War Plan Red — Project Overview
The description of British imperial power in this novel — financial networks, diplomatic depth, intelligence infrastructure, communications control, cultural prestige — is recognisably a description of what people today mean by American hegemony. The novel dramatises what happens when a rising power challenges an established global order without fully understanding what it is challenging.
Core Concept
A historical counterfactual trilogy set in 1931, based on the real declassified US military contingency plan for war against Britain. Not period recreation for its own sake — the 1930s are a lens to illuminate the present. The central thematic argument: national character is more durable than national circumstance.
The Anglo-American "special relationship" is not a natural state. It is a contingent alliance born of WWII. Strip it away and both countries become more visible — their instincts, blind spots, and appetites.
Why This War Was Possible
Pre-WWII American attitudes to Britain were far more ambivalent than modern readers assume:
- Irish-American communities with active grievances against the Crown
- Isolationist suspicion of European empires
- Economic rivalry — Britain was still a genuine commercial competitor
- Class resentment built into American identity from the Revolution
- Sour memory of WWI — suspicion of having been manipulated into a European quarrel
- Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) devastated European economies; British diplomatic note on war debt had genuine legitimacy
- The Hoover Moratorium — its expiry is the pressure cooker that starts the spiral
The Hobbesian Arena
International relations as amoral power competition. Neither side holds moral authority. Both are the heroes of their own story. The War of 1812 parallel is instructive — America initiated it, claims to have won it, and quietly revised its role when things went badly. The same self-serving narrative machinery operates here.
The Dimensions of British Power
The real revelation — for Howe and for the reader — is that you cannot defeat this kind of power militarily. The war is always being fought simultaneously on multiple dimensions:
Financial
City of London still the centre of global finance. Sterling bloc. Credit withheld, loans called, Lloyd's insurance denied. The financial war is as devastating as the naval blockade and far harder to see.
Diplomatic
Ambassadors in virtually every country, decades of presence, local languages and marriages. American diplomacy in 1931 is comparatively thin and recent. Keeping Europe neutral is achievable for Britain.
Intelligence
Infrastructure simply there — assets, networks, methods refined over generations. American intelligence in 1931 is embryonic. The OSS doesn't exist. The FBI is new to counterintelligence.
Communications
Britain controls a disproportionate share of the world's undersea telegraph cable network. American diplomatic traffic, commercial intelligence, communications with neutral countries — all potentially compromised.
Cultural Prestige
English as the language of international commerce is a British achievement not yet transferred to America. British universities and social forms have global prestige the US hasn't yet acquired.
The Sterling Bloc
Countries whose trade runs through London — Dominions, much of South America, Scandinavia, parts of the Middle East — face enormous pressure to maintain British alignment.
You can win every battle and still lose the war. The system reconstitutes itself around the damage. The only way to truly defeat the British Empire would be to replace the system — which is exactly what America spent thirty years after WWII doing.
The Contemporary Resonance
This is the project's purpose, not an optional layer. Every significant plot decision should connect to this: a previous version of the system we currently inhabit, dramatising what happens when a rising power challenges it without fully understanding what it is challenging.
The critique of established hegemony from outside is often accurate about the pathologies, and self-serving about the alternatives. The novel dramatises that gap — between an accurate diagnosis and a self-interested prescription — and connects the present-day reader to the issues of the 1930s.
Trilogy Structure at a Glance
| Book | Subtitle / Code | Theatre | Tone | Key Events |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One | The Atlantic War (Crimson) | North America, Caribbean, Atlantic | Political thriller, paranoid, intimate | Spiral & trigger, Caribbean campaign, chemical weapons, subversion, Butler moment |
| Two | The Pacific War (Garnet) | Pacific, Antipodes, East Asia | Military, vast distances, colonial complexity | Anglo-Japanese Alliance, fall of Philippines & Hawaii, Mexico second front, West Coast panic |
| Three | The Imperial Twilight (Ruby) | India, Middle East | Elegiac, widest lens, dissolution | Indian independence movement, Arab nationalism, the war accelerates imperial dissolution |
Preferred Ending — Option B: Exhausted Stalemate
The invasion of Britain is planned but never executed because American internal disintegration makes it impossible to sustain. A negotiated peace satisfies nobody. Hitler has consolidated Europe; Japan has consumed China. The world of 1939 in this timeline is dramatically darker than our own.
Option A (American pyrrhic victory) is kept live as an alternative — America wins the military war and loses itself in the process, the republic that emerges unrecognisable — but Option B is the preferred direction. In either case: nobody wins. History goes somewhere worse.
Key Historical Anchors
- War Plan Red — the actual declassified US contingency plan for war against Britain. See source document link below.
- The Hoover Moratorium (1931) — real suspension of inter-governmental debts. Its expiry is the pressure cooker.
- The Business Plot (1933–34) — wealthy Americans allegedly approaching Smedley Butler to lead a fascist coup against Roosevelt. The model for the "Butler moment" in Book One.
- British Security Coordination — Stephenson's real WWII operation in Rockefeller Center. The model for Tarrant's New York operation.
- Roald Dahl's intelligence work — deployed into Washington society to cultivate influential Americans. Model for Tarrant's social operational method.
- Defence Scheme No. 1 — Canada's real contingency plan for pre-emptive raids into the United States, drawn up 1921.
- El Águila / Mexican Eagle — real Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary; British economic presence in Mexico providing the basis for the Mexican second front.