Twilight's Last Gleaming (novel)

Plot

In the year 2024, significant oil reserves are discovered in the Indian Ocean, in Tanzanian territorial waters. The following year, U.S. President Jameson Weed and his staff meet in the White House. The United States of the year 2025 was suffering from a long period of economic stagnation, exacerbated by the effects of peak oil and global warming. Weed's plan to take control of the Tanzanian oil gets support from Vice President Leonard Gurney, a political hack, and from National Security Adviser Ellen Harbin, a hawkish neocon, but is opposed by Secretary of Defense Bill Stedman, who believes the plan is asking for trouble. Meanwhile, the president of Tanzania, knowing that the United States has a history of fighting for oil, senses danger and appeals to his country's ally, China, for protection.

The men of the Chinese government's inner circle, knowing that they have reached parity with the declining United States, devise an ambitious plan to help their client state, and receive eager assistance from America's numerous enemies. The Chinese are able to keep their plan secret, and thus the American forces are taken by surprise when they launch the invasion in July 2025. The Chinese hack the American satellite network, hampering communications, and launch a volley of high-speed cruise missiles that they had smuggled into Tanzania. The American fleet, unprepared for this new generation of missiles, is devastated: most of the ships, including the aircraft carrier, are either sunk or disabled.

Meanwhile, the Army and Air Force launch the invasion from Kenya, the only American client state remaining in the region. The arrival of Chinese planes via Russia and Iran puts the Americans on the defensive. The American fighters were selected for their ability to produce profits for their politically connected manufacturers rather than their efficacy in combat, and the Chinese gain air superiority. Tanzania and several other African nations declare war on Kenya. The international press chronicles the fighting (reporters from Australia and the United Arab Emirates play a prominent role) but the Weed administration tries to keep the news out of American newspapers.

The Chinese and their African allies drive the American and Kenyan forces back into Kenya. With so many ships and planes already lost, the Americans cannot resupply them easily. The Weed administration escalates the conflict by attacking a Chinese military base directly. Aghast, Stedman resigns as Secretary of Defense. The Chinese retaliate by launching a surprise attack on the American base at Diego Garcia, taking control of the island. By September, the government of Kenya had fallen, and the American forces are trapped and must surrender. Iran, with promises of a quid pro quo from the Chinese for stirring up trouble, launches an invasion of Saudi Arabia, and the Americans are powerless to intervene.

Weed escalates the situation further, threatening a limited nuclear strike on the Chinese. The president of Russia responds by promising an all-out nuclear war if the United States acts on its threat. A nuclear crisis unfolds. When local authorities fire on panicked civilians trying to flee the city of Trenton, New Jersey, several other states, led by Texas, openly defy the federal government, implementing their own plans for surviving the crisis. Seeing his own government crumbling and no sign of concessions from Russia or China, Weed finally backs down and sues for peace.

Although the terms of the peace treaty only required the United States to accept the loss of Kenya and Diego Garcia, the defeat and the ongoing war between Iran and Saudi Arabia cause the price of imported oil, already high, to skyrocket, and the United States faced an energy crisis. Weed, knowing that his navy is obsolete and U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf are vulnerable, evacuates them, effectively shutting the U.S. out of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean. As investors around the world realized that the United States was no longer a hyperpower, they began selling dollar denominated investments, causing the dollar to fall sharply. This led to high inflation and a major economic crisis in the United States. The problem becomes worse when several large investment banks, who had taken unhedged risks that had been intended to pay off when the United States won the war, became insolvent. With the dollar in free fall, the federal government could not bail out the banks without risking a total collapse of the dollar, and so they went out of business, and the United States entered an economic depression. Weed resigns the presidency and commits suicide.

The new president, Gurney, inherits Weed's cabinet, including Harbin, with whom he has begun an extramarital affair. He appoints Senator Pete Bridgeport as his new Vice President, as an incentive to protect the administration from congressional hearings on the military misadventure that had ruined the country. The hearings proceed anyway. Gurney's recovery plan involves a grandiose rearmament project that the United States can no longer afford, and a domestic spending plan based almost entirely on unfunded mandates. The plan is universally condemned by the states and the people, and the government of Arkansas passes a resolution calling for a constitutional convention to ban unfunded mandates.

Harbin, trying to protect the administration, arranges to have Stedman murdered to prevent him from testifying before Congress. However, Stedman had been aware of this possibility, leaving instructions for his computer-whiz grandson to leak his documents in case anything happened. The government fell into a crisis of legitimacy, with anti-government rhetoric and donations to extremist political parties reaching new records. Other states joined the call for a constitutional convention, and the convention opened in September 2026 in St. Louis, Missouri.

At the convention, a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to ban unfunded mandates passes easily, but the delegates cannot agree on anything else. After several weeks of deadlock, a proposal to dissolve the United States outright surfaces. The shocked delegates pass the resolution, and the convention closes.

In Washington, Gurney and Harbin draw up plans to avert dissolution by means of a military coup, drawing up a long list of people to be purged, including Bridgeport and many other high-ranking government and military officials. The crisis comes to a head in October, when Stedman's grandson, still hacking government computers, discovers the plot and leaks it, alerting Bridgeport. As president of the Senate, Vice President Bridgeport seeks military protection from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and convenes an emergency meeting of Congress. Gurney is impeached, convicted, and removed from office in one day. Gurney flees the country and is killed by unknown assailants in Brazil, while Harbin is imprisoned.

Bridgeport becomes President, and although he enjoys personal popularity and a reputation for honesty, he cannot overcome the near-universal perception that the American government is broken beyond repair. As the dollar has lost more than 90% of its value over the past year, Bridgeport recalls all American troops home from overseas, and tries to work with Congress to balance the budget with tax revenues a tiny fraction of what they had been before the war. It is too little, too late. States begin to ratify the dissolution amendment, starting with South Carolina. In January 2027, Nebraska becomes the thirty-eighth state to ratify, and the United States ceases to exist.

In the following weeks, the states begin to arrange themselves into a number of successor states. In Washington, Bridgeport and other former government officials contemplate founding a rump United States out of states that voted against ratification, based in the Rust Belt and Mid-Atlantic regions.

Speculations

Some of the speculations that Greer made in this novel:

Production

Greer published a short version of this story on his blog, the Archdruid Report, in October 2012.