This is my first work that I cooked up some time ago, involving some sort of crazy Japanised unification between Japan and the Commonwealth of Nations, with Algeria thrown in for good measure, because why not?
Ahem. Anyway, the Titanium Solstice is my very first piece of work this site, and what I think might be the first of one or more series that I'm coming up with. That's right, we are talking about a Neo-Anglo-Japanese pseudo-empire, only this time the whole thing is being controlled by the country you would least expect to do so: Singapore.
This work is partially inspired by Homefront, in which a unified Korea under Kim Jong-un controls Japan, Southeast Asia and even the western US. Here, we instead have Singapore hijacking control of the Brotherhood of Guntai Sovereign Regions, which in this world consists of Japan plus most of the Commonwealth of Nations (minus Pakistan, Quebec and Sri Lanka but including India for reasons that will be explained later) and (of all the countries I could pick) Algeria, and having parts of Southeast Asia, and more, as client states under the eagle-eyed watch of Singapore. Oh, and I think this is the first ever timeline that makes use of a little-known IRL military alliance as a stepping stone for all of this to happen.
Sit back and enjoy!
This is a cover created by myself for my very own
EEUSG entry, the Piratocracy of Nicaragua. All canon lore and material has been created by me (yes, this is a solo project).
The PoD is that shortly after the bombing of the Kerch Strait Bridge in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin unleashes a nuclear missile on the Ukrainian city of Lviv, drawing massive condemnation from the West. The diplomatic spat between Washington and Moscow gets so bad that Putin is overthrown by Russian ultra-nationalists who proceed to nuke the American city of Portland, sparking off a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.
The United States, China and Russia would then be gravely devastated in the aftermath of the Northern War that precipitated the Second Russian Revolution, which in turn replaced the old authoritarian regime in Moscow with a comparatively sane and democratic one. Russia was invaded by a joint occupation force consisting of NATO, Japan and China (which joined after a nuclear missile intended for Japan backfired and blew up in Manchuria). The global economy went down the toilet as stocks crashed and bankruptcy skyrocketed worldwide. Faced with increasing internal unrest, the United States of America could no longer fund its military presence overseas, most notably in Europe, South Korea and Japan. Thus, decades of US military presence on foreign soil came to an end as US troops withdrew completely from Europe and Asia, while retaining only token commitments to Liberia and the USA's immediate neighbourhood in Latin America. China, for its part, turned isolationist and quietly abandoned any plans to annex Taiwan as its military was deployed to ensure law and order in the neighbouring Russian Far East as well as within the PRC itself.
It was at this time of crisis when an admittedly obscure alliance originating in the early 1970s would set the stage for the eventual creation of a superpower that no one had ever expected. The Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA), which was a military alliance between Britain and four of her ex-colonies (Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore) dating back to the heyday of the Cold War, was expanded to include Japan at the behest of Tokyo (mainly out of concerns of a resurgent China, given what had happened to the Russians), giving rise to the Five Power Defence Arrangements Plus Japan alliance. Not long after, Canada was accepted into the new alliance, which subsequently blossomed into a loose confederation called the Oceanian Union. Being a country composed entirely of democracies, and one that was just getting started with promoting multiculturalism and peaceful coexistence between the many races that inhabited the nation, the outward-looking Oceania was seen as a promising candidate for being a potential successor of the now-isolationist United States: A champion of freedom, democracy and multiculturalism throughout the globe.
However, the Union would soon find itself sucked into a war against a separatist Quebec, which was being supported by the recently-formed, French-dominated Federal States of Europe. The war was so bloody that Oceania was forced to withdraw and leave behind a
de-facto independent Quebec. Tensions would worsen even more when the FSE then invaded a pro-Oceania Algeria in an attempt to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels for the next few decades, causing the FSE and the Oceanian Union to be embroiled in a war over Algeria. And the final straw would be an attempted assassination of the British and Japanese royal families in Tokyo, which would pave the way for an attempted military coup and then the rise of the Singapore-born Octavian Kai, who would eventually transform the democratic Oceanian Union into the militaristic Brotherhood of Guntai (Japanese for military) Sovereign Regions as its Grand Praetor, with Singapore as its capital.
Over the next few years, the Guntai Brotherhood would see its influence and prosperity grow under the Grand Praetor over the next few years. When Octavian Kai first took power, numerous members of the ruling People’s Action Party and other political parties in Singapore were detained for speaking out against militaristic rule, and the subsequent puppetisation of these political parties by the military commenced, a clear indicator of what would happen throughout the rest of Oceania. However, he also introduced policies and sweeping reforms that would bring about greatly improved living standards for citizens of the Brotherhood, winning over even those who were previously sceptical of his rule. He also introduced a new currency called the Guntai credit (Ƶ), created a new national anthem for Oceania and made English and Japanese the official languages in the Brotherhood, the latter of which was more controversial but still succeeded nonetheless. And above all, he would drastically upgrade the country’s armed forces from a collection of rag-tag militaries with a mix of equipment to a highly professional military that could go toe to toe with the world’s greatest superpowers.
