Kinda late, but
Because in the relevant time period (2035-50, roughly), Victoria is undergoing White Supremacist Year Zero. It's in no shape to manufacture pharmaceuticals or medical equipment or much of anything else except wandering death squads and human trafficking victims.
Puerto Rico, meanwhile, is a relatively helpless island that has the facilities to make something valuable, but no means of posing a threat or somehow acting as the basis of a reunited America (Alexander's bugbear). Exactly the kind of polity that can be trivially subordinated into the Russosphere with a casual flex of military and economic muscle, on terms strict enough to ensure that they don't mess up anything Alexander doesn't want messed, but not so strict as to inspire revolts.
Alexander breaks things because he doesn't want to have to deal with potential rivals. Puerto Rico isn't a rival; it's loose change that fell out of the pocket of the rival he just broke.
Fair point.
I'll give you that much.
That is VERY true in the modern international order. It is less true in a relatively lawless environment, or one where there is no clear hegemony, or where the hegemony doesn't care that you rob someone unless it's a friend of theirs.
Victoria, for example, will no doubt buy just about anything and not give a shit that you stole it from a foreign ship, as long as the ship in question wasn't under Russian protection. The Caribbean is in real danger, in a situation like this, of breaking down into the maritime equivalent of the post-Collapse Midwest: lots of little warlords, periodically terrorized by the big boys whenever they come through. But "lots of little warlords" equates to "piracy" in an ocean region.
Victoria is several thousand kilometers from the Caribbean, and any pirates would have to pass FCNY.
Nor does it have any interest in international trade anyway. Nor is there any indication that it suddenly turned into a pirate mecca, which would not help their resort business anyway.
And critically, most of the things that international trade does involve are not fungible.
How do you fence bauxite ore? Or crude oil? Or lithium ore? The places that buy those things are also the best regulated. How long can you keep a grain shipment before it starts to spoil? Who will buy random heavy machinery without technical support?
How do you even unload all that shit?
Port facilities are big and expensive, and require considerable infrastructure investment and ongoing investment both in personnel and maintenance. How do you hide the ship from searchers when its late and its AIS beacon is broadcasting precisely where it is?
Will your pirate port facilities survive a driveby visit from a Euro/African/Colombian/Brazilian frigate with a deckload of cruise missiles?
Or even just something like a Danish Absalon-class with a 5-inch deck gun and a company of Marines onboard?
Modern day pirates concentrate on ransom for a reason; attracting seriousface, gloves off nationstate attention generally is bad for business.
The big difference is that pirates can get away with operating smaller ships, more infrequently, than the merchants they prey upon. Keeping up a fuel supply would be a problem, and it might well be a limiting factor on piracy in the region, but if the economy of the Caribbean is so poor that fuel for ships can't be had at any relevant price, then the region has other bigger problems of its own... and so does the global economy.
The problem as I see it, is that the sort of piracy is rather straightforward to deter.
Put a squad of Marines or PMC mercs on board your nation-flagged ship with heavy weapons and maybe a couple remote weapon stations(a Kongsberg RWS is apparently <90k, and can be fitted with a variety of weapons including nonlethals, HMGs, autocannon and anti-tank missiles) and it becomes straight up impossible without the pirates owning naval ships with medium-caliber cannons or the ship crew mutinying.
That sort of milspec weaponry is not permissible in RL because late stage capitalism is all about minimizing costs, and because nationstates provide sealane security. And frankly because no one trusts the sort of people who become mercs with govt-supplied heavy weapons while sailing into international civilian ports.
In a situation where we are talking about a significant breakdown of the international order and nationstates are invested in maintaining their supplies, those scruples go away. Shipping security would probably be bread and butter for international PMCs.
False comparison.
The comparison isn't between supporting these overseas islands economically and spending money settling refugees. It's on supporting these overseas islands economically and NOT supporting them, including not spending money to integrate them as refugees, because the money just ain't there. Because, ahem...
I'll grant you that they may be able to find extremely cheap ways to help those particular locals. The big complication is...
The EU cant be taking in millions of largely white refugees from the US, Canada, Switzerland and the UK, and abandoning its own legal, browner citizens to fend for themselves in EU territory. That's basically handing Alexander and the Okhrana a wedge issue to slip right into the heart of the EU as an entity, compounding the extant crisis of confidence after they proved incapable of preventing the Baltics, Romania and Bulgaria falling to Alexander's ambitions.
Nor will it do it's diplomacy in subsaharan Africa or South America any favors either.
And that's without considering the specific problem of places like the Netherlands, which owns half the EU territories in the Caribbean(France owns the rest) and which is about 15% non-European descent.
You are arguing that the EU cannot afford to support its citizens for financial reasons.
