OK: a different take on Krapman's "Caliphate":
In a world which already had diverged from OTL substantially from 2007 on and not for the better, certain fanatical Islamicist groups temporarily cooperating and backed by big Saudi money succeeded in getting their hands on atomic weapons from a Pakistan in failed state freefall and a particularly dumb high North Korean official who needed the money. Some failed to go off or were intercepted – the Israelis managed to avoid disaster – but in 2015 several US cities and London saw explosions leading to the deaths of four million Americans and a million Brits, including most of the British government, “in revenge for the people of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan and their millions of dead and unborn”, according to the group’s released statement.
What was seen as an insufficiently vigorous US government response (the occupation of Pakistani nuclear facilities, the execution by the Saudi government of a couple of their wealthier non-Royals as sacrificial lambs, and an even larger purge on the part of the North Korean government, and a global hunt for everyone even peripherally involved in the plot) led to victory by a razor-thin majority by third-party candidate Pat Buckman on a platform not too different from Ann Coulter’s.
War is a good time for scrubbing out those annoying civil liberties, and Buckman proved adept. Drawing the US into a war against virtually all of Islam provided all _sorts_ of opportunities for Emergency Measures, mysterious illnesses and disappearances of opposition candidates, arrests of “traitors”, etc., [1] although it wasn’t until the nuking of New York (believed by many to this day to have been a false flag operation using nuclear materials taken from Pakistan) that national martial law was established, and was never removed. In the final phase, pretty much every major Muslim state not _already_ invaded by the US was presented with a laundry list of demands as impossible as those presented to Serbia before WWI, and their failure to cave properly lead to “massive nuclear retaliation.” Some 32 countries out of 49 Islamic-majority states were targeted, and others would later face US action as a result of “hosting terrorists”: it is rumored that his aides tried to talk Buckman out of nuking US ally Turkey, but Buckman noted that an Islamist government was in control in Turkey and had largely hobbled its traditional opponent, the military leadership: there was no way he was leaving an Islamic regime in control of a major middle eastern power, and in his twisted world view the Turkish people deserved what they got for voting them into power in the first place. North Korea was also targeted.
It is estimated that the final death toll was near 800 million: nearly 150 million of these were non-Muslims, Christians and others within Muslims countries, North Koreans, people in neighboring countries dying of fallout and in subsequent famines, plagues, and civil wars as the global economy tanked and crops failed widely due to bad weather and farmers fleeing in panic from atomic contamination.
A global panic gripped the world as people feared what the US might do next: the European Union, Russia and China created a joint nuclear defense pact to deter further US attacks. The US found itself essentially without allies, save for some extremely anti-Muslim African Christians and the UK, which was under its own “government of emergency.”Attempts to woo countries such as India (where the US went looking for replacement for the huge number of illegal Latin American laborers Buckman had ordered expelled) generally failed badly (Indians, already nauseated by the death toll and infuriated by the fallout and the huge refugee problem, engaged in massive “pick your own cotton, fuckman”- themed protests).
Buckman, seeking to reinforce US power through gaining control of resources abroad, would go on to extend US rule in the Pacific, annex Canada, and occupy Mexico to “restore order,” while reducing most of Latin America to puppet regimes. Ultimately the biggest failure in his efforts to expand was Japan, where a combination of existing military bases and a belief in the “childish, pacifistic nature of the Japanese”, combined with Russian and Chinese unwillingness to go to bat for Japan militarily, led him to think Japan could easily be made into another puppet regime. Things would go seriously pearshaped within a few years, although it would not until after Buckman passed away in his sleep in 2036 that the US would withdraw from Japan, leaving a population reduced by a fifth and utterly radicalized.
The US would remain a dictatorship, with the presidency-for-life passing first to Buckman’s hand-picked successor, and then on to his successor’s children. It was Buckman’s successor, Nehemiah Featherstone, who would rename the US as an Empire, although neither he nor his heirs would take an Imperial title, remaining simply President or Fist Citizen, and Featherstone’s son who would introduce the many neo-Roman flourishes to the Empire which so annoy European classicists.
