March 8, 2985, is a day that will go down in history. US President Donald Trump XI — head of the state that scholars call the “United States of Europe” to distinguish it from the English-speaking federation that existed centuries ago in North America — was last seen disappearing into the melee as Turkish troops stormed the streets of Brussels this morning. The distraught Trump reportedly shouted, “Amerika fällt, und ich bin noch am Leben” (“America is falling and I am still alive”) before leaping towards the nearest cluster of enemy soldiers, grasping the Stars and Stripes in one hand and an antique .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum in the other.

With Trump’s vanishing, the long and tumultuous story of the American experiment has reached its final chapter, though its legacy is far from over.

Why did a rump state in Belgium call itself “Amerika,” anyway?

Trump XI’s dramatic end comes after centuries of struggle. The US — officially the Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika — persisted in its European heartland for nearly a thousand years. While it has long been moribund, little more than a small enclave around Brussels for the past several decades, the nation’s impact on modern culture has been inestimable. Its universities, hospitals and libraries were some of the only institutions in the world that preserved higher learning during the turbulent 26th, 27th and 28th centuries.

The origins of the US lie in the late second millennium, where a group of English colonies on the eastern coastline of North America declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, forming a republic based on the principles of democratic governance and individual liberty. Over the following centuries, it expanded westward across the North American continent, eventually becoming a global superpower by the 20th century.

That century saw the young republic increasingly drawn into European conflicts. After intervening in World War I (1914–1918) on the side of its English-speaking British ally, the US made an abortive attempt to settle European affairs under President Woodrow Wilson before the Senate intervened and enforced a more isolationist foreign policy. Europe would however soon erupt into war again, and after President Franklin Roosevelt I, better known as Roosevelt the Great, intervened in World War II (1939–1945), his successor Harry Truman established a more permanent American presence on the continent. American military personnel were stationed across half of the continent, ostensibly to preserve democracy and, later, to provide a deterrent against the Soviet Union. While European polities remained nominally independent throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, the US de facto controlled their foreign policies.

The decisive moment came with the outbreak of World War III in 2028 following the third Russian invasion of Ukraine. After this cataclysmic war, the United States established direct rule over parts of Europe, a move that was justified at the time as a means of stabilizing the continent and preventing quasi-fascist governments, as had arisen in Slovakia, Germany and Austria, from taking root. Particularly loyal US allies like the United Kingdom, Poland and Italy were permitted to govern themselves, while the French presidents, through uncharacteristically intelligent policy, were able to maintain a precarious independence.

By the end of World War IV (2072–2077), it was no longer possible to pretend that Europe was anything but an extension of the United States. The US intelligence establishment had become convinced by this point that the Europeans were utterly unable to share a continent peacefully without American domination. President Donald Trump III crushed the last remnants of European resistance, and from that point on, Washington governed the region directly. Before long, most European countries had been admitted into the union as states.

The United States’ center of gravity shifted eastward

The political union of North America and Europe brought about unexpected economic consequences. While California was an unchallenged tech and AI powerhouse, New York’s financial services industry now found itself in direct competition with London. Europe also experienced an economic boost from the vast influx of Latin American laborers, especially after the US annexation of Chihuahua and Coahuila in 2120.

Far more lasting, however, were the effects of the brain drain that the North American portions of the union experienced in the late 21st and 22nd centuries. American students flocked to European universities, which were mostly public institutions and a welcome alternative to their exorbitantly expensive private American schools. Documents recently unearthed in northwestern Manhattan reveal that Columbia University, a mid-tier institution, was already charging students as much as several million dollars per semester in the 2050s.

The 22nd century saw a cultural and economic renaissance in Europe. Paris, London and Warsaw became fashionable hubs of intellectual activity — the French “post-atheist” literary movement becoming particularly notable. Science and engineering saw just as much of a boost as the liberal arts. Before long, cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Rotterdam began to outmatch their transatlantic counterparts in industrial activity. As more and more money poured into the region, a snowball effect ensued. This — along with the widespread adoption of cloning from the 2160s onwards, which freed wealthy women from the need to take time off from work in order to have children — led to a population boom. By the year 2200, it is estimated that over 25% of the population of the United States spoke German or Dutch. Before long, that number was 50%. Eventually, German would become the first language of nearly the whole population, save for those in some parts of Britain.

Meanwhile, the North American portion of the empire was facing tough times. Several measles outbreaks decimated the population, and political infighting grew to a fever pitch. After the 2232 assassination of President Donald Trump V, outright civil war broke out. The European portions of the union were fortunate to support the victor, Jaden Bloomberg, Jr., who took the title of Donald Trump VI.

As the 23rd century wore on, European Americans gradually came to realize that the transatlantic portions of the union were becoming a military and financial drain on the federal government as usurper after usurper looted the treasury to pay for war materiel. President Franklin Roosevelt III made the difficult decision to relocate the de facto capital of the union from Washington to Brussels, where the central institutions of the union could be more easily defended. This move, originally intended as a temporary measure, quickly became permanent.

