intelligence operation.
The Intelligence Community does not merely collect intelligence; it also engages in clandestine and covert action in order to affect outcomes. The CIA is infamous for its support of rebels in authoritarian countries, though its record is distinctly mixed: while CIA-backed revolutions mostly tend to succeed, they only sometimes leave stable democracies in their wake, and sometimes the new government turns out to be as bad as the old one. Nevertheless, the CIA's budget for covert operations is still north of fifty billion dollars per year, and it has a private arsenal of military materiel to distribute to its partners. Likewise, the NSA has engaged in targeted cyberoperations since the start of the digital age. While Cyber Force operations tend to focus on specific tactical goals, NSA hacks are strategic in scope: compromising not a single server or facility, but the security architecture of devices or applications used by millions of people. The goal is not to cripple the target, but to affect it in more subtle ways, shaping public perception or the profits of foreign companies. Often, the Community's covert operations are closely aligned with clandestine missions of SOCOM and the Cyber Force; each agency plays a specific role in achieving Congress's objectives, and in keeping America's hand obscured.
But there is one place where the Intelligence Community's broad authority meets a hard limit, and that is America itself: since the 1950s, Congress has prohibited every agency but one from collecting intelligence on American citizens for national-security purposes. The one agency that remains allowed to spy on Americans is the Congressional Supervisory Service: the Freedmen's Bureau, which serves as America's domestic counterintelligence and counterterrorism department. It has very broad authority to investigate and surveil anyone suspected of violating the civil rights of citizens. This extends both to foreign spies (who violate Americans' privacy rights) and to domestic extremists (who seek to violate the rights of some Americans to full civic equality). But it also covers unscrupulous corporations (who violate rights related to economic dignity) and even other government agencies. The main limit on the Freedmen's Bureau's authority is that, although it can investigate nearly anyone, it is not a police agency in itself; when its investigation is complete, it must turn to state police or federal marshals to make arrests, and it must prosecute its cases in the ordinary federal criminal courts. This ensures that, in pursuing men who violate the rights of others, the Bureau does not itself become a violator of civil rights: it is held to the same standard that it enforces.~The Power of Peaceful Engagement~
As the foregoing discussion shows, Congress does not draw a bright line between military force and other forms of national power; rather, military and intelligence operations complement each other to advance U.S. objectives. Other agencies, neither military nor clandestine, also contribute to this collaborative project. These include the United States Information Service (USIS), which directs America's nonprofit international broadcast corporations: of which Radio Liberty and the Voice of America are the most important. Traditionally reliant on shortwave radio broadcasts - which remain widely used today, especially in developing countries, as a cheap transmission medium that is difficult for authoritarian regimes to jam completely - USIS has in recent years turned to the internet as its primary vector. With the help of the CIA, Radio Liberty smuggles over a million USB drives, pre-loaded with VPN and e-sim programs, into authoritarian countries every year. Installed over and over again, these programs allow access to the American internet, and specifically to country-specific USIS programming. This is available in over 200 languages, and is supported by a staff of more than ten thousand journalists reporting worldwide - including many who work undercover in countries where their activities would be cause for treason or espionage charges. Although often derided as American propaganda, USIS is actually an independent agency: Congress is prohibited by statute from setting its editorial agenda or appointing its directors, and its investigative reporting - though focused on foreign governments rather than the United States - is scrupulously sourced and widely trusted.
Foreign aid also fits into the mosaic of U.S. power projection. The U.S. has, since 1990, been committed by statute to spend at least $100 billion on foreign aid; in 2025, the actual budget was $111.8 billion. Most of this money goes to the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Its missions are varied and have made an enormous impact worldwide. For example: USAID health and family planning programs, by providing contraceptive and antiretroviral medicine, played a key role in bringing the HIV-AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa under control. USAID education programs have provided essential funding and teacher-training expertise for schools in developing countries; USAID agricultural programs were instrumental in providing genetically modified strains of wheat and rice to Chinese and Indian farmers, which ended famine in those countries. USAID democracy offices have nurtured independent judiciaries, civil society organizations, and human rights advocates in dozens of countries; and USAID disaster relief teams - often aided by the U.S. military - are among the first to respond after earthquakes or tsunamis. Since 2015, USAID has shared some of its portfolios with the Development Finance Corporation (DFC): a dedicated investment bank that provides capital for everything from infrastructure modernization to women-run small businesses. Its objective is to compete directly with the global investment programs of rival powers, which often seek to buy control of a nation's infrastructure or natural resources; the DFC, on the other hand, seeks not to buy out local people but to fund the most liberal and pro-American elements among them. It tries to align economic power in developing nations with democratic institutions that uphold the rule of law.
