FE Lore: The Great Bifurcation
One of my main goals is to write my sci-fi trilogy Frozen Embers before AGI makes any human creative enterprises moot. The premise is that a rogue black hole called Nemesis knocks the Earth out of the Sun’s orbit in 2045, so subsequent life is somewhat of a downgrade relative to the Singularity promised by Kurzweil for that same year.
My first notes on this concept date to 20141. Over the years, I intermittently engaged in worldbuilding. The notes and lore now account for about 150,000 words, in addition to dozens of maps and stats tables. The “geopolitical backstory” dates to 2020, and so far as the 2020s are concerned, it is based on a theory that I first set out in November 2018 which I termed the Great Bifurcation:
Trumpism’s most significant legacy may be the bifurcation of the world-system. This will preserve US hegemony well beyond its natural, Sino-determined “expiration date”, but at the cost of a drastic reduction in geographic scope (based in USA and core Europe). Ironically, it will be the Blue Empire that is to almost exclusively benefit from this, as demographic replacement increasingly consign Republican support retreats to the rural hinterlands.
China will remain fully sovereign within its own “Sinosphere” (China and southeast Asia, with tendrils reaching along OBOR into the Middle East, Africa, Russia, and as far afield as Visegrad and Latin America).
Global geopolitics will consist of a cold war between a techno-authoritarian Leninist surveillance state and global cabal of Western Bioleninists who are no less totalitarian in their aspirations.
In the long run, I expect China to beat Western neoliberalism.txt.
If there are no radical technological breakthroughs such as mass genetic IQ augmentation, then population replacement migration to the West will make it increasingly dysfunctional and uncompetitive economically, militarily, and culturally (not to mention making the weakness of Chinese soft power moot). If there are major technological breakthroughs in “controversial” areas such as IQ augmentation, then China is bound to win even sooner. Why? Let's start with the fact that they don't consider it “controversial” at all.
Looking back there’s some cringe “multipolarist” aspects to it (e.g. neoreactionary brain worms - “Bioleninism”, “neoliberalism”, etc. coupled with an amusing overestimation of the competence and “will to power” of CPC apparatchiks, whereas in reality, all aspects of frontier technology remain the near exclusive preserve of American technocapital and what passed for Chinese soft power has collapsed globally). Nonetheless, I do think it was a prescient “prediction” for all that. At the time, the US was enabling Chinese technological convergence instead of trying to strangle it, Chimerica was the motor of the world economy, and the prospect of a Taiwan War was more a subject of geopolitical thrillers (Ghost Fleet) than urgent national security debate (World on the Brink). The idea that the world-system would bifurcate into giant spheres of influence dominated by the two superpowers was, while not absurd, decidedly speculative.
Sadly, I never got around to writing the longread that I was promising about the Great Bifurcation (so much so that its absence became a meme that some old frogs still remember). The speed of events, accelerating under COVID and continuing up to the present day, have been such that the Great Bifurcation has become a self-evident reality.
That said, the Great Bifurcation longread did in a circuitous way make its way into the lore of Frozen Embers. This “future history” of the 2020s first appeared in my worldbuilding notes in September 20202, and is reproduced below as is (in the present worldbuilding notes, it has remained largely intact in essence, though not the details, which I’ll address at the end).
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The Great Bifurcation
Timelines diverge at the time of writing – so, the early 2020s. This period was defined by the Great Bifurcation, in which the world system split into two camps dominated by the United States and China. Most of the EU remained within the Atlanticist camp, while Russia and Iran drifted off into the Sinosphere. In 2027, unnerved by the inexorable growth of Chinese naval power – and bolstered by the presence of a hardline neocon administration in Washington, D.C. under President Tom Cotton – Taiwan finally bit the bullet and declared independence on February 12, 2027. The PLA sprang into action. Seeing this as a direct challenge to America’s increasingly flimsy pretensions to global hegemony, not to mention an opportunity to rescue flagging approval ratings, the US moved in to defend Taiwanese sovereignty, kickstarting World War III.