In the foreign affairs department, the Grand Praetor would oversee the successful co-option of all of South-East Asia into the Confederation of South-East Asian States, a successor to ASEAN under the Oceanian sphere of influence. India would voluntarily join the Brotherhood after a Pakistani nuclear strike on New Delhi which decapitated the Indian government (and was reciprocated with the Grand Praetor ordering a nuclear strike on the Pakistani port of Gwadar using an ICBM based off the Japanese-designed Epsilon rocket); the Brotherhood would provide plenty of humanitarian aid to India in the years that followed. And when the countries of eastern North Africa requested the Grand Praetor’s assistance in resisting a series of rebellions backed by the Arabian Empire, the Grand Praetor accepted, helping the North Africans defeat the rebels and then co-opting Egypt, Libya, Sudan and South Sudan as client states into his sphere of influence, grouping the first two of these into a federation called the North African Imperium, which was placed under
de facto Egyptian leadership. These actions helped improve the Brotherhood's public image in the eyes of many but exacerbated tensions with the FSE, especially as Algerian mercenaries started being deployed in Quebec to help bring Montreal back into the fold. The resulting Second Cold War would consist largely of proxy wars and influence campaigns much like the first, only this time it would pit the freedom-promoting and democratic Federal States of Europe against the militaristic and authoritarian Brotherhood of Guntai Sovereign Regions, which eschewed prioritising individual rights and freedoms in favour of maintaining law and order for the collective good of the people.
The Brotherhood would eventually reach the peak of its influence after the devastating Southern War, in which the rogue states of Venezuela and Zimbabwe ganged up to subjugate Latin America and Africa respectively. Zimbabwe lost the war after it attacked the pro-Guntai Great Lakes Republic in east Africa (essentially Tanzania plus Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi), drawing the Brotherhood into the war. Zimbabwe itself suffered a devastating Carthaginian peace and its culture was totally wiped out, and it remains under heavy military occupation to this day. As for Venezuela, it was allowed to surrender and was lucky to escape with little more than its own survival, seeing as to what happened with Zimbabwe.
However, the consequences that the invasions of both countries had on their respective environments was profound and would shape the world for many years to come. The defeat of Zimbabwe paved the way for the Guntai Brotherhood to directly annex the Great Lakes Republic and turn many formerly pro-FSE African countries into pro-Guntai client states (most of them being members of the now-defunct Commonwealth of Nations, which was led by the British); South Africa even had its own sphere of influence within the newly-formed Guardians of the Titanium Solstice.
The post-war situation in South America was even worse. The Brotherhood intervened in the subsequent Brazilian Civil War, successfully overthrowing the pro-Brussels government of the Federative Republic of Brazil and replacing it with a resurrected Brazilian monarchy heading the Holy Brazilian Empire. The HBE too would grow in power as it flexed its muscles on the international stage and even managed to carve out a small sphere of influence in Africa. All while the FSE could do little but helplessly watch more and more nations fall into the combined spheres of influence of the Brotherhood and the Empire.
Unfortunately for the Grand Praetor, the initial honeymoon between Singapore and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil's new capital) would come to an unhappy end. After a regional war over Uruguay, the Brotherhood and the Empire would break off relations in the acrimonious Guntai-Brazilian Schism, causing much of Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka to drift into the Brazilian sphere of influence instead. The Brotherhood was severely weakened by this schism, but it was still the most powerful nation on the planet, controlling many strategic locations including the Suez Canal and the Straits of Malacca.
The year is now 2054, twenty-five years after the Grand Praetor rose to power. Tensions between the Federal States of Europe, the Guntai Brotherhood and the Holy Brazilian Empire still run at an all-time high. The international scene is dominated by numerous instances of political intrigue, with two factions regularly ganging up against one only to backstab each other later on. Though neutral, China is keeping an eye on the Second Cold War in the event that the Grand Praetor's agreement with Beijing no longer applies after his death (the Grand Praetor is ethnic Chinese). The United States of America, on the other hand, can only watch in disappointment as it sees its peaceful post-First Cold War legacy torn down by nations formerly within its sphere of influence quarrelling with one another and even engage in war on more than one occasion.