Finally, there is the National Air and Space Administration: NASA. NASA's ties to the NRO and the Cyber Force are as close as USAID's ties to the CIA and SOCOM - most American intelligence and military satellites are launched into orbit on NASA rockets. But NASA also plays an essential role in American public diplomacy. Space exploration is the quintessential American contribution to the larger human story: it expresses both American industrial might and scientific genius, and the American pioneer spirit; it frames the United States as a representative not of itself, but of the highest ambitions and wildest dreams of all mankind. This message is sent especially by NASA's longstanding policy of including at least one non-American astronaut on every manned mission. Since placing a man on the moon in 1967, NASA's research missions have pivoted to rely more on unmanned rovers and satellites. But scientific research is not the agency's only mission: its charter from Congress requires it to explore and not only to study, and it is tasked with paving the way for human settlement on other worlds. Thus, NASA maintains the GENESIS space station in low Earth orbit, where astronauts from the U.S. and allied countries can conduct long-term experiments; American and allied astronauts have visited the moon twelve times, most recently in 2022; and a manned mission to Mars is expected to lift off later this year.The work and prayers of centuries
Have brought us to this day
What shall be our legacy?
What will our children say?
History:17th Annual Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Memorial Lecture in American History
Choosing Redemption: Human Agency in American History
Dr. Eric Foner, Harvard University
Harvard Yard, 15 October 2024
Thank you very much to the University, and to the Department of History, for inviting me today. We gather at a time of profound uncertainty in this country, much more so than when Dr. Schlesinger became a witness and an author of history, back in the 1960s. Many things that we assumed as unchanging truths have been cast into question by populism at home and authoritarianism abroad. The president of the United States - that ceremonial figurehead whose only role has long been to give voice to our highest ideals - is a propagandist for our worst impulses. And if the fabric of the Union still holds, we may reasonably ask: for how much longer?
What I have to say to you today is simple: none of this is new. The story of American history is not an account of natural, providential progress - out of the darkness of slavery and injustice, and toward the light of freedom and social responsibility. It is a story of people who made that choice for themselves: while the outcome was still unclear, when the stakes were very high. If they had done otherwise, then the progress of our history could have been very different - could have, and would have. None of this was inevitable. Had our forefathers made different choices, we would live in a world where the American citizen exists to serve corporate profits, instead of a world where American business exists to serve the prosperity of the people; a world where the President is not a powerless figurehead, but a king in all but name; a world where American power attempts to dominate the world instead of to lead it.
We were saved from that world because, when it really counted, Americans chose a different path. That's the story I want to tell today: a story of a people who chose Reconstruction and progress, who chose to redeem this nation from its past. And I tell you this story for a reason: because if they could make that choice, then so can we.
The story begins, as it must, with the Second Founding - the War of the Rebellion, the Civil War. When the slaveholders' revolt was finally crushed, one in every fifty Americans had died in the last four years. It was by far the worst carnage this land had ever known. And the men who had saved the Union were determined that it should not have been saved in vain. They intended to free the South: to break up the big plantations, and redistribute land to the former slaves, and build a whole new system of public education, so that the economic and cultural foundations of slavery would be torn down as surely as the legal ones. The great opponent of these Radical Republicans was the president, Andrew Johnson: himself a former slaveholder, not to mention a drunk and a brute, whom the last century of Radical historiography has made out to be one of the great villains of our history. In my opinion, he deserved it.