Europe faced somewhat a moral crisis after what people would later call “The Islamic Holocaust”: what could they do to alleviate the horrendous suffering? One thing they could do was accept refugees in bulk lots: in a narrow victory against the forces of nationalism, it was decided to throw the gates wide, and millions of desperate people from Africa and the Middle East flowed into Europe. Assimilation, already a serious problem in France, Germany, and other places, would be a political hot potato for the next decade: in the end, it was the new pan-European Party, the Transnational Progressives, who would deal with the problem not through efforts to make Muslims into good Europeans, but by rather creating a society which would make sure nobody was left sunk in poverty or segregated on the basis of race and nationality. (A global economic collapse which made the 2008 recession look like a walk in the park, and the broader European impression that European neo-liberals and right wingers were stooges of the now horrifying Americans, meant that the Left came back this time with a vengeance: politicians who talked “letting the market do its thing” and “austerity” tended to get death threats and bricks through their windows).
The gates to immigration would eventually swing at least partly shut again, but the boost to Europe’s Muslim population would be huge. As this worked its way through the demographic pipelines over the next few decades, the writings of the Turkish mystic and refugee known to many as “the heir of Rumi” would win a large portion of Europe’s irreligious youth to his Sufi version of Islam. Combined with the eventual assimilation of NW Africa into Europe, this Islamic shift in Europe would break up the EU into a (mostly) Christian east and an increasingly Islamic west. Admittedly, even by the early 22nd century the Euro-African Union would only have a Muslim plurality of about 45% of the total population, with Christians making up another 30% and the remainder being a mix of Atheists, Agnostics, Deists, Mormons, Bahai, Neo-Pagans, Jews, Spaghetti Monsterists, etc.
In the year 2106, the world is still shaped by President Buckman’s reign. The world’s largest and most powerful political block, the Grand Alliance, exists principally to counter and contain the still extant and still deeply alarming American Empire. Global warming has done its worst, sea levels have risen and deserts expanded, but human beings have proved adaptable and found technological and other workarounds, and have even begun to work on changing the climate back to something a bit less troublesome. Humankind, after a long pause, is again pushing out into space, and still struggles with issues of freedom and responsibility, religion and secularism, assimilation vs. multiculturalism.
The UK would remain under “Emergency Rule” for quite a while, but the junta which came to power in the chaotic immediate aftermath was never able to win enough support, even the support of acquiescence, to consolidate its rule the away Buckman and his “Wake Up, America” (later renamed something less silly) party did in America. The effort to use the young king (the Queen had perished in nuclear fire) as a figurehead for the dictatorship didn’t work out very well, especially since the rather thick-headed royal fancied himself an Arthur figure and wanted real power, not figurehead status. There is a reason the Throne stood empty for three decades before being reoccupied by a personable Jacobite. By the 2060s Britain was back to democracy and patching things up with the continent, although ultimately balking at joining the increasingly Islamic EU. As a result of the dictatorship, Scotland and England parted ways shortly after it ended, although dynastic reunification remains a popular idea among many.
The Union of Prague, originally founded on the basis of worries about Islam overrunning the European Union, is nowadays ironically very friendly with the Euroafrican Union, and rather secular, but its politicians still like talking about “Christian values.” It is currently a bit in love with space travel, the New Space Age of the late 2090s and beyond having inspired a new Futurist movement based in Poland, and the revival of the works of old-time SF master Stanislaw Lem. (“Polish” jokes re the Union’s space program are _not_ appreciated).
Russia was an anti-US/American Empire European ally for a while, but ultimately its undemocratic nature became a serious problem, especially after a demographic panic re Islamic refugees from central Asia and a US threat to do something about the “Kazakh problem” if the Russians didn’t led to war in Asia, internal rebellion, and brutal reaction. Eventually the Putinist Old Guard were overthrown by a new Clerical-authoritarian party whose leader had some odd ideas on history [2] and science, which has led over the years to Russia going down some strange roads. Nowadays Russia, while relatively placatory with respect to most of the world, has something of an informal alliance with the American Empire to keep the Chinese and Muslims at bay, although in the private opinion of the Directors of Rectitude the Americans are a bunch of brutal, bloodthirsty heretics which are going to burn.
