In the early hours of March 4, 2026, in international waters off the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka, the USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles–class nuclear-powered attack submarine, closed in on the IRIS Dena, a new Iranian Moudge-class frigate.
Submerged, the Charlotte fired a heavyweight, acoustic-homing torpedo at the hull of the Dena. It missed. It fired another. It connected. The periscope footage of the attack was released by the United States Department of War. It shows the shockwave of the torpedo fracturing the Dena’s hull and sending its helicopter flight deck metres into the air.
Within seconds, what was left of the Dena was plummeting to the depths of the Indian Ocean, carrying at least sixty of its crew of 180 to their deaths.
Some moments later, an email was sent from US Indo-Pacific Command to Sri Lanka’s maritime rescue agency. Twenty miles from Galle’s coast, a ship is in distress. Sri Lanka immediately engaged a search and rescue effort that included its air force and navy. The surface of the sea contained clues that a vessel had been attacked and had likely been sunk. But it was not clear whether the attack had come from above or below. They were able to rescue thirty-two sailors, and recover the bodies of eighty-seven others, many of whom had mysteriously broken legs.
The Charlotte had long vanished like an apparition beneath the waves.
This was on the fifth day of the US–Israeli war on Iran, 2,000 nautical miles from the immediate conflict zone.
US are not the good guys since WWII.
Since ever.
America was leaning towards the Nazis before Pearl Harbor.
America was sharply divided between socialism and fascism in the run up to the collapse of the Russian Empire and emergence of the Soviet Union. Consequently, American leftists saw a ray of sunlight in the path Lenin took to revolutionizing the Russian socio-economic system. At the same time, American corporationists saw the USSR as an opportunity to describe American Leftism as a Foreign Invasion.
The adoption of European political theories and figureheads on the left triggered the hysterical anti-immigration reflexes on the right, polarizing and galvanizing the general public which had already grown deeply anti-European in the wake of the First World War.
This culminated in the Palmer Raids of 1919, split the union movement going into the Roaring Twenties, and - in a hat trick of reactionary revisionism - managed to unify Dixiecrat bigots, big money Industrialists, and evangelical Christians (both Protestant AND Catholic) into a single suffocating mono-party that would dominate American politics for the next twelve years.
The Neo-Confederates, the Industrial Fascists, and the Evangelical Paleo-conservatives congealed into the Coolidge/Hoover Republican Party and managed to govern virtually uncontested until the Great Depression upended their coalition.
But at this point, leftist organizing and activism had rebuilt and reorganized around generally palpable national socialist principles. And over the subsequent decade leading to Pearl Harbor, established a left-leaning national government coalition that was broadly sympathetic to the Russian and Chinese Communists to the point that we were openly aiding them in their wars against Germany and Japan.
Pearl Harbor was an attempt by the Japanese military to cut the US out of the Pacific Rim, precisely because we’d undermined their access to Middle Eastern petrochemicals and smuggled arms to the KMT/Communist coalition on mainland China. It was “unprovoked” in a very technical sense, but far from unanticipated given our open aiding and abetting of anti-Japanese forces all across the East Pacific.
America was leaning Communist by 1944. If FDR hadn’t plotzed and handed the keys of the country to a reactionary like Truman, we might have avoided the Cold War entirely. Or, at least, forestalled it for a few more years.