So for three years after the murder of the great martyr-president, Abraham Lincoln - he whose face and words are everywhere in our modern Union, the abiding spirit whose wisdom we seek in every moment of crisis - for three years after the great man's death, President Johnson stopped Congress cold, and it looked like the war might have been fought for nothing: the slaves would go back to work as sharecroppers, the old rebel officers would resume their places in statehouses, and the Ku Klux Klan would ride at night to burn the new schools and terrorize Congressional commissioners. But Congress would not allow this. They impeached Johnson, and on March 4, 1868, he was convicted and removed from office. It was the first successful impeachment of an American president. And you have to understand the risk they were taking, John Bingham and the other Radical Republicans in Congress: the practical risk, because the president was commander-in-chief for real back then, and we had just fought a civil war - but also the moral risk. Everyone knew that Johnson was impeached not because he was a criminal, but because he refused to go along with Congress. At the time, this was very widely considered an abuse of Congress's power, a bid for supremacy. In hindsight, we can see that it was exactly that - the first step on the road to legislative supremacy in this country. But it was also, and for that very reason, the first step on the road to Reconstruction. Johnson's impeachment killed the old Constitution of 1787, and gave us a new system of government in which the president serves Congress, and Congress serves to protect the rights of the people. That's why, even more than the Rebellion, it's March 4, 1868 that marks our Second Founding.
Over the next twenty years, that Second Founding delivered Reconstruction as a generational project, and not the flash in the pan that Johnson sought to make it. Freedman's Bureau schools raised literacy rates for African-Americans to the same level as Whites. Land redistribution broke up the plantations, and created a landscape of small farms - albeit that northern corporations soon bought out most of the freedmen, and created a new - equally paid - class of White and Black tenant farmworkers. The Ironclad Oath forced former Confederates - and anyone who would not swear loyalty to the Second Founding - out of government, so that the old plantation barons were replaced by a biracial progressive coalition. And these measures were enshrined not as policy, nor as statute, but as a constitutional mandate. First, the Fourteenth Amendment made the rights of the citizens - not the rights of the states - the foundation of American constitutional law. And second, the Sixteenth Amendment required Congress to take affirmative action to protect those rights. For the first time, the Constitution became not only a shield against government power, but a sword that Congress could use on behalf of the powerless. That sword assumed physical form in the shape of the United States Army. For the first time, Congress did not demobilize the wartime Army after the Rebellion ended. Instead, it retained peacetime conscription, and occupied the South with a force of a million men. For decades, a year's tour of duty in Alabama or Louisiana, protecting the Black population from Klan terrorism, was a rite of passage for American men. And those two changes - the transformation of the American government into a dedicated agent of social justice, and the transformation of the American army into a draftee force charged with enforcing civil rights - had implications far beyond Reconstruction. Together, those institutions gradually influenced the culture of this nation: teaching Americans to believe that a free society was a society that changed for the better rather than a society that stayed the same, and that membership in such a society linked one's rights inseparably to one's duties toward that project of social change. In the end, the 16th Amendment and the conscript Army gave us the country we know today.
Reconstruction also had profound material effects. By 1890, southern African-Americans had the same literacy rates as whites. By 1905, they had the same average income. By 1925, they had the same average household wealth. We tend to focus on the ways in which Reconstruction deepened American divisions - on the anti-Klan counterinsurgency that plagued this country until the early 20th century, and that continues at a lower level to this day. But it's important to consider the alternative: that had our commitment to Reconstruction flagged, African-Americans would have remained second-class citizens, economically and socially and educationally disadvantaged. The continued expense of treasure and blood to rebuild the South prevented the emergence in this country of a racialized underclass. That was a real possibility after the Rebellion, and it would surely have been even more divisive and corrosive than the Klan terrorism we've endured because we avoided it.
Meanwhile, the country continued to evolve. The destruction of the slave power left most economic power in the hands of northern capitalists. The country industrialized: railroads doubled and then quadrupled, and where they met, steel mills and machine shops and chemical plants sprang up like mushrooms. The financial sector grew vastly in complexity, initially to support the railroad industry; then, financialization allowed for the consolidation and vertical integration of the country's first corporate giants. As more and more of the population moved to the cities and the factory towns, and more and more Americans worked for fewer and fewer massive corporations, so the labor market began to organize: hundreds of thousands of workers who shared the same boss found that they also shared an interest in better pay and safer working conditions. The first industrial unions - aimed at organizing all a company's workers, instead of only those who shared a trade - began to coalesce. Bosses responded with strikebreakers and gun thugs. By 1890, the United States had passed Great Britain to become the world's largest economy - as this country has remained ever since. But labor conflicts had also escalated into gun battles, like the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. It was increasingly clear that the Union's prosperity now required a political solution to the struggle for economic power.