In a phase of Orthodox Christian millenerianism, the Balkans went clerical-fascist in a whole other way (the Basileus's claim to descent from one the Byzantine dynasties is disputed at best).
Although battered by demographic problems and climate change over the course of the 21st century, China by 2106 was the one power which could really compete with the huge US Empire on something like a comparable scale, and in some fields of technology exceeds it. Although a (somewhat authoritarian) democracy nowadays, the Chinese today have a strong ideological bent, and that bent is transhumanism: the Chinese believe that the challenges of the 22nd century and beyond require a better brand of human beings, and have embraced cybernetic enhancements, combinations of behavioral therapy and mind-altering drugs to escape from normal congnitive biases and weaknesses, other drugs to enhance existing functions, and genetic engineering, to a more limited extent (since the effects of genetic modifications are complex and full of often unexpected multiple interactions). The Chinese make everyone, even their closest allies, a bit nervous.
India had a bad 21st century, with refugees from first atomic war and later rising seas, fallout, global warming messing with the monsoon and bringing famines, and crisis-exacerbated internal strife between aggressive Hindu-nationalists arguing for the subordination of Muslims and perhaps an American alliance, and more liberal elements backing the notion that Muslims were full Indians, too. A series of revolts and civil wars led to the breakup of India by mid-century: by the early 22nd, reunification is an ongoing process led from Bombay, although the prospects for getting the Ganges valley to rejoin any time soon seem iffy. (Orissa’s government will probably collapse if the Japanese decide they aren’t worth propping up, so there may be movement on that front). Collapse, agricultural failure, and massive numbers of Pakistani refugees have shifted the religious boundaries in the Punjab: relations are tense between the Hindu hardliners of the Pure Land and the theocratic socialists of the Green Banner Empire, which they claim is holding properly “Hindu” territory. There is also a small Sikh state which survives on pure badassery.
North Africa and the Middle East were of course a mess, with massive destruction of infrastructure and huge mortalities collapsing things down to pretty medieval conditions for a while. There are more people living in the area today than you would think: one consequence of killing the majority of Muslims and throwing the rest into utter squalor is that after a while, the birth rates go up again, as women are re-subordinated, contraception technology is lost, your only hope for a survivable old age is strong sons, and you need multiple kids to make sure some of them survive to adulthood; the population is now up to more than half of what it was before the Islamic Holocaust. Iran, after decades of thinly populated Mad Maxery followed by more decades of fragmented dictatorship, has emerged as a minor member of the Grand Alliance, along with the rump of northern Egypt. Most of Arabia is under the rule of the Black Brotherhood, which finally brought stability to the wreckage of post-Saudi Arabia at the point of a gun. Initially somewhat like the unfortunate offspring of an unholy marriage of the North Korean Communist Party and ISIS/ISIL, the Brotherhood has mellowed, although they continue to insist that only followers of the Four Accepted Schools of Islam are allowed to permanently settle in Holy Arabia. Mecca and Medina have been rebuilt with a lot of foreign donations, and there is even a Kaaba stone, although Brotherhood claims of it being the original, sneaked out before the nukes started to fall, remain controversial.
Israel took advantage of/was forced by the post war chaos to do some “house cleaning” and “securing of borders”, leading within a few years to a substantially larger – and over 90% Jewish – Israel. (Given the actions of the US, Israeli behavior hardly seemed worth commenting on.) In the longer run, however, Israel managed to save its soul by ending its alliance with the US and allowing (most of) its Arab citizens to remain: in 2106, although there have been some “temporary blips”, it remains a democracy, and if it has few allies globally, and remains detested by Arab nations, it does get along quite well with the African powers and East Asians. It’s population has been increased over the years by immigration from the American Empire, until it started putting restrictions in place in the 2080s: Buckman and his heirs have never been anti-Semites, but oddly enough many Jews have tended to find some issues with living in a genocidal dictatorship.