There are still those who claim to fight for freedom, justice and democracy in this world despite the weakening of the United States, and they comprise the Association of Free Nations. The AFN is led by a revitalised European Union that eventually became the French-dominated Federal States of Europe, co-opting as many like-minded nations to their side as they could in their quest to spread their own brand of liberty, equality and fraternity to every corner of the globe. In fact, libertarian democracy plays such a key role in the FSE's style of governance that the four ballistic missile submarines newly commissioned by the French have names which are the French translations of liberty, equality, fraternity and secularity (being
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité and
Laïcité respectively), the last of which has drawn plenty of flak from both the Guntai Brotherhood and the Holy Brazilian Empire for its perceived use as a justification for discriminatory policies towards Muslims in France (in the words of one correspondent: You couldn't name it
Prospérité or prosperity instead? Really?).
Though the FSE is weaker than its Brotherhood rival both economically and militarily, it still has powerful allies who would stand by its side in the event of a war with the Brotherhood. That said, some of their allies aren't exactly stable at the moment, let alone what you'd call "democratic"; in parts of "Free West Africa", people still don't have enough to eat. This is starting to become a problem for a resource-starved Brussels, because as Kazuo Kawai once remarked, "democracy cannot be taught to a starving people". Another eyesore in the AFN is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which is itself under martial law once again after the chaos of the Northern War forced China to withdraw military support for Pakistan (Beijing needed to use its own arms to police its portion of the former Russian Far East as well as its own territory due to increasing unrest both within its borders and in the surrounding areas) and, as Brussels quickly found out, is paying lip service to the AFN only so it can get India (and by extension the Brotherhood) off its backside. These further add validity to critics' remarks that the "Free" in the AFN's full title refers only to those countries not under Guntai or Brazilian influence, rather than true freedom and democracy in every sense of the word.
Brussels' Public Enemy No. 1 would be the Titanium Solstice (TST), led by the militaristic Brotherhood of Guntai Sovereign Regions. Formed mostly from the deceased remains of the British-led Commonwealth of Nations and possessing the largest economy and population in the world, the Brotherhood is a bastardised version of your standard über-powerful military dictatorship, being seen as a resurrected British Empire that proceeded to take up Japanese as an official language before adopting a weird mixture of socialism and fascism. As far as military dictatorships go, it is only because of the Grand Praetor's absolute rule that the Brotherhood has been able to reach such astronomical heights. The underlying ideology of the Brotherhood, known as Praetorianism, takes elements from real and fictional governments like the British Empire, the Soviet Union, the Domination of the Draka and Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire, but its main influences are the early Roman Empire under Augustus, Imperial Japan, the Tokugawa shogunate and the Republic of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew. Praetorianism has also incorporated an increasingly unhealthy hero-worship of Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore (which is the homeland of the Grand Praetor), which critics and dissidents have deemed eerily similar to Imperial Japan's use of State Shinto. As a matter of fact, the Brotherhood is a culturally Japanised version of the Commonwealth of Nations, thanks to Japanese economic strength as well as successful efforts by the Grand Praetor to introduce elements of Japanese culture into Brotherhood society, such as making Japanese the second official language of the Brotherhood after English.
The Guntai Brotherhood is also the strongest military power on Earth after the United States thanks to extensive cooperation between the Brotherhood's member nations (most notably Britain, Japan, India and Singapore) and two decades of rapid remilitarisation by the Grand Praetor, and the navy is particularly impressive. While the
Rengō Kantai (short for
Guntai Kakushin Rengō Kantai, which is itself the Japanese name of the Guntai Revolutionary Combined Naval Fleet) does not have any nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, let alone aircraft carriers that rival those of the United States, it more than makes up for this deficiency with the single largest naval fleet of any nation (and the majority of this fleet is by far high-quality) and top-notch naval doctrine. Article 9 of Japan's Constitution forbidding the use of war to settle international disputes has been done away with long ago, with the same thing going for India's no-first-use stance regarding WMDs. Another notable feature of the Brotherhood military is its massive stockpile of white phosphorus-based incendiary weaponry, and more importantly, the Grand Praetor's willingness to use them after what happened in the war against Zimbabwe (which was really brutal). These powerful tools in the Brotherhood's arsenal, together with the Brotherhood's immense population of over 1.5 billion (excluding its client states and/or allies) and the incorporation of a toned-down version of Japanese
bushido into its overall military doctrine, are just small components of what makes the Brotherhood a truly dangerous foe.
As for allies and client states, the Brotherhood obviously has the countries comprising the former Japanese occupation zone of Russia in its fold, although the Grand Praetor exerts his influence with a surprisingly light hand, letting them do as they wish as long as they do not fall too much out of line in Singapore's view.