That solution emerged, ultimately, from the schism of the Republican Party. This had actually begun several decades earlier, after the Woodall Campaign of 1877. This was the last major offensive against the Ku Klux Klan's stronghold in northeastern Mississippi, where the group had established near-total control on the ground and established a de facto breakaway state. The Army crushed the terrorists and reestablished federal control, but at hideous cost: over ten thousand troops dead or wounded in just three weeks of fighting. In the aftermath, the Republican Party split between moderate Northern business interests - who hoped to avoid repeating such carnage, and therefore favored a less aggressive approach to Reconstruction - and the remaining hardline Radicals. The moderates prevailed at the party's 1878 convention, and the Radicals therefore left to found a new party. The two parties soon aligned along class lines: the Radicals forged alliances within the labor movement, and therefore came to represent both southern Blacks and the northern White working class; the Republicans found their support among Northern business interests and Midwestern farmers. (The Democrats remained the party of the White South.) For nearly twenty years after 1878, the Republicans predominated in Congress. And while today we tend to remember this "Gilded Age" - which coincided with much of the industrial growth I discussed a moment ago - as a time of rampant inequality and labor conflict, it did have one important political upside: successive Republican Congresses systematically stripped the presidency of much of its traditional power. The modern system of joint and select congressional committees dates from this period, as do the first agencies of the Congressional Administrative Service. As government grew to keep pace with the industrializing nation, it was the legislature and not the executive that would control the new bureaucracy.
progressive era, square deal (unions) and main streets,
westward expansion, indian policy, hawaii annexation, spanish-american war, philippine-american war, president loses military control, boxer rebellion, Panama canal and intervention, intervention in Mexico
wright brothers, arts and culture
RP Example(s): I think you know me.
Do not remove - 2026RP
by Reverend Norv » Sun Nov 02, 2025 8:06 am
by Dragos Bee » Sun Nov 02, 2025 10:31 am
Reverend Norv wrote:Well, I am finished up through the history section, and I have a good idea of the primary beats I want to hit by way of domestic history. But world history since 1868 still seems a bit unsettled, at least based on the existing apps; and this U.S. would not fill quite the same role in past conflicts or dynamics as Orostan's would. So let me inquire, before I go further: does anyone have a particular historical relationship that they want to establish with the U.S., either friendly or hostile? A particular role that they want or need the U.S. to play in their nation's history? I would like to incorporate as much of that input as I can - it is always easier to plan a history together from the start, than to try to reconcile incompatible stories after they've already been written.
by Tracian Empire » Sun Nov 02, 2025 10:58 am
Reverend Norv wrote:Well, I am finished up through the history section, and I have a good idea of the primary beats I want to hit by way of domestic history. But world history since 1868 still seems a bit unsettled, at least based on the existing apps; and this U.S. would not fill quite the same role in past conflicts or dynamics as Orostan's would. So let me inquire, before I go further: does anyone have a particular historical relationship that they want to establish with the U.S., either friendly or hostile? A particular role that they want or need the U.S. to play in their nation's history? I would like to incorporate as much of that input as I can - it is always easier to plan a history together from the start, than to try to reconcile incompatible stories after they've already been written.
by Cybernetic Socialist Republics » Sun Nov 02, 2025 4:48 pm
Reverend Norv wrote:Well, I am finished up through the history section, and I have a good idea of the primary beats I want to hit by way of domestic history. But world history since 1868 still seems a bit unsettled, at least based on the existing apps; and this U.S. would not fill quite the same role in past conflicts or dynamics as Orostan's would. So let me inquire, before I go further: does anyone have a particular historical relationship that they want to establish with the U.S., either friendly or hostile? A particular role that they want or need the U.S. to play in their nation's history? I would like to incorporate as much of that input as I can - it is always easier to plan a history together from the start, than to try to reconcile incompatible stories after they've already been written.
by Reverend Norv » Sun Nov 02, 2025 8:13 pm
Dragos Bee wrote:Reverend Norv wrote:Well, I am finished up through the history section, and I have a good idea of the primary beats I want to hit by way of domestic history. But world history since 1868 still seems a bit unsettled, at least based on the existing apps; and this U.S. would not fill quite the same role in past conflicts or dynamics as Orostan's would. So let me inquire, before I go further: does anyone have a particular historical relationship that they want to establish with the U.S., either friendly or hostile? A particular role that they want or need the U.S. to play in their nation's history? I would like to incorporate as much of that input as I can - it is always easier to plan a history together from the start, than to try to reconcile incompatible stories after they've already been written.