Im arguing that in this sort of situation, the EU cannot afford NOT to support them. The non-material costs far outweigh the financial costs required to keep said places on life support.
...See, this is the big thing.
Europe is here undergoing a major, and actively enhanced by Alexander, economic collapse. In the middle of that, they have to maintain an extensive military buildup, because they need to rapidly transition from "we spend 1% of GDP on the military, continentwide, due to lack of pressing military threat" to "oh shit there's a pressing military threat, and half our member states have collapsed so the other half have to spend even MORE money proportionately speaking."
Will they be maintaining French Guiana as a launch site? Maybe Dunno. It depends on what their alternatives are. They will be doing literally the cheapest possible things in many, many, many areas involving anything BUT military security, and even in military security they'll be scrimping and saving where possible, because military muscle is the only thing deterring Alexander from sending Little Green Men in to take over another tier of countries.
1) The European Union in this AU kicked the US off the continent in the aftermath of alt!Trump defaulting on US debt in 2016 and then demanding that they pay him for protection. That was 17 years before the US collapsed.
This is not coming at them out of the blue.
2) To be fair, they have mainland alternatives for sat launch. Like Andoya. But they'd have to invest a lot of billions to get it up to snuff.
Guiana just happens to be the
cheapest and safest option because of its geography.
Cheapest because its equator location gives the most slingshot assist for space launches.
Safest because a malfunctioning rocket out of somewhere like Andoya would drop into populated mainland Europe, while one out of French Guiana would drop into the South Atlantic.
And its not valuable to any of its neighbors. So not at physical threat.
3) Spain split but reassembled peacefully.
France schismed and had civil unrest, but did not suffer sectarian conflict. Italy fractured, and
may have fought a civil war. Greece is a battleground; that implies ongoing conflict of some sort, whether covert or overt is not stated.
Croatia is EU, and on the borders of Serbia going to war with Kosovo, but is not at war itself. Neither Serbia nor Kosovo are EU members.
Switzerland collapsed, but is not EU. The UK collapsed, but was not EU at the time. North Macedonia is applying, but is not currently EU.
The rest of the Balkans is in turmoil, but not EU.
Its worth remembering that most of the EU's stabilization problems stated on the information page, the things swallowing time and resources, are in its near abroad, not in the EU proper.
4) The EU retained enough economic strength to keep Finland out of Alexanders jaws. For Poland to contest Russian expansionism. For Alexander's ambitions towards Germany not to have ever had a significant chance of realization.
They did this while researching and implementing a full switchover of their entire economy away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, while doing their best to stabilise their frontier areas and maintaining support for the FCNY. All of this while struggling under the artificial malus of an Alexander-implemented oil price spike in the middle of a Cold War that occasionally got very warm(the Romanian Affair).
That puts a floor on precisely how much economic and military power the EU retained even in the depths of the Collapse.
We may see false economies, too- the EU collectively fails to maintain the launch site for long enough that it falls apart, then they have to spend more to compensate in some other way (e.g. building a new site somewhere they didn't lose control of, or rebuilding the site in Guiana, or developing military capabilities that function adequately without satellite support).
Come to think of it, Alexander almost certainly has viable ASAT capabilities, probably including space-based lasers if he wants to. It may not be such a great idea to rely on having satellites if you're planning to fight him.
1) Today, about 70 something nations currently have satellites partly or wholly owned or leased in orbit.From the usual suspects, down to places like Sudan, Nepal and Rwanda. Thats how increasingly important(and accessible) it is to even small nations.
Maintaining the Galileo navigation network, for example, is necessary for maintaining military capability and a significant portion of the civilian economy. Cars, ships and aircraft rely on GPS-analogues for navigation, just for one example.
So do a lot of smart weapons.
Then there's weather satellites. Communications satellites. Environmental monitoring satellites. Recon satellites.
Not to mention that its also a high technology jobs program.
So no, I do not agree.
The EU will have maintained satellite launch capability all through the Collapse as both a natsec and economic imperative, ever since the US allowed alt!Trump to shit the bed economically and militarily in 2016, so they would be uncoupled from relying on US systems.
2)China, the US, Russia and India all have publicly demonstrated ASAT capabilitiy; Israel is believed to as well. Its doesn't seem to be all that hard to shoot down an LEO satellite once you have indigenous space launch capability, or invest in exoatmospheric ballistic missile interceptors.
But shooting down a recon sat in LEO is a very different kettle of fish from attempting to knock down a global positioning constellation in geostationary orbit. Both the costs and the risks(Kessler cascade) are significantly higher.
And launch costs for satellites are way down anyway; from the ~54,000 dollars/kg of the Space Shuttle to ~2700 dollars/kg today to LEO.
3) A scenario where Alexander has exclusive access to space weapons would look very different from what we have now.
to attack Cascadia. a seized USN carrier group?