After a very rough first half of the 21st century, Africa has finally emerged as an important power center, with the important regional powers of Azania, neo-Jacobin Ethiopia, and the West African federation joining forces as a powerful alliance. All have somewhat of a prickly relationship with people of European descent, shaped by experience from the slave trade to colonialism to the failed effort by South African whites to reestablish white minority rule in the post-Islamic Holocaust chaos (they are very few Azanians of white descent nowadays), and although members of the Grand Alliance to contain the American Empire, are members through an alliance with the Chinese sphere rather than with all members including Europeans. Azania used to be allied to the Nihonese Collective and the Orissan Naxalites in the Communist Internationale, but since they have returned to a more capitalist economy there has been a fairly thorough falling out.
The American Empire is an autocratic regime that has edged more closely to totalitarianism over the years as the number of lies required to keep it going have increased. It’s fairly tolerant in terms of race – Hispanics have become “white unless they are seriously dark”, and black people are better integrated if still required to hold their noses re American meddling and propaganda about Africa. Religion, however, is an issue: Islam remains essentially illegal, being an Atheist is un-American, and Mormons have found themselves increasingly under suspicion of late. It is probably the world’s strongest military power still, but its position has been in slow decline for a while. The absorption of most of Mexico (the “no Mexicans” stand had been quietly reversed before Buckman’s death, and after a long war of pacification, something had to be _done_ with the place) and Canada, plus pro-natalist policies, mean that there are over 800 million Americans not counting “territorials”, but its technological edge has been slipping, and continued isolation (there are a wide variety of trade embargoes by all members of the Grand Alliance, although the Chinese do tend to cheat) and the stultifying effects of an environment suffused by propaganda damage innovation and creative thinking, combined with the inevitable corruption of the elites.
The current President-for-Life is a boob whose councilors and guards struggle to keep from doing anything too stupid, and unrest is rising. In spite of efforts to brainwash the population into believing the Orwellian line that “freedom is order” and that American rule is so excellent that there was no rational reason for people such as Canadians and Mexicans to resist its imposition, too many people have problems with the way things are run, and with advances in medical science, there are plenty of over-100s who remember well what things were like before Buckman, and many more younger men and women who lost family to the purges, and too many of them are willing to pass on what they know to younger generations once they are old enough to keep a secret.
Demonizing the outside world as a way to foster unity, on the other hand, remains a fairly effective policy: aside from angry anti-white Africans and mutant cyborg Chinese, the Muslim Eternal Enemy is once again threatening.
The Euro-African Union is of course American Enemy Number One. If you will ask a conservative Muslim, it is clear that Islam is a minority in the EU since the Neo-Sufi 14% are of course Not Proper Muslims. But to Americans, the EU is clearly the World Center of Islamic eviltude and firmly Muslim dominated, and Imperial propaganda regularly displays computer-generated reconstructions of European Dhimmis groaning under the Islamic yoke. In fact dress, male and female, does tend to be a bit more conservative than in 2015, and a lot of legal cases are worked out privately in Sharia courts, but on the other hand there are a lot of Islamic boozers and bacon-eaters, and women are if anything rather more prominent in politics and the sciences that they are in 2015 OTL Europe. There are a lot of new mosques built over the last century, but by and large the EU is mostly secular, and if some of the more noticeable Muslim politicians are fire-breathing conservatives, their chances of actually reshaping the EU in their image are somewhat less than of Sarah Palin doing the same in OTLs US, and the religious extremists that worry Europeans the most are the Baha’I (50 million strong world wide and getting cocky).
The EU Muslim community have established the position of a mediator of religious disputes for the state as a whole, elected from among the most reputable religious scholars in the EuroAfrican Union. It's a position with no actual political power, and - so far - it's the Americans who are calling him a Caliph.