The Mapuche, if you are okay with it.
Tracian Empire wrote:Reverend Norv wrote:Well, I am finished up through the history section, and I have a good idea of the primary beats I want to hit by way of domestic history. But world history since 1868 still seems a bit unsettled, at least based on the existing apps; and this U.S. would not fill quite the same role in past conflicts or dynamics as Orostan's would. So let me inquire, before I go further: does anyone have a particular historical relationship that they want to establish with the U.S., either friendly or hostile? A particular role that they want or need the U.S. to play in their nation's history? I would like to incorporate as much of that input as I can - it is always easier to plan a history together from the start, than to try to reconcile incompatible stories after they've already been written.
Historically, China. Sao's final ruling in regards to the Sino-Japanese War was no direct American involvement, but nevertheless indirect American support for the ROC which would have been vital for China's ability to wage that war.
After that, up to you. As I explained to Orostan back in the thread, even with the rise of an economic rivalry between the US and China, at no point would Nanjing willingly try this special relationship, but Orostan's concept had the US turn against China and start to support Japan, which would in turn have been a red line for China's relationship in the US.
Since Orostan never really fully determined the extent of the American position, and since the modern position of the US as an NPC was also never determined, the situation as of right now is sort of blank. It's part of why I didn't respond in the IC to the situation regarding Ethiopia - normally China would be quite anti-communist, but if the US is hostile and pro-Japanese, that changes things.
Cybernetic Socialist Republics wrote:Reverend Norv wrote:Well, I am finished up through the history section, and I have a good idea of the primary beats I want to hit by way of domestic history. But world history since 1868 still seems a bit unsettled, at least based on the existing apps; and this U.S. would not fill quite the same role in past conflicts or dynamics as Orostan's would. So let me inquire, before I go further: does anyone have a particular historical relationship that they want to establish with the U.S., either friendly or hostile? A particular role that they want or need the U.S. to play in their nation's history? I would like to incorporate as much of that input as I can - it is always easier to plan a history together from the start, than to try to reconcile incompatible stories after they've already been written.
Britain starts moving toward becoming an Imperial Federation from the 1870s until finally concluding it in 1925. One of the foundations of this was the development of a common Imperial debt to cover the armed forces and infrastructure investments. A great deal of that debt was structured to be owed to american creditors, with this really taking offer during WW1, to the point that the foreign debt is nearly exclusively american held. In the middle of WW2, internal tension leads to a coup/revolution that concludes with the founding of the "Socialist World Republic". At this point, the old US app invaded Canada to ensure the existence of a friendly capitalist neighbor, but the SWR response to that was the complete repudiation of all american held debt and maintaing a frozen conflict since. So mostly the question of whether or not SWR and US relations are friendly or unfriendly boils down to if the United States invaded Canada or not. If they didn't, it'd have remained part of the SWR. Also the SWR would have kept making payments on its debt to the United States and probably even expanded the debt to pay for imports of technology and capital goods.
by Dragos Bee » Sun Nov 02, 2025 8:23 pm
Reverend Norv wrote:Dragos Bee wrote:
The Mapuche, if you are okay with it.
Sounds good! At the most recent, that relationship would have flourished after the 1998 and 2004 student uprisings and subsequent democratic reforms - which the U.S. foreign aid/NGO/intelligence complex likely had a hand in supporting. But if you'd like the Mapuche-American connection to go back further, we could add an Argentinian invasion in the 1950s (which would make sense, given the Peronist regime), which the U.S. would have intervened to stop. Thereafter, the Mapuche would have been a formal treaty ally, and the gradual process toward democracy that we see beginning in the '60s would be explicable, in part, as the result of American influence.
by Tracian Empire » Mon Nov 03, 2025 1:27 am
Reverend Norv wrote:Tracian Empire wrote:Historically, China. Sao's final ruling in regards to the Sino-Japanese War was no direct American involvement, but nevertheless indirect American support for the ROC which would have been vital for China's ability to wage that war.
