The Gulf Of Mexico Crisis

The Crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, known colloquially as the Gulf Crisis, was a multiparty confrontation principally involving the Provisional Government of the United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China. It was the culmination of a number of smaller “soft conflicts” in the region, most importantly the Russian and Chinese challenges to American sovereignty in the wake of the collapse of the United States and the Russian, Chinese, and European competition for influence in the Western Hemisphere.

The factors which led to the crisis originated in early July, when the Chinese government outbid Russia for ownership of the abandoned Guantanamo Bay naval base, which Cuba had decided to put up for auction to offset the effects of the global economic decline on its economy. Still wanting to establish a foothold in the region, Russia negotiated a deal with the FRA, effectively its client state by this point, allowing it to construct a joint naval base (in reality, a Russian-operated, Russian-owned, Russian-serving one) in Galveston, Texas. The US government in DC and its counterparts in New York and Los Angeles expressed outrage at China’s violation of longstanding diplomatic protocol, and Russia’s outright disregard for American sovereignty as it was recognized by the UN, but little else could be done. Any attempt to punish either country through the UN would be voted down, and no allied nation would consider sanctions with the global economy already so fragile.While the New York Provisional Government consolidated power and international recognition, eventually becoming the Provisional Government of the United States, Chinese naval assets began using Guantanamo Bay as a staging ground for anti-piracy operations in the Caribbean, and Russian contractors began building proper military port infrastructure in Galveston. During this period of time (late summer-early autumn), the severity of pirate attacks on Chinese-aligned vessels in the Caribbean sharply rose. Although the increased Chinese military presence deterred attacks near Cuba, Venezuelan merchant ships and unescorted Chinese transports were frequently targeted for raids in the southern Caribbean. Some pirates were even bold enough to raid coastal settlements in Venezuela.

Tensions came to a head in mid-October. Construction of rudimentary infrastructure in Galveston was complete. The Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and the cruiser Marshal Ustinov accompanied the standard complement of two Kirov-class battlecruisers in escorting three cargo ships to Texan waters, intending partly to flex Russian military muscle in celebration of the base’s progress, and partly to deploy a small contingent of special forces to man the base.The ships did not make it to Galveston. As it departed Russian waters, President Andrew Cuomo of the PGUSA ordered the USS Harry S. Truman to steam south into the Caribbean with a small escort fleet and prepare to intercept them. Following a phone call with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, two British warships, the HMS Kent and Duncan—temporarily stationed in French Guiana in solidarity with the ousted French government—steamed north to rendezvous with the American vessels. Further discussion among European heads of state led to the reclassification of the British deployment as an official ECANAC military deployment, the first of its kind. Command was promptly transferred to the newly formed European Naval Command.

On October 19th, a destroyer from the American fleet intercepted the Russian ships roughly 250 miles off the coast of Texas. It followed them at a distance, broadcasting a request for the commanding officer to clarify their intent in US waters. Vice-Admiral Moiseyev, aboard the Admiral Kuznetsov, responded with a pre-written statement affirming the sovereignty of the FRA. All further attempts at communication were ignored. Roughly an hour and a half later, a miles-long blockade of American and British ships forced the fleet to come to a halt at the border of internationally-recognized American territorial waters.The standoff persisted for two hours before Vladimir Putin personally called president Cuomo to ask him to call off the blockade. The exact content of their conversation is unknown, but White House staff claim that it was “heated”. Needless to say, the blockade was not called off.

With the situation having remained unchanged for 48 hours, the Russian minister of defense suggested to president Rick Perry that he order the FRA’s naval forces, small as they were, to attempt to break through the blockade from the rear. At noon on the twenty-first, a detachment of coastal patrol boats led by the FRS Jefferson, a Sovremenny-class destroyer on loan from Russia, approached the scene and attempted to pass between the Truman and one of its escorts. Without warning, an American destroyer fired two shells at low angles over the deck of the Jefferson, killing one crewman instantly and injuring twelve others. Vice-Admiral Kriete of the Euro-American forces notified Moiseyev that any ship attempting to violate the blockade from that point onward, whether incoming or outgoing, would be sunk without warning. Suffering fire damage, the Jefferson steamed out to the rear of the Russian flotilla as the Americans closed rank behind it.

Intending to call Kriete’s bluff, Moiseyev—with considerable protest from the FRA crew—ordered the Jefferson to attempt to pass through the blockade a second time from a different vantage point, where a larger gap between two smaller ships reduced the likelihood, in his opinion, that the enemy would risk an engagement. In the early hours of the morning on the twenty-second, the Jefferson approached the blockade from the northeast at full steam. Moiseyev was shocked when the ships to either side of it opened fire with no attempt at communication, severely damaging the hull and injuring an additional three crewmen, one fatally. The Jefferson reversed course, still sustaining enemy fire.With it being unable to return to port in the FRA, but incapable of remaining at sea for much longer without major repairs, preparations were made to evacuate and scuttle the Jefferson. Before they could be carried out, however, president Jair Bolsonaro offered to let the ship dock at a Brazilian port until the crisis could be resolved. This brought the scorn of the PGUSA and its allies, but the Jefferson made use of the offer, departing the Russian fleet for Brazil within the hour.

