A would-be autocratic US President abuses his partisan majority across all three branches to defeat Constitutional checks and balances. He publicly questions the continued relevance of NATO, while secretly negotiating with China and Russia to form a kleptographic consortium of superpowers. Giant defense firms from all three nations are in on the plan, as are Cabinet members and four-star generals.
The President employs a ruthless Private Military Company, and he takes advantage of a dysfunctional weapon systems procurement process, to recruit and arm obscure Canadian racist survivalist groups. The President's mercenaries co-opt the hapless thugs to commit heinous acts of terror that threaten NATO Northern Defense missions in Canada and Greenland. This false flag terrorism aims to justify US intervention on the sovereign territory of neighbors and erstwhile allies. Underneath it all is a scheme to enrich a cabal of international oligarchs with exclusive rights to exploit the new economic opportunities represented by the melting Arctic.
To the rescue come an unlikely alliance that includes a stalwart Canadian Mountie of Nez Perce ancestry, his brilliant professor of a wife of color, their adopted teenage hard cases, a swashbuckling female Canadian Native casino security specialists, small tactical units of heroic Canadian Inuit and Cree, a couple of Canadian Native tycoons, a reformed-ish young female African American partisan pundit, and a really tough elderly American White lady.
Nerdy application and discussion of cutting edge, but realistic, tech is central to storytelling. No super genius hackers or satellites that see through walls! The action is interspersed with equally nerdy, but entertainingly snarky, historic lessons in Civics. The lessons warn of the frailty of democratic checks and balances, and the dysfunctional prevalence of bureaucracy over meritocracy, in a gerrymandered two-party system.
The story's outcome is ambiguous.
A contemporary cautionary tale, the prose is a bit tongue in cheek, and the premise is slightly over the top... or is it?
