2035: The Rising Tide (New)

The collapse of Russia, the Labor Shortage, the Flood; these are the great events that shaped the first half of the 21st Century. With the end of the Little Cold War in 2023, the Eurasian Union, and ultimately the Russian Federation ceased to exist, fragmenting across ancient cultures long since forgotten by the world until that point. The Tartars, the Don Cossacks, and the Yakuts all found themselves independent for the first time in centuries, while former Russian Army units attempted to carve out their own kingdoms inside their former country. Endless efforts to secure former Russian nuclear arms from upstart powers like the Samara Republic would become a defining crises of the 2020s, and NATO forces would be engaged in a series of brush-fire wars in former Russian states for the next 15 years. The chaos also gave rise to poachers all along the Russian periphery; the Finns retook their long lost Karelian territories in a peaceful union, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania occupied much of the territory they lost to the Soviets at the end of WWII, and the Baltic States, who bore the brunt of the responsibility for securing St. Petersburg would eventually come to annex the increasingly fuzzy borders between their lands and the city. In many ways Russia's descent into chaos merely punctuated a story of that had been unfolding in Eurasia since the Great Recession. The European Union had been picked apart by rising nationalism, left to a core of Eurozone countries, and a significantly weakened free trade zone. Germany, once the mighty engine of Europe, finally slumped into a depression after the free trade zone that their economy depended died a death of a thousand cuts. The center of gravity in Europe, has shifted to the East.

While Russia fragmented, China's economic troubles over the last ten years finally came to fruition in the Market Crash of 2027. While China had officially been in a state of recession for more than nine years, the Crash of 2027 made deep demographic problems in the Chinese, and ultimately the world economy apparent. With the loss of the south Greenland Ice Sheet in 2025, and the subsequent rise in global sea levels by 7 meters, China found themselves facing open revolt across their country, a revolt that cost them the territories on their western peripheries and made their northern border porous to foreign influence. To prevent the collapse of the world's third largest economy, the US, intervened directly, pumping over a trillion dollars into the Chinese economy and deploying US Naval detachments to provide relief to refugee flooded cities like Hangzhou. China's collapse also spelled the end for a number of Cold War era institutions like the World Bank, which was never able to secure any significant capital from cash strapped European powers, who were dealing with their own refugee crisis in the low countries. This is often seen as the direct precursor for the eventual dissolution of the United Nations, as American interests in China conflicted with those of Japan, a country desperate for labor to supplement its demographic crisis of an aging population and a xenophobic culture.

As the developing world's coastal cities drowned, across the globe, only the wealthiest cities managed to save themselves from falling beneath the waves by hastily constructed sea walls. Tokyo, Washington DC, New York, and London all found themselves fighting to survive against the seven meter rise in global sea levels. CO2 production had finally stymied by the 2030s with the Electric Vehicle revolution, but the demand for energy put ever greater strain on the global economy, even with Helium-3 shipments from Luna and new improvements in Solar energy. All of this was ultimately secondary in the global zeitgeist when compared to the Population Crisis that drove the Recession of 2027. The sitting administration made several attempts to save the global economy with economic theories left over from the Reagan and Obama administrations, but to no success. This led to the election of Dylan James Price to the Presidency. President Price pushed for an aggressive immigration incentive program to attract skilled immigrants to the US and close the labor gap met by an aging population and increased global demand for high tech goods and services. This is where a silver lining to the rising tide became apparent; as more urban centers found themselves underwater, the displaced populations could fill the labor shortage in the developed world, taking advantage of the new immigration incentives, none more aggressive than those of the United States and Canada (though with the first people's more aggressive calls for independence, Canada was still far behind the US in incentives). Millions of Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, Nigerian, Chinese, Indian, and Bengali immigrants flooded into North America as their home countries drowned, driving the United States population to 400 million citizens.

While the United States took an incentive approach to solving its demographic problem, the Turks and Japanese took a more direct approach. With the fall of Russia, and China in such a weakened state, the Japanese and Turks took more aggressive military action to secure their regional interests, and export industry to surrounding territories to supplement their population problems. Turkey was aided by ancient cultural ties to neighboring states and a grateful US, who had been supporting their more active role in the Middle East since their invasion of Syria in 2016, while Japan exploited the power vacuum in the North Pacific to secure national interests. The US had moved beyond direct engagement in all but the most serious of crises, and now preferred to lean on regional players like Poland, Turkey, Iran, India, and Japan to maintain the balance of power in their respective corners of the world. This doctrine emerged during the Little Cold War and the War with the Islamic State, and in the 2030s it had become the standard practice of the United States. It was in these years that the seeds for a new global conflict were sewn.

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