Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Read Online Free PDF

and they give us peace.  Only in peace can we gather enough to feed everyone in the village.”  It struck me as a remarkably pragmatic view, out of place in this new society which put adherence to sharia law above all else.’
    Here, then, is an important clue to how the Caliphate expanded so rapidly.  At the local level, it could guarantee security and safety to villages and towns, dependant only on their acceptance of the Caliphate’s strict laws.  While there can be no doubt of the Caliphate’s murderous barbarism to those whom it considered unbelievers, its ability to protect localised populations soon caused a material shift in its image in the Arabic world.  Indeed, such did its popularity grow that the assimilation of the last portion of Saudi Arabia merely required the execution of the Saud royal family and a few thousand of their followers, who singularly failed to see which way the wind had begun to blow.
    From the beginning, the only authorised information to come out of the Caliphate emerged from its Ministry of Information, first based in Baghdad then subsequently relocated to Tehran.  Through a number of spokesmen, each Caliph made his pronouncements, most of which hold no value to the historian, any more so than Soviet displays of ‘perfect towns’ or Nazi proclamations on the relocation of Jews.  Of greater significance are the diplomatic fusillades which the West exchanged with Moscow and Beijing.  These contain the material indications of the democracies’ waning authority as China’s ability to project its political power globally increased.
    The American diplomat and political scientist Preston Grant became one of the leading proponents of realpolitik .  Born in 2007 into a scion of a wealthy Wisconsin real estate family, he enjoyed a successful political career and served as Secretary of State in Phelps’ Republican Administration from 2051 to 2056.  When Democrat Coll took office, she convinced him to remain in a supporting role, as over the years he had travelled to Moscow and Beijing hundreds of times and had become familiar with the leaders of both countries.
    Grant published three books, the last of which underscored with surprising frankness the problems facing the NATO allies.  In Night Flight to Beijing , he criticised members of the English government: ‘… [Foreign Secretary] Blackwood was pissed I wouldn’t take him with me.  He kept acting like he could make a difference to the negotiations.  I told him the English needed to take a back seat on this one.  Hell, Chinese corporations owned over half of his country’s energy production, including all of its nuclear plants, controlled nearly all of its banks and hospitals, and with Chinese individuals owned something like three-quarters of all the real estate in London.  To the Chinese government, the whole of the British Isles was just another pseudo-vassal state, like Nigeria or Zambia.  But Blackwood didn’t get it.’
    Grant understood that the British Isles were in an especially weak position, although to some degree all NATO members employed Chinese hardware and software in their civilian and military infrastructures.  As will be shown below, in many cases these systems could be manipulated, with devastating consequences.
    The negotiations to which Grant refers concerned Chinese exports to the Caliphate; he had the unenviable task of convincing Beijing to moderate its supplies (for example, in 2045 annual Chinese steel exports to the Caliphate amounted to fifty million tonnes; by 2060, these had increased to almost two hundred million tonnes).  With a pragmatism which earned him as many detractors as plaudits, Grant ‘… conceded the Taiwan issue.  I wanted [Chinese Interior Minister] Xueping to agree to allow free elections on the island for a minimum one hundred years, but he insisted on a maximum of fifty years, exactly as they’d given the British for Hong Kong.  I had to use the reduction in heavy