After that, up to you. As I explained to Orostan back in the thread, even with the rise of an economic rivalry between the US and China, at no point would Nanjing willingly try this special relationship, but Orostan's concept had the US turn against China and start to support Japan, which would in turn have been a red line for China's relationship in the US.
Since Orostan never really fully determined the extent of the American position, and since the modern position of the US as an NPC was also never determined, the situation as of right now is sort of blank. It's part of why I didn't respond in the IC to the situation regarding Ethiopia - normally China would be quite anti-communist, but if the US is hostile and pro-Japanese, that changes things.
Well, to start with, I'd like to appeal the ruling against direct U.S. involvement in the Pacific War. I understand that the necessary outcome is that Japan remains in control of the Home Islands. That, in turn, means that there was no Pearl Harbor - because a direct attack on the U.S. would have made it impossible for America to accept any terms short of unconditional surrender. But by the late '30s, the U.S. - in this timeline - was a much less isolationist society than it was historically. For a variety of reasons related to prolonged Reconstruction and the expanded social role of the military, Americans already had a much clearer sense of global mission and leadership. So I'd propose a limited and voluntary American intervention in the Pacific War, intended to eject Japan from China; once that was achieved, the Americans considered their mission accomplished, and this both allowed Japan to secure - and obliged China to accept - a negotiated cessation of hostilities.
As this somewhat ambivalent involvement might suggest, I think the Sino-American relationship thereafter might benefit from slightly more complexity than we've seen in past iterations. This would still be a very close friendship, and the U.S. might still be a member of EATO. But it wouldn't simply be a Sino-American axis aimed at containing Japan. Rather, the U.S. would want to bring Japan into the international system, not to isolate and antagonize it. So although the dynamic would not be a clean break - the U.S. still would not support Japanese claims against China - it would be an attempt by the U.S. to triangulate, to build influence in Tokyo without abandoning Nanjing. This would also, more subtly, set up the U.S. as an alternative patron for smaller nations in the western Pacific: one that seeks good relations with both Tokyo and Nanjing, and that tries to manage their rivalry rather than to help one side win. Such a power offers smaller states - the Philippines, say, or Indonesia - a third option, a way of opting out of Sino-Japanese tensions. I think that will create a more complex dynamic - and one less likely to spiral directly into war - than a pure U.S.-China alliance against Japan.
by Tracian Empire » Mon Nov 03, 2025 1:30 am
by Sao Nova Europa » Mon Nov 03, 2025 6:28 am
by Tracian Empire » Mon Nov 03, 2025 6:35 am
by Cybernetic Socialist Republics » Mon Nov 03, 2025 10:56 am
Sao Nova Europa wrote:OK, call to see who's interested.
We have two solutions here:
1)
If enough people are active, we continue as is and hopefully with a new events post, we can get some more posts.
2)
If we don't get enough interested people, I will be doing a soft reboot: anyone who has active claims (say Norv with US) or accepted apps (say Trace with RoC or Shohun with Japan) will have their claims/reservation confirmed, and people who have been accepted in this thread will be automatically accepted in the new one with no new review (simply posting your app in the new thread so I can link to it will be enough). The rest of the map will be clear.
Benefit of this is that people won't have to redo whole apps/concepts, and we can continue with already a fair number of accepted nations and/or reservations, so we will be able to move to an IC quicker while still making it attractive to new people who might want to join.
NOTE: If we do go soft reboot route, I will only be auto-confirming reservations and accepted apps of people who have shown interest. So, if you've been accepted but do not post to show you are active, your claims/app will not carry over to the new thread.
My personal preference is for 1, but I'm open to 2. Again, for clarification, if we do go for option 2, it will be a soft reboot where active people are auto-confirmed in their claims/reservations rather than completely new RP where everyone starts from the beginning. I ain't talking about a full reboot.
