Future Shock

Tom Kratman's Caliphate takes place about a century into the future, but during that century the United States of America, and the entire world, have changed drastically. The United States has become the American Empire – an expansive nation engaged in a titanic struggle with the Islamic world, now united into two super-states, one of which used to be the predominantly Christian continent of Europe. Thus, the world of the early twenty-second century closely resembles the dark future foretold by Mark Steyn in America Alone: a world where America has taken upon itself the burden of defending Western Civilization since the nations of Europe were unwilling and later unable to do so.

One of the protagonists of Kratman's novel is a young American Imperial Army officer named John Hamilton, who has been recruited to go on a dangerous special ops mission into what was once Germany. His mission is to stop some renegade American scientists from creating a lethal smallpox-like virus for use against the American Empire. The other main protagonist is a young girl named Petra bin Minden, a member of Germany's shrinking Nazrani (that is, Christian) minority who was seized by the Caliphate and sold into slavery when her mother and father were unable to pay their annual jizya. Petra happens to be "employed" at the same location where the super-virus is being developed. Other interesting characters also abound, like the South African airship pilot named Retief (a nice nod to the late Keith Laumer).

The story unfolds with the story Hamilton's and Petra's lives being told, interspersed with interludes telling of how the American Republic became the Empire and of how Germany slid into dhimmitude under waves of growing immigration from Muslim nations. By the early twenty-second century, America has been on a decades-long campaign of revenge against the Islamic world for the destruction of three major American cities by nuclear weapons in 2015.

The harsh future depicted by Kratman is reminiscent of those presented in Orson Scott Card's Empire and Theodore Judson's Fitzpatrick's War, but quite different than both by way of identifying radical Islam as the primary threat to traditional American liberties. The point of liberties lost is best explained by this quote from an essay by Lee Harris, which Kratman includes in his novel:

Any realistic assessment of any possible scenario will inevitably conclude that nothing that al Qaeda can do can cause the collapse of America and its capitalist system. The worse eventuality in the long run would be that America would be forced to break its hallowed ideal of universal tolerance, in order to make an exception of those who fit the racial profiling of an al Qaeda terrorist. It is ridiculous to think that if al Qaeda continued to attack us such measures would not be taken. They would be forced upon the government by the people (and anyone who thinks that the supposed cultural hegemony of the left might stop this populist fury is deluded).

On Thursday evening we saw 84,000 such deluded people at Invesco Field in Denver cheering the nomination of a neophyte Illinois senator, with questionable ties to unrepentant domestic terrorists, who intends to implement lackadaisical national security policies should he be elected. Does anyone truly believe that by preaching a meaningless mantra of hope and change, pretending as if Islamic extremism is no big deal, and seeking rapprochement with European nations hostile to our interests will make this country better off?

To ask the question is to answer it. Thus, the disaster of 2015 depicted by Kratman just may become a reality should the political winds in this country blow the wrong way. And if so, the characters of John Hamilton and Petra bin Minden may indeed represent the type of change we can believe in.