Anti-ship ballistic missiles and hypersonic cruise missiles emerged supreme over the US Navy, which was soon forcibly ejected from the first island chain, and severely challenged in the second. Particularly traumatic was the sinking of two aircraft carriers, after which the USN resorted to harassing actions with its submarine fleet (the only naval arm that lived up to prewar expectations). In the Middle East, Iran closed down the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. Taking advantage of waning US attention, Russia launched a blitz up to the Dnieper River, coupled with an amphibious assault on Odessa. When this triggered NATO air intervention, it followed it up by overrunning the Baltics and cutting them off at the Suwalski Gap to preempt NATO reinforcements, thus opening up a second front and making it a truly global conflict. Emboldened by Russia’s successes, Serbia took the opportunity to bring its sundered territories back into the fold.
Unlike in World War II, none of the major combatant powers had strong expansionist drives – their ambitions were primarily limited to “righting” what they considered to be historical wrongs. Russia was perfectly content with restoring the old Soviet borders in Europe, while China was aware that it wasn’t yet in a position to challenge global US naval hegemony – they could not lift the blockade of the Straits of Malacca short of a land invasion, and even in that case, the Indian Ocean would remain closed to them regardless. For their part, the Europeans weren’t keen on sacrificing their soldiers to regain Riga, and the US was too preoccupied with China to bother. Subsequently, after the initial Sino-Russian advances during the summer of 2027, the conflict was cooling down by winter of that year.
Wracked by military setbacks and economic turmoil, the Cotton administration was voted out in favor of a pro-peace one in November 2028. They were dominated by leftists who wanted to transition from a foreign imperialist war to a domestic cultural war. This agenda reached its apogee in a gun confiscations program, following a large terrorist attack using guns mounted on drones which was blamed on White Nationalists but was likely an Antifa false flag. This provoked outright resistance, resulting in armed militias taking over broad swathes of rural Cascadia. The heavy-handed government response provoked a Constitutional convention and a flurry of state secessions over summer 2029.
The feds launched an Anti-Terrorist Operation. However, with major desertions from the US Armed Forces and local militias, it soon grew into a full-scale US Civil War II between the US and the coalescing League of the South (LS); though unlike in the original Civil War, its core was now in Texas, not Virginia, which remained under federal control. Two years of escalating grinding warfare followed, with the brunt of the fighting falling on the MidWest. Public dissatisfaction in the United States was building up amidst perceptions that it was the poor and unprivileged who were doing the brunt of the fighting with the buntive rednecks, while neolib kids made extended “study abroad” tours to Europe. This culminated in “Red August” of 2031 as armed leftist revolutionaries, operating from a network of DSA bases, seized power throughout the major cities of America’s eastern seaboard. They proclaimed their new fledgling state to be the People’s Commonwealth of America (PCA).
Soon after, California – which had long been quietly distancing itself – declared independence, extending its protection to the other Pacific and Mountain states. The Communist revolts in Portland and Seattle were put down by Silicon Valley’s mercenary forces, with the uprisings there being muted as most of its cadres had been transferred east. The resulting polity styled itself the Western States Pact (WSP). In the war-wracked MidWest, the Great Lakes Republic (GLR) took form, also declaring independence.
At this point, it is possible that the LS could have put the crushing blow to the PCA. However, just at this time it fell into internal disarray, splintering between a conservative restorationist faction within the former Confederacy, and a Alt Right-Aztlan synthesis from Arizona to Texas that favored accommodation with the PCA against the US. Making peace with China and Russia with the Treaty of Honolulu in March 2032, they used their newly formed Red Army, commanded by sympathizing and captive US officers, to launch a surprise attack on the Great Lakes Republic and hurtle down all the way west to Idaho.
By the summer of 2033, the front lines were firmly established and the civil war was petering down, with the PCA controlling the northern US heartlands from New England and Virginia to Idaho; the LS controlling the territories of the former Confederacy down to Arizona; the WSP controlling the Pacific coast and the Mountain states; and the rump US government having relocated to Hawaii. Subsequently, Hawaii would re-accede into the WSP, thus securing it formal continuity of the US and its seat in the UN.
Alaska and Utah declared independence and armed neutrality, though the latter would eventually integrate into the WSP .
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Obviously, allowances have to be made for the sci-fi element; it’s the setup to a post-apocalyptic story. But the vibes are on track so far.
US Politics
I thought Trump was finished after 2020, but I soon revised that assessment when it became clear that his cult of personality was here to stay; indeed, by October 2021, I predicted the next election would be Biden vs. Trump again, with Biden the likely winner. This timeline was going quite well until the stark revelation of Biden’s senility crisis in the recent debates. Now, that’s looking iffy.