So, with that in mind, everyone who is still active make a post.
by Azurnailia » Tue Nov 04, 2025 5:45 am
Azurn/Akagi
She/her, Proud Lesbian Transfem
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by Cybernetic Socialist Republics » Tue Nov 04, 2025 12:33 pm
Reverend Norv wrote:Cybernetic Socialist Republics wrote:
Britain starts moving toward becoming an Imperial Federation from the 1870s until finally concluding it in 1925. One of the foundations of this was the development of a common Imperial debt to cover the armed forces and infrastructure investments. A great deal of that debt was structured to be owed to american creditors, with this really taking offer during WW1, to the point that the foreign debt is nearly exclusively american held. In the middle of WW2, internal tension leads to a coup/revolution that concludes with the founding of the "Socialist World Republic". At this point, the old US app invaded Canada to ensure the existence of a friendly capitalist neighbor, but the SWR response to that was the complete repudiation of all american held debt and maintaing a frozen conflict since. So mostly the question of whether or not SWR and US relations are friendly or unfriendly boils down to if the United States invaded Canada or not. If they didn't, it'd have remained part of the SWR. Also the SWR would have kept making payments on its debt to the United States and probably even expanded the debt to pay for imports of technology and capital goods.
Having reviewed your history, I'd like to find a way to avoid the U.S. invasion of Canada. Congress in the 1940s was led by pretty far-left, social-democratic Radicals in the FDR mold (Speaker Roosevelt himself would have led them for most of the last two decades). They would not have immediately perceived the S.W.R. as a threat, especially since the revolution served to keep the Imperial Federation in the war against Germany. To the extent that the SWR's purge of opposition parties unnerved the Americans, they would have reassured themselves that control of British debt was a lever that they could use to encourage reform down the line; in the same way that the Brits were expecting an inevitable revolution in America, the Yanks were expecting an inevitable reform toward democratic norms once the war was over. This is, after all, a world with no USSR. The Americans, of all people, had no reason to think that revolution is a path to tyranny rather than to liberty.
This relationship would, of course, curdle somewhat as the decades passed and it became apparent that real democracy was not on the cards. The CIA and Green Berets probably armed and trained a bunch of nationalist, anticolonial insurgencies in Namibia, New Guinea, possibly Jamaica, and other restive corners of the SWR. (An interesting reversal of real brushfire wars in southern Africa.) In the 1980s, there would have been a thaw, and an effort to integrate the liberalizing SWR economy with the global market - a kind of Clintonesque gamble that economic liberalization would ultimately produce political liberalization. When it instead led to Social Grading, the U.S. would have reversed its position, and so the last few years have probably brought relations between the two powers to their nadir. Even now, though, the U.S. is not truly approaching the conflict in Cold War terms; while it certainly seeks to contain the SWR's influence, and to exacerbate its internal tensions and contradictions, Washington does not see London as an existential threat. If nothing else, continued American ownership of the SWR debt means that the two countries are economically interdependent in a way that limits escalation. London is a problem to be contained, managed, and gradually reformed - not an evil empire to be overthrown.
There is one act by the SWR that would change this calculus, which I mention because it figured in your conversations with Orostan, and that is attempting to place a nuclear weapon in the Western Hemisphere: Canada, Jamaica, Guyana, etc. The U.S. would consider this a total repudiation of the status-quo relationship between the two countries: a threat to resolve their differences with nuclear hellfire, rather than with the gentleman's game of diplomacy and espionage and economic chess. It would instantly render the stakes of this contest existential, and cause the United States to make the SWR's overthrow its single, overriding priority in global affairs. This would make such an act suicidally counterproductive for the SWR: guaranteed to provoke the very outcome it was intended to deter. Perhaps London's diplomats - likely the most skillful Congress-watchers in the world - understood this, and never tried to base a nuclear weapon in the Americas. Or perhaps the Americans failed to communicate their red line clearly, and we got something like the Cuban Missile Crisis - this world's closest brush with nuclear war - before some combination of American threats and compromises convinced the Brits to withdraw their weapons, and the status quo relationship returned (albeit with trust badly bruised for a few decades). Either way works for me, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
by Newwe Zion » Tue Nov 04, 2025 4:22 pm
by Reverend Norv » Tue Nov 04, 2025 5:10 pm
Cybernetic Socialist Republics wrote:Reverend Norv wrote:
Having reviewed your history, I'd like to find a way to avoid the U.S. invasion of Canada. Congress in the 1940s was led by pretty far-left, social-democratic Radicals in the FDR mold (Speaker Roosevelt himself would have led them for most of the last two decades). They would not have immediately perceived the S.W.R. as a threat, especially since the revolution served to keep the Imperial Federation in the war against Germany. To the extent that the SWR's purge of opposition parties unnerved the Americans, they would have reassured themselves that control of British debt was a lever that they could use to encourage reform down the line; in the same way that the Brits were expecting an inevitable revolution in America, the Yanks were expecting an inevitable reform toward democratic norms once the war was over. This is, after all, a world with no USSR. The Americans, of all people, had no reason to think that revolution is a path to tyranny rather than to liberty.
