Easter 2026 (Part 4: The Fall Of the Roman Empire (sorry American/Western Empire!) by Alfred N.Muggins

19/5/26
     The Fall of Afghanistan was a shock to Alfred, as it must have been to millions of western citizens. The fallibility of western power and strategy was very obvious now, as it had been at the fall of Saigon, but this was current, empires and spheres of influence in obvious decline or defeat. 
   As always, the newsfeeds on TV and in social media go quiet, the subject is relegated to the smallprint, and everyone  gets bored from talking about it, and other subjects come to the fore once again. Normalcy returns. Western/modern civilisation is like a sponge which absorbs not only tourists, migrants and refugees, but also bad news, defeat and failure. The failure is normalised and everyone carries on their normal existance, as if it didn't matter after all. Alfred, like all the other sleepy people had no idea there were any other geopolitical earthquakes around the corner.
    The next one, which had seemed quite dormant to most, was Putin's decision to renew his attacks upon Ukraine. He had cleverly taken the 'island' of Crimea in 2014, and seized much of the Donbas region, on behalf of some of the locals who he claimed wanted independence from Ukraine! Not many were taken in by that claim, as everyone could see those were largely Russian soldiers lining up on the frontlines, as in Crimea.
29/6/26
    Everyone, in Europe that is, and America, got used to the idea that Vladimir Putin had managed to reoccupy the old Imperial and Soviet holiday and naval power 'island' of Crimea which had been Russia's in that history until the (actually Ukrainian?!) Soviet leader Krushchev had made it part of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic in about 1955, and that large chunk of the Donbas. (They had of course originally pinched it off the Turks in Catherine the Great's time and then defended it bitterly from the Turks once again and their Western European allies Britain and France in the Crimean War of the early 1850's!) Western leaders and international lawyers and the United Nations didn't like it at all, but they weren't going to actually do much about it, apart from a few sanctions here and there. If he played his cards right, Napoleon Putin (or Catherine the Great Putin!) might actually get away with his conquests, and he could just wait a few years until his de facto takeover was registered on the minds of Europe and America and the rest of the world and eventually became, as these things often do, acceptable, or at least accepted. NATO was not going to do anything about it. Ukraine wasn't even in NATO!
     Putin could have sat on his laurels, and still pretended to be a democratic and relatively civilised leader for the rest of his life, without plunging Russia into a war economy, and a stretched military power facing inflation and manpower shortages and economic hardship. He would still have been tolerated, even hosted by the West. But no, unfortunately for all concerned, Putin didn't want to let the rest of Ukraine maintain its own independence, it's fledgeling 28 year old democracy, and its peace and quiet. He didn't want it to align with the West, with the European Union, and, as all the other local Baltic States who had left the Soviet Union had chosen to do, to one day potentially join NATO. Of course no one was seriously suggesting that at the time as everyone knew Putin wasn't too keen on that idea, and they were not going to go out of their way to upset him were they. It would not have been worth it.
  Then on February 24th 2022 the whole world seemed to change overnight (Well Putin's forces had been building up, but no one in Europe or America had really expected him to go ahead with it. Most of us hoped, and thought, he was just posturing.) Putin's Russian army actually did invade the rest of Ukraine, and in great force. Everyone really thought it was 'curtains' for Ukraine, but most of us were angry, surprised, and aggrieved, so many were prepared to back a fight, even from our armchairs. the important thing, that really mattered however was the reaction of Ukraine. Were they prepared to fight? Were they strong enough? Because NATO wasn't going to fight for them, even though that might be tempting to some, because Ukraine wasn't in NATO, and their was no obvious or inevitable legal mechanism for western nations to intervene, and lets just face it we were all rather scared of what Putin and his forces might do to us, not least in nuclear terms, potentially. It was evident and clear that Europe hadn't fought a war on European ground since the 1940's, and we weren't entirely sure whether we would be up to it. Anyway luckily it didn't matter, Ukraine proved strong enough, and proud enough to actually fight back and resist, with a little bit of help from its friends of course, in terms of secondhand weapons and money.
     Again increasing confidence, the world returns to Hunky Dory as it becomes clear Ukraine can fight back, Putin's threats are relatively empty, the West is hanging together in support. Alfred was able to go all the way to Turkey, not too far from the war zone, and survive, not only survive, but to get a tan, go in a mudbath, do plenty of holiday writing, all the while Putin did his worst. It just got better as Ukraine later that year retook Kherson and many swathes of territory around Kyiv/Kiev and Kharkov. Life returned to normalcy even as vicious and deadly trench and drone wars developed, but the fronts became mostly static. (Civil War in Sudan May 2023!)
    Then came October 7th 2023, a surprise to everyone but Benjamin Netanyahu, it seemed, and the higher command of the (badly named!) Israeli Defence Forces. But most of us were thoroughly shocked, and not just by the initial 'success' of the Hamas assault, but soon after and for the 2 and a half years after, by the viciousness, and depravity of the Israelis in their destructive forms of fighting.
     Still we place our trust in the Americans, and friendly caring Joe Biden. He will calm the Israeli wolves down surely, with a few choice words and occasional actions from the European states? Ukraine with Biden's support will sort Putin out? Everything will soon/eventually return to normal?  But it didn't did it? After a brief unexpected glimmer of hope as Britain ditched the half measures austerity Tories, the following year, America proved that it was indeed a lumbering ship without a rudder, or an anchor, and that it was going perhaps, although surely there was no inevitability about it at all, to hit an iceburg, in the form of Sir Donald Trumpenstein, (or perhaps more rightly a spanner in the works? No the Iceburg is quite a good representation of the reality!) but would it sink? Probably but it would take quite a long time for it to completely tear apart and sink, and surely there would be many chances for it to resurrect itself, or at least to stem the flow of blood, and money, and public finances.