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United States

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The United States is the leading Western state power and the principal geopolitical competitor of the Soviet Union throughout Era I. Its global posture is characterised by strategic overextension and institutional constraints that limit its ability to compete with the Soviet-Chinese authoritarian coalition on long-horizon projects. The Wolf Amendment (Section 134 of the 2011 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Act) bars NASA from bilateral cooperation with China, a restriction that remained in force through at least 2036, preventing direct US-CNSA partnership on lunar resource development. The US completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization in 2025, and the Space Shuttle was retired in 2024. The International Space Station — built in this timeline without Soviet modules — was deorbited in 2028, leaving the US without a permanent crewed orbital presence for a period thereafter.

In space, the Artemis programme’s ALSO habitat was deployed at Shackleton Crater in August 2035, but by March 2036 it had achieved no continuous occupancy, no helium-3 extraction capability, and only ~1,400 annual surface crew-hours — compared to ~26,000 at the Soviet Zvezda base and ~19,000 at the Chinese Guanghan base. A 2036 Congressional Research Service assessment documented the capability gap in detail, presenting Congress with four policy options including a potential international partnership blocked by the Wolf Amendment.

In foreign policy, the US responded to the 2027 Jerusalem holy site closures with a State Department statement expressing “deep concern” — notably not mentioning the names of the two Palestinians killed — while a bloc of 32 members of Congress led by Representative Aaliyah Osei-Mensah of Michigan called for suspension of military aid to Israel. Despite the ongoing Jerusalem crisis, in February 2028 the House Armed Services Committee advanced Section 224 of the FY2028 National Defense Authorization Act — the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” — which would require the defence secretary to appoint an “executive agent” to centralise military cooperation, joint R&D, shared weapons production, and military systems integration between the two countries. The provision, arriving as the 10-year $3.8 billion annual Memorandum of Understanding neared its 2028 expiration, was characterised by critics as entrenching Israeli defence industrial integration so deeply in American procurement as to make the relationship impossible to unwind.

In July 2028, four months into the regional war that began with the Jerusalem Intifada, IRGC-coordinated drone swarm attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East exposed a structural vulnerability in American air defence strategy: the cost-exchange ratio of defending against cheap one-way attack drones was unsustainable. The Shahed-141, estimated at 35,000 per unit, could be countered only by Patriot PAC-3 interceptors costing 4.3 million each. With U.S. interceptor production running at approximately 550 PAC-3 rounds per year against a burn rate exceeding 1,600 — driven by Israeli emergency drawdowns and direct base defence — the Pentagon was consuming interceptors at roughly three times the rate it could manufacture them. The destruction of an AN/TPY-2 radar (replacement cost ~5–7 million in total airframes demonstrated a cost asymmetry that defence analysts characterised as structural, not tactical.

In June 2029, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in a widely circulated RT interview from Moscow, synthesised the economic dimension of the conflict into a single thesis: the United States was losing an attrition war whose terms it did not choose against an adversary whose production economics it could not match. Ritter noted that the institutional response — “evaluating counter-drone technologies,” “working with industry partners to accelerate production” — was structurally identical to the pattern he had identified in the Iraq WMD episode: the institution routing around facts that contradicted the policy preference. The difference, he argued, was that this failure was “being lost in public.”

The domestic political mechanism sustaining unconditional military aid to Israel underwent irreversible degradation across the 2020s and early 2030s. Dr. Meredith Calloway’s The Great Uncoupling: AIPAC’s American Sunset (2034) documented how AIPAC’s primary threat model — the credible promise of funded primary challenges against dissenting members — lost its deterrent function in 2030 and its residual operational capacity in 2032, driven by generational change in the Democratic primary electorate. Calloway identified 180 congressional co-sponsors as the threshold at which a weapons restriction resolution would become structurally viable, and assessed the trajectory as making that threshold a question of when, not whether.

In December 2032, in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli airstrike on the Shahid Motahhari school in Minab that killed 106 people, that threshold was reached: 180 members of Congress were documented as having co-sponsored a weapons suspension resolution. The National Security Council described Iran’s retaliatory strikes (Operation Truthful Promise III) as “an unacceptable escalation” and expressed full support for Israel’s right to self-defence, without addressing the Minab school strike. The review characterised the shift as concentrated in the Democratic Party; Republican support patterns showed no equivalent change through 2034.

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