Having reached an impasse, the two parties entered into the diplomatic phase of the crisis, butting heads in a series of tense negotiations mediated by representatives from China, the other emergent power in the region. Neither side was willing to compromise—the PGUSA’s minimum demands were that Russia completely withdraw from the area and cease all relations with the FRA; Russia’s were that the PGUSA allow it to continue construction on the Galveston base, cease cooperating with ECANAC, and remove the leftover American nuclear weapons stationed in Europe during the first Cold War, which it claimed had fallen under sole European control since America’s collapse, in violation of the spirit of various nuclear non-proliferation treaties. The FRA, despite being the focal point of the crisis, was largely a tertiary party to the negotiations.

The developing stalemate was shaken to its core on the third of November, when six divers were captured in Guantanamo Bay attempting to rig Chinese warships with explosives. Interrogation of the divers revealed that they were Russian special operatives sent to sabotage the Chinese navy and blame it on the Euro-American forces, hoping to turn China against them and force a resolution to the crisis more favorable for Russian interests. Russia, of course, denied the allegations outright. But this latest development was not the final one, nor the most dramatic. Inconsistencies in one of the captured divers’ confessions raised alarm bells among the Chinese authorities. Intelligence officers trained in negotiation were flown in from China to investigate further. On the ninth, the diver under suspicion committed suicide in his cell. On the tenth, Cuban authorities in Havana captured an American national meeting with a Cuban double agent in a sting operation. The files collected over the course of the operation were enough to prove that the American was working for the CIA, that he had been in Cuba (but not Havana) both on the night of the attempted sabotage in Guantanamo and on the night of the captured diver’s death, and that he was in contact with at least one man of Ukrainian origin who had been living undercover in Cuba for some time. Altogether, it was enough to implicate the CIA, even if not definitively, in a plot to stage a failed sabotage attempt at Guantanamo Bay using Ukrainian divers posing as Russian agents, all with the intent of framing Russia for an attempt to manipulate the negotiations, thereby (presumably) either causing the Chinese to recuse themselves as mediators or side with the PGUSA. It was also assumed that the diver’s “suicide” had actually been an assassination to keep the story from falling apart under further examination. The PGUSA denied everything as fervently as Russia had when the blame was directed at them, but the story was now substantiated by more than just a confession made under duress. Before long, two of the Ukrainians independently corroborated the story in exchange for asylum.

Almost as if to balance the scales, American investigative journalists in contact with the CIA released a bombshell report the following day containing hundreds of pages of documents, both compiled during CIA investigations and stolen from Russian archives through online espionage, which established an undeniable paper trail between the Russian defense ministry and pirates active in the Caribbean. According to the leak, Russian operatives had provided pirate crews with money, fuel, and munitions in return for targeted attacks on foreign shipping, with the majority of the targets being Chinese and Venezuelan. The Kremlin offered a meek statement condemning the PGUSA for its theft of Russian government documents, thereby tacitly admitting that the accusations were true (the likelihood that the documents had been faked was slim to nonexistent anyway).

Outraged, the PRC declared that both offenses constituted acts of war against the Chinese people. It withdrew its mediators from the negotiations, placed its defense forces on high alert, and dispatched a handful of warships to Maceió, Brazil, to apprehend the Jefferson with or without permission from the Brazilian government. Tensions between the countries involved, already high, reached a fever pitch.

Facing threats of crippling economic retaliation, Russia and the PGUSA were forced to come back to the negotiating table, now on China’s terms. The first condition of the negotiations, that all naval assets involved in the standoff return to their home ports, was fulfilled on the seventeenth of November, officially recognized as the end of the crisis. The Jefferson, which the Chinese frigates Yueyang and Handan were effectively holding hostage in Brazil’s own waters, was the only exception; it remained in limbo as collateral until the end of the negotiation process. As the negotiations progressed, major concessions were made by both offending parties to avoid further hostilities with China. Firstly, the naval base at Galveston was shuttered, and Russia was forced to abandon future plans to establish a direct military presence in the FRA. In return, the European and American delegations agreed to discontinue any attempt to restrict or otherwise control commerce in the Caribbean, which included the de jure end of American sanctions on Cuba (the de facto end had come with America’s collapse into civil war). Furthermore, the PGUSA had to agree to a resolution formally acknowledging the illegitimacy of the Monroe Doctrine (it, too, had been functionally obsolete for some time). Lastly, a charter was drafted for the Joint Caribbean Affairs Council, a body of military representatives from local and international powers tasked with managing the defense of Caribbean commerce, especially through the coordination of anti-piracy strategies.

Each of these concessions had the appearance of a reduction of influence of one party to match a similar reduction by the other, but the reality was that both Russia and the PGUSA were reducing their influence relative to China, which conceded nothing of real value. It maintained its base at Guantanamo, which was to be the hub through which the JCAC’s activities would be coordinated. Even the formation of the Council effectively handed more influence to the PRC—of its nine-person governing committee, two representatives were Chinese, one Cuban, one Venezuelan, and one Nicaraguan, with the remaining four consisting of one each from the PGUSA, Mexico, Brazil, and Russia, meaning China could reliably count on a majority of support on any decision put up for a vote by the committee. In fact, all the PRC offered was the prompt return of the Jefferson and the captured CIA operatives, and in return they were given undisputed dominance in the Gulf-Caribbean region.