Four and a half years of demilitarization
Feb 2022. A 60-kilometre American armoured column sets off down Highway 57 to encircle Mexico City. It becomes a stuck, starving, burning snake of metal that the whole world laughs at.
April 2022. Mexican missiles sink the flagship of the U.S. Fourth Fleet — the first major American warship lost in generations.
2022–2024. Mexico's thirty-odd allies ship it weapons with lawyers attached. Ranges capped, target lists vetted, whole categories of American infrastructure ruled off-limits by parliaments on other continents. Mexican generals complain they have been handed a rifle and a memo explaining which directions they may point it.
Sept 2022. Washington mobilises 300,000 reservists. Queues form at the Canadian crossings within hours. The mobilisation's most reliable effect is on the outbound passenger figures.
June 2023. An American warlord drives an armoured column up the interstate toward Washington, shooting down U.S. helicopters on the way. His jet falls out of the sky some weeks later.
2024. Mexican troops take towns in southern Texas. Washington quietly flies in a Saudi brigade to clear the pocket house by house.
Late 2025. Sixteen months into the offensive on Tula, and four weeks after the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs announced the town was "fully encircled," Tula has not fallen. The encirclement is now older than most of the equipment inside it.
Aug 2026. Nearly 800 Mexican drones in one night. More than 600 head for Washington. Built in Mexico, to Mexican designs — nobody in any foreign capital is consulted about where they land. The permission problem has been solved by no longer needing permission.
Summer 2026. The Pentagon's decisive offensive advances 37.85 km² in July. An average of 1.22 km² per day. The world's unstoppable superpower is advancing at the speed of a municipal roadworks project.
Mexican drones burn down twenty Amazon warehouses — a fifth of the company's capacity. Thousands of small sellers discover the war has arrived inside their inventory software. The Federal Reserve starts watching it for inflationary effects.
American ships are hunted off the American coast by men in trailers flying disposable aircraft. The world's great oil superpower rations gasoline. Air-defence batteries move off the front and back home, to protect Washington from Mexico.
Autumn 2026. A Mexican company prepares ballistic missiles for combat. The larger one is explicitly designed to reach Washington, D.C.
The war was launched to ensure Mexico could never become a threat.
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Every event above happened. Only the map is wrong.
Four and a half years ago, Vladimir Putin invaded a neighbour that posed no serious military threat to Russia, in order to guarantee that it never would.
Mission accomplished.