Technological progress, if somewhat slowed by the global economic collapse and the generation-long recovery from it, and the essential cutoff of intellectual exchange between the US and most of the old world, has been substantial. A consensus on Global Warming was finally reached, although not soon enough to avoid some substantial global sea rises: the American Empire, the EU and China are leading effort to remediate the situation by geo-engineering, although limited communications between the Empire and the others means they sometimes work at cross purposes. Genetic engineering is fairly advanced, with a number of useful engineered plants and animals. (Enough “failure modes” have been discovered that people are taking changing humans very slowly, sticking so far mostly with genetic ailment prevention and minor cosmetic mods). Cancer is mostly curable, your arteries can be scrubbed out with little trouble, there’s a drug regime to stave off Alzheimer’s until your brain just shrinks too damn much, and the average lifespan in advanced countries is now well over 90.
Direct brain-computer interfaces are the thing today, and people see through electronic eyes and hear through economic ears (including those who in other days would be entirely blind or deaf) and control mechanical bodies: more disturbingly, nowadays the process can be reversed, electronic implants allowing one to turn another person into a remote-controlled waldo. Power armor is employed by the armed forces of the more advanced nations, remote-controlled machinery (and people) being somewhat limited due to advanced hacking tech.
President Buckman was a bit ambiguous on the “global warming” thing: he commanded the seizure of the Gulf oilfields, and opened wide Canada’s tar sands and southern shale oil, but also invested heavily in nuclear and solar power. By the later years of his rule this would prove useful, since by the 2030s that global warming was real and a serious problem was clear to anyone not dedicated to being a fool, and Buckman was no fool. The oil economy and (mostly) the coal economy are gone by 2106, with most power coming from solar, wind, hydro, ocean-thermal, and nuclear power. Nuclear includes fusion, which finally ceased to be 20 years away in 2072, when the first test power reactor came on line. It has however not crowded out fission yet, since at present state-of-the-art fusion reactors are considerably larger and more expensive than fission plants, and cannot yet burn hot enough for the less radioactive-generating He3 reaction, leading to a need to replace and dispose of highly radioactive neutron-activated internal surfaces every few years, and a sad lack of Moon-mines. Energy remains more expensive than during the 20th century Golden Age of Consumption, and efficiency is pursued zealously. Cars are variously electric, run off hydrogen fuel manufactured by other power sources, or on biofuels from fast-growing genetically engineered weeds. Planes usually run on hydrogen fuel, although a few crazy peoples use nuclear-powered blimps.
There are as yet no true AI (although modern computers can fake it pretty well) antigravity, teleportation, or nanotech that does anything that bacteria haven’t been doing for over a billion years.
After a long pause brought on by the aftermath of the Islamic Holocaust, Space travel and exploration resumed, and by the 2090s people were talking of a “new space age” as technological advances finally made practical many dreams of the 20th century. Single-stage to orbit is the norm, and several militaries now have a space presence allowing personnel drops from orbit. There are now a bunch of manned stations in orbit, along with bases on the Moon, and both China and the American Empire have reached Mars. Modern biotech has made long-term space residence possible, allowing the development of genuinely long-lived closed-cycle ecologies, and a regimen of drugs has been developed that counter most of the long term downsides of living in zero or very low gravity. Solar power satellites multiply, along with secret space weapons, alas. Robots, meanwhile, crawl and burrow and fly all over the solar system, and there is talk of using them to build a nice cozy base on Mars in advance of sending human colonizers.
The Nihonese Collective for some reason is roofing over most of its cities. Nobody is quite sure why they’re doing it, but it makes people nervous.
[1] Much to Buckman's disappointment, the US public failed to do his work for him by assassinating many of his political opponents, in spite of much nudging and hinting and suggestive waving around of Presidential Pardons.
[2] For one thing, the Millenium of Christ’s crucifixion hasn’t happened yet, you see.