But what would a Trump 2.0 administration look like? Tax cuts for the rich, abortion restrictions for the poor, and a foreign policy sooner characterized by Trump’s mercurial personality characteristics than the fake “pro-peace candidate” narrative pushed by MAGA3. Trump is also personally lazy and incompetent, now more so than he was eight years ago, so in practice we can expect Project 2025 ideologues and neocons to run things in practice. The vibes of a pre-war Fallout America, resurgently “patriotic” and performatively anti-Woke on the surface, socially riven and corrupt underneath, rushing into a final war with China, is not far-fetched under Trump 2.0.
The full-fledged Civil War it ends up devolving into remains firmly in the realm of political sci-fi, and discordant with political science (rich advanced countries are politically stable). I actually retconned it out a couple of years later, having found a more elegant devices to set up pre-Nemesis geopolitics in the way I wanted for the story. Then again, we might be on the cusp of AGI, and as I say if that is true we can expect increasingly unlikely things to start happening if that and some form of the anthropic principle is true. I do think that a Trump 2.0 regime - especially one that fails in cardinal ways - will reinvigorate Far Left movements that seems to currently be in terminal down only mode.
In the current version, Trump wins in 2024 with his VP Sandra Preston (fictional), who becomes President when the Don dies of a heart attack a year later. War weariness leads to Mike Bloomberg running as a Democrat with AOC as VP winning in 2028.
WW3
In 2020, I believed that the Russian military was the world’s third strongest one after the US and China, and would crush a country like Ukraine much in the way that Nazi Germany did Poland in 1939. I obviously overestimated Russian military capabilities; no rush to the Dnieper ever happened, with <1% of collective Western GDP being sufficient to stymie its last attempt to rebuild the Empire. (I discussed the reasons for that extensively in The Z of History).
Clearly with its Soviet stockpiles approaching depletion, Baltic border areas denuded, the “modernized” MIC being revealed as largely vaporware, and no longer with the capacity to take a small town 2 km from its borders, the events described above in Europe can no longer transpire. At least short of extensive rearmament with Chinese weaponry, high military spending of resources that Russia doesn’t have, and retraining/reform under leaders with no relation to the ruling Putinist kakistocracy that can’t win in principle. But that’s a story of at least a decade, and the timelines no longer match up.
However, a Chinese military victory over the US in the late 2020s is still plausible, though less likely in 2024 than I would have predicted in 2020 (i.e., when the US was at peak woke and without its AI revolution, and before China itself closed up and retreated back into itself). In the event, the current version deemphasizes the European fighting, and has a largely stalemated war between the US and China, which ends with the Treaty of Honolulu in 2030 and without the US falling into civil war afterwards.
Drone Guns and Aztlan Groyperism
I have been rather obsessed with the potential of drones to revolutionize warfare (and terrorism) since the mid-2010s, and this is now coming to fruition on the battlefields of Ukraine with an outright majority of all destroyed hardware accruing to drones as of late 2023. Drone-assisted terrorist attack catalyzing a political crisis is something I consider as very much programmed, sooner or later.
The Alt Right-Aztlan synthesis idea made sense to me in light of Latinos even 5 years ago being the demographic contingent with the highest prevalence of Alt Right sympathies and the emergence of Nick J. Fuentes as a semi-prominent political personality as “thought leader” of the groypers, which was once nothing more than a schizo online cult (well, it kind of still is, but the Christian nationalism it spearheads is far more visible and influential now). Needless to say, I have nothing but contempt for it, but it objectively it has legs, on the principle that the dumbest ideologies have the greatest staying power.
Though initially, the global cooling happened as a result of a geoengineering catastrophe to reverse AGW. The black hole idea replaced it in 2016 and was intimately tied to the Katechon hypothesis, the idea that the universe-simulation only has a limited amount of calculating space, which incentivizes alien civilizations to destroy competitors on sight.
In practice, Republicans are consistently more aggressive in foreign policy than Democrats. On Iran, on Israel, on China, and - Russiagate conspiracies regardless - on Russia (Trump sold lethal weapons to Ukraine, Obama didn’t). Always look at actions, not rhetoric. And the leopard doesn’t change its spots. This alone should tell you that Trump 2.0 will be far more hawkish than Biden or some other Dem.