The period extending roughly from 2300 to about 2450 saw a nearly endless succession of warlords arise from power centers like Texas, Florida and Alaska to momentarily claim the title of “President” before being shot or poisoned after mere months or even weeks of rule. While the federal administration in Brussels occasionally recognized some of these in an attempt to project some kind of political stability, it was of little use. Epigraphic evidence indicates that there may have been as many as 20 self-described presidents by the eve of the Mexican invasion in 2445.

As every schoolboy knows, Mexican President Aníbal Sánchez Córdova made quick work of the disunited and corrupt North American US forces. Intellectuals across the European portions of the union lamented the downfall of the western half of the union — particularly due to the melodramatic scenes of arson and looting that accompanied the fall of Washington — but administrators in Brussels were quietly grateful for the elimination of the fiscal burden that the west had become.

In 2449, an entity calling itself the Supreme Court of the United States, and recognized as such by Brussels, established itself in Alexandria, Virginia. It was little more than a paper tiger, and records of its chief justices — appointed more or less on the whims of the Mexican president — peter out in the 26th century. Europe was, for all intents and purposes, on its own.

The decline of Europe until today

US President George Washington II (ironically named because, among other things, his ancestors had spoken German for at least three generations) could waste little time grieving the downfall of the transatlantic territories, for trouble was brewing much closer to home. Russia remained a constant menace on the US’s eastern flank, and Turkey, too, was becoming more assertive — a harbinger of things to come. Washington fortified the eastern frontiers with state-of-the-art laser weapons and quantum-powered surveillance systems, but he was quickly called away to affairs in another corner of the republic. In Britain, a nostalgic monarchist party of “freemen on the land” had declared independence. While the movement was quickly crushed, Washington himself lost his life to a knife attack on the streets of London in 2461.

The Russo–Chinese War (2497–2551) did grant the US some respite. This was only the third war in world history to go fully nuclear, and by far the most deadly. By the end, Russia and China had lost a combined 50% of their population and over 90% of their productive capacity. Beset by domestic troubles, Europe took little advantage of the situation except to reduce defense spending and enjoy a minor economic resurgence. This left younger and more agile powers, like Vietnam, Rwanda and, above all, Turkey, to fill in the power vacuum.

By the year 2600, Turkey had consolidated its hold on the Caucasus and Ukraine regions, along with pacifying its Arab neighbors to the south. As a more confident Turkey finally pushed westward, a series of tragic and sometimes nearly comic military disasters characterized European attempts to prevent the onslaught. The republic lost half of its territory and one-third of its population by the end of the century, although the border eventually stabilized around the Elbe-Carpathian frontier. Europe had been severely weakened, but it kept going for another two centuries.

The 28th- and 29th-century culture of the United States of Europe produced a noteworthy flowering of German-language literature, the likes of which had not been seen since the 22nd-century renaissance. Yet, despite appearances, it was fundamentally different. No longer creative, the literature of late modern Europe was inward-looking and mostly historical in character, reflective at best but usually nostalgic and even self-indulgent at worst. These intellectuals saw themselves as the heirs of the twin cultural and philosophical legacy of federal America and ancient Europe. In reality, they were neither. Their civilization had become a museum and, like all museums, it closed abruptly.

Some people alive today may still be old enough to remember the Second Euro–Turkish war that severed the economically productive Rhine, Po and Seine valleys from Europe forever. In 2930, President Donald Trump X and the rest of his administration holed themselves up in a 20-mile circle around Brussels with the last functioning nuclear weapons, antiques already two centuries old, as the last line of defense. The Turks were happy to ignore this little enclave as they spread their control over the rest of the continent, and Britain, of course, declared formal independence from Europe.

That was the situation until about two weeks ago. While the late Turkish monarch Cevdet Muhammad Özdemir was a relatively tolerant ruler, his son Özdemir, who succeeded him two years ago in June 2983, has been a vigorous supporter of the most extremist portion of his parliament in Vienna. These pious believers have long rankled over European possession of the Great Mosque of Brussels, and the younger Özdemir has decided to give the people what they want and make a name for himself in the process. Gambling correctly that either the European nuclear weapons are no longer functional or the Europeans no longer willing to use them, Özdemir gave the order to his marines to breach the border six days ago. European resistance has been sporadic, but fighting reached the downtown neighborhoods of the city yesterday afternoon. With the death of Trump XI, I believe we can safely say that the US constitutional experience — stretching 12 centuries back to the North American colonies’ 1776 declaration of independence — has finally come to an end.

While the United States of Europe no longer exists as an independent state, its ethnic identity still remains in the Turkish-dominated areas of Europe. I recall one of the most striking illustrations of this phenomenon, a quasi-apocryphal story from the Turkish occupation of Ragusa in September 2927. A Turkish sergeant addressed the town’s residents in elementary German: “We are Turks, Europeans like you. We have come to liberate you.” To which, without skipping a beat, one Sicilian lad responded, “Wir sind keine Europäer, sondern Amerikaner.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.