(Act 1) Chapter 7 - A Red Tide

Although the Korean War had dominated Japan's attention for two decades of constant guerrilla warfare in the region between 1952 and 1973, numerous other events drew Japan's attention worldwide, especially after the Suez Crisis in 1956. One of these events was the rapidly evolving Space Race involving the Soviet Union, the United States, and the joint effort by member states of the Trident Alliance, which was currently leading the competition.The reason for the Joint Allied Space Agency (JASA) taking the lead in the space race was their acquisition of various research papers on German rockets and most of their scientists after World War II. This acquisition helped the Alliance leapfrog in rocket development. Meanwhile, the Soviet rocket development was hindered by continued purges of scientists and other intelligentsia under Stalin's orders until his death in 1953. This created a gap between the Soviet Union and the Trident Alliance, favoring the latter.On the other side of the Atlantic, the USA, lacking a rocket development program, had to conduct its research from scratch. As other major Trident members constantly hindered American efforts to bring former Nazi scientists to North America, especially Japan. This meant that the US was largely forced to rely on reverse engineering the few available V-series rockets they were allowed to acquire as war prizes due to their limited participation in World War II.Furthermore, JASA had access to the vast Colonial Empires of Britain and France at the time, along with ideal launching areas near the equator, particularly in French Guiana. They also benefited from a fluctuating but consistent stream of funding due to the participation of various nations in the Trident's space program. Additionally, they could outsource much of the rocket parts production to their member states, which at times, meant lower costs for the project.And so, on December 14, 1957, with the launch of the Joint Communication Satellite Alpha (JCS-A) by JASA, the space race would begin. The event came as a surprise to the Americans, given the perceived technological superiority of the Trident member states, from which the US had withdrawn a year earlier. However, American perception would soon be turned to shock as the Soviets launched their own artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, just a few months later, securing the USSR's second place in the Space Race. Consequently, the Americans found themselves in the dead last third position in this informal competition in every achievement.The American government would do its utmost to catch up and surpass the other two power blocs. However, in every achievement, it would always be either the JASA or the Soviets who would take the first and second places. The Americans then set their sights on what they considered the final and ultimate goal of the space race: landing a human on the moon by the end of the next decade.But the Space Race was not the only significant event unfolding. In the Americas, especially in Central America and the Caribbean, the so-called backyard of the United States, turmoil ensued as the American-sponsored regime in Cuba was overthrown by Cuban revolutionaries. Despite American attempts to oust the Castro Regime, they all met with failure. This led Cuba to align itself with the Soviet Union, sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.The crisis was triggered when, right under the nose of the newly imposed American embargo on Cuba, the Soviet Union managed to deploy medium-range ballistic missiles. This brought the two superpowers perilously close to a nuclear war, as the US government insisted on nothing less than the removal of Soviet nukes from Cuba. As both sides worked toward an agreement, peace narrowly prevailed. The USSR agreed to the US demand to withdraw its nukes from Cuba, but in exchange, the US had to withdraw its nukes from Iran and the Northwestern Indian states. This information would only become known to the general public decades later.With the worst possible ending narrowly avoided, the two nations returned to a tense but still peaceful coexistence. As the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis slowly faded into the background, the focus shifted to the breakthroughs in space and the growing competitiveness among the participants. The final lap of the Space Race was drawing ever closer. Then, at the very height of the Space Race on June 28, 1969, the world witnessed the live recording of the launch and subsequent landing of the first men on the moon. As one of the crew members left the lunar module, he uttered the words that marked the end of the space race:"Ten krok jest dla mojego narodu i kraju, ten krok jest dla całej ludzkości."The words of the Polish astronaut, Lojzy Maksymilian, as he took the first steps on the moon, marked the victory of the Trident Space Program Member States in space, a victory snatched from the grasp of the Americans by mere weeks. Although the outcome of the event wasn't the worst possibility of a Soviet victory, the defeat to the Trident Space Program still wounded the American pride.However, that victory of the Trident Alliance would soon be overshadowed by the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape just a year later. As the new decade rolled in, the colonial empires of old began to disintegrate one after another like a house of cards.The first one to fall was the Empire of Japan. By the 4th of June 1969, the nation had lost all control of the Korean peninsula. The conflict only ended in 1973 when Korean nationalists and communists started to infight, ultimately leading to a civil war, which brought their colonial war with Japan to an indefinite conclusion.The second empire to collapse was the British Empire. Its government knew that their empire was dying, but they still did what they could to delay the inevitable. They held onto their slowly crumbling empire until 1971 when they finally