This relationship would, of course, curdle somewhat as the decades passed and it became apparent that real democracy was not on the cards. The CIA and Green Berets probably armed and trained a bunch of nationalist, anticolonial insurgencies in Namibia, New Guinea, possibly Jamaica, and other restive corners of the SWR. (An interesting reversal of real brushfire wars in southern Africa.) In the 1980s, there would have been a thaw, and an effort to integrate the liberalizing SWR economy with the global market - a kind of Clintonesque gamble that economic liberalization would ultimately produce political liberalization. When it instead led to Social Grading, the U.S. would have reversed its position, and so the last few years have probably brought relations between the two powers to their nadir. Even now, though, the U.S. is not truly approaching the conflict in Cold War terms; while it certainly seeks to contain the SWR's influence, and to exacerbate its internal tensions and contradictions, Washington does not see London as an existential threat. If nothing else, continued American ownership of the SWR debt means that the two countries are economically interdependent in a way that limits escalation. London is a problem to be contained, managed, and gradually reformed - not an evil empire to be overthrown.
There is one act by the SWR that would change this calculus, which I mention because it figured in your conversations with Orostan, and that is attempting to place a nuclear weapon in the Western Hemisphere: Canada, Jamaica, Guyana, etc. The U.S. would consider this a total repudiation of the status-quo relationship between the two countries: a threat to resolve their differences with nuclear hellfire, rather than with the gentleman's game of diplomacy and espionage and economic chess. It would instantly render the stakes of this contest existential, and cause the United States to make the SWR's overthrow its single, overriding priority in global affairs. This would make such an act suicidally counterproductive for the SWR: guaranteed to provoke the very outcome it was intended to deter. Perhaps London's diplomats - likely the most skillful Congress-watchers in the world - understood this, and never tried to base a nuclear weapon in the Americas. Or perhaps the Americans failed to communicate their red line clearly, and we got something like the Cuban Missile Crisis - this world's closest brush with nuclear war - before some combination of American threats and compromises convinced the Brits to withdraw their weapons, and the status quo relationship returned (albeit with trust badly bruised for a few decades). Either way works for me, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
SWR would, through World War 2 and sometime onward assume that good relations with the United States would eventually lead to socialism by soft power. This would probably last until a anti-socialist (or even just conservative) turn in American politics, at which point an attempt to move nuclear weapons into Canada would be made, perhaps setting up a Cuban Missile Crisis situation. Assuming that it'd harm it'd trade relations by defaulting on american debt in response to an invasion of Canada caused by the SWR moving nuclear weapons into Canada (because it'd basically have been the aggressor rather than reacting to anything other than a potential American move), the SWR decides to back down and pull nuclear weapons out of Canada. From then until economic liberalization, you'd have the lowest point of US/SWR relations, probably when efforts to undermine SWR's grip on black-majority territories occurs, even if economic ties remain.
The 1980s would probably be the high point of SWR & United States relations. The World Socialist Party probably had an un-interrupted dominance of the government during this period. Maybe there's even talk about an EU-type organization uniting the ATO and the Lagos Pact. What I think happens that helps bring this era to a close is that the World Communist Party, which traditionally strongest in the most industrialized, whiter parts of the SWR, ends up making headways in the non-white majority periphery of the SWR due to fear English/American united "Social Imperialist' exploitation of the periphery. So the military establishment, not wanting to see disarmament, combines with the periphery in political alliance. The final nail in the coffin of the era is when that coalition manages to flip Manchester technocrats (think of Manchester being home to the SWR's Silicon Valley) with the promise of essential shredding privacy rights on behalf of social grading and big technology. By the 2000s the Social Grade Economy becomes a the unquestioned economic orthodoxy of the state, even as the communist and socialist parties swap office pretty frequently. The main difference between the two tends to Hawkishness vs Dovishness in foreign policy and Authoritarianism vs Libertarianism in social policy.
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