granted independence to their various African and Middle Eastern colonies and protectorates.The third empire was the French Republic. Just like Britain, its government knew that their Colonial Empire was dying. But unlike Britain, the French government fought tooth and nail to keep their empire whole, especially in Algeria, which they saw as part of Metropolitan France. However, as their war in Algeria dragged on without any noticeable results, the French people, alongside the US and Soviet governments and various third-world countries, began putting more pressure on the government to leave Algeria, which they did in 1972. This soon led to the remaining French African colonies to also declare their independence.The last remaining colonial empires were Portugal, Spain, and Italy. These three nations, under the authoritarian rule of their fascist leaders, expended much of their nations' resources in fighting never-ending guerrillas in their African colonies. When their fascist governments eventually fell, so did their empires, along with the last fascist bastion known as the Latin Bloc.The Latin Bloc, as implied by its name, was a faction led by Italy and comprised of Spain, Portugal, and Greece. It aimed to preserve their ideological regimes for as long as possible and to circumvent their isolation from the rest of the world. Aside from preferential trade with each other, this faction achieved little in their objectives. In each of the member nations, their ideologies crumbled as soon as their iron-fisted leaders died.Greece was the first to leave in early 1970, followed by Portugal in 1974, and Spain in 1975, leaving only Italy as the sole remaining member of the Latin Bloc. Just as Romulus founded Rome, the Latin Bloc was formed by Italy. Like Rome, it would crumble under the weight of its founder's name in 1977, the year of Mussolini's death and Italy's liberalization.In the wake of the power vacuum left by the fall of the colonial empires, the capitalist world watched in horror as communism began to take over, in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Pro-Soviet revolutions, coups, and governments rose to power in many of the newly independent states.Syria, Congo, Mozambique, Algeria, the Arab Islamic Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Korea, Iraq, and many more, all driven by distrust of the West, their colonial legacy, the Suez Crisis, and failed American coups, led to the dreaded nightmare of the West becoming a reality: the "Red tide" had arrived.But that was not all. With the sweeping rise of governments aligned with the USSR, either due to ideology or a hatred of the West, the Soviet Union, which for decades had criticized the United Nations as nothing more than a self-legitimized Western organization of the old imperialist powers, took action. This was due to the almost total domination of its Security Council by three imperialist colonial powers.All three worked in tandem to veto any charter that decried colonialism and any other motions. This included various attempts to bring international arbitration to solve the Korean War, which were vetoed by Japan at every turn.As these empires began to collapse, whether through various attempts to delay the inevitable with or without the United Nations, it became the moment for the Soviet Union to make its move. In 1977, just months after the fall of the last European colony in Africa, the disparate members and associated nations of the Eastern Bloc, known as the Moscow Pact, jointly declared the formation of the International Congress. This entity was, in all shape and form, nothing more than a Soviet-led United Nations.The formation of this parallel international organization surprised many and cast doubt on the effectiveness and even the legitimacy of the UN, especially when the various newly independent states of Africa swarmed to the IC due to their distrust of the West, stemming from decades, if not centuries, of exploitation by them. The world was now more divided than ever before.On one side, the Trident Alliance, which had expanded with the entrance of Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Italy into its ranks, still remained as the largest factional bloc, even though it had lost a lot of influence with the near-simultaneous collapse of the Asian and European colonial empires.Across the Atlantic and Pacific, the Organization of Free Nations, jointly led by the US and China, was growing in strength, mostly thanks to the enormous American economy fueling its Military-Industrial Complex and the massive manpower pool of China. However, in terms of influence, the bloc was stagnant. It hadn't lost as much as the Trident Alliance, but it hadn't gained anything meaningful either. Even more troubling, a slowly recovering Empire of Japan was now setting its sights across the Pacific, particularly in South America.Finally, the Moscow Pact, as the true winner of the 1970s. Within a decade, the faction had more than doubled its size, increased its influence in all corners of the world, and was now seen as a true competitor to the Western world. However, not everything was good; the Soviet economy was starting to stagnate due to the pressure imposed by all of its neighbors and rivals. Just before the turn of the decade, the union would plunge itself into a costly war...In 1979, just two years after the Soviet Union had declared the International Congress as a rival to the UN, the USSR would, against all expectations, invade Afghanistan with the justification of protecting the Afghan government from rebels. Although the UN was mired with problems due to its power distribution, the International Congress found itself in a worse crisis as its founder and main pillar was now at war with a sovereign nation.Just a few years after that, South America would be plunged into an undeclared war as well, which would see the Trident Alliance interests of Japan and the OFN interests of the US to officially clash for the first time.