The year is 2077. Resources are scarce, and global inequality is at an all-time high. Long-simmering tensions between the United States and China erupt into active warfare when Chinese paratroopers land in Alaska to seize its oil reserves and the United States, in return, launches a counteroffensive into the Chinese mainland. Under the looming threat of nuclear escalation, a few lucky citizens enter underground shelters, bracing for the fallout. There’s a flash on the horizon, as what was once just a war spirals into the Great War—a nuclear apocalypse.
This is the premise of Fallout, one of the most popular video game series of the past 30 years. Set in a post-apocalyptic United States, the Fallout universe is equal parts absurd, philosophical, and alarmingly realistic. Players are just as likely to have conversations about Hegelian dialectics as they are to encounter giant robots satirically devoted to squashing Communism.
Now, around 26 years after its debut, the beloved series is getting the silver screen treatment. The television adaptation of Fallout, released on Amazon Prime Video on April 10, has been an instant success—Amazon’s most watched U.S. television premiere of all time.
The show follows a path familiar to those who played the games: a protagonist ventures out into the blasted wasteland of the future and must navigate the perils of vicious mutated bears, radiation exposure, and the messy politics of survivor factions warring for power. However, it makes one major, telling departure, providing a new answer to the question of who to blame for starting nuclear Armageddon. In doing so, it puts forth an incisive argument about the growing disharmony between American politics and what Americans actually believe could threaten their way of life.
(Warning: Major spoilers ahead.)
Prime Video’s Fallout adaptation is mostly set two centuries after the Great War, in the year 2296. We follow Lucy (Ella Purnell), a kindhearted, resilient young woman who has spent her entire life living in a vault, one of many massive subterranean fallout shelters built under a government contract by the powerful company Vault-Tec that enabled human civilization to survive the Great War.
Lucy lives in the seemingly idyllic Vault 33 with a small, meritocratic community of residents clad in matching blue jumpsuits. But when her father is kidnapped by mysterious intruders from the surface, she chooses to leave her vault and search for him among the ruins of what was once California. What she finds, however, is a Wasteland dotted with struggling communities where pure water is a precious commodity and human life is cheap.
It is in this world where viewers meet the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a ruthless bounty hunter who survived the apocalypse but has a tortured form of immortality due to radiation exposure. He now roams the Wasteland, hunting for clues about the fate of his family. Eventually, however, it is revealed that the Ghoul was once known as Cooper Howard, an actor who starred in Western movies. Through his flashbacks, we are provided the most sustained look in the entire Fallout series of what life was like before the bombs were dropped.
The United States of the 2070s is in many ways a retrofuturist fusion with the 1950s. Housewives have jet-powered helper robots yet take photos of their children with flashbulb cameras. Soldiers drive vintage Chevy pickups yet are equipped with advanced armor that grants them super strength. The United States is a racially diverse society, its social problems instead defined by income inequality and the loss of individual freedom in the face of a Fordist-like garrison state, yet McCarthyist posters warning of Communist infiltration abound.
In Fallout canon, “Communist” has always been a reference to China, the unmistakable primary antagonist of the United States. There is plenty of evidence for this. The United States’ resource war with China is what eventually precipitates nuclear exchange. In two of the series’ more recent video games, the player encounters human and material leftovers of this conflict. In Fallout 4, the player meets a surviving Chinese submarine captain who describes carrying out orders to nuke Boston. In Fallout 76, rusty Chinese drones are among the first hostile characters the player meets. (Although a creator of the original 1997 Fallout game did, decades later, eventually claim that China was the “first” to drop the bombs, none of the games intend to point a finger at who caused the end of the world.) The conflict between China and the United States is ultimately background noise, an accepted context for a narrative experience that, if anything, positions both governments as culpable for its horrors.
Yet in the television adaptation, the showrunners have offered up a clear culprit for the apocalypse—and it’s not China. As Howard’s storyline carries the viewer through the prewar United States, the show is keen to highlight the Red Scare sweeping his Hollywood circles and to linger on fleeting news clips about faltering peace negotiations. But unlike the video games, the United States’ enemy in this war is never identified beyond terms like “Communists” and “the Reds.” The audience never hears “China” once in the show’s eight hour-long episodes.
After a conversation with a blacklisted former costar, Charles Whiteknife (Dallas Goldtooth), Howard eventually discovers a conspiracy that reveals the true power pulling the strings. Vault-Tec, a gluttonous partner of a contract state, had taken advantage of the U.S. government’s privatization of its core function—ensuring the survival of its citizenry—and realized its monopoly over fallout shelters would be most lucrative if there was nowhere else to live. As Whiteknife put it, they have a “fiduciary responsibility to keep the war going.” Knowing this, not only did Vault-Tec actively stop research that could have alleviated the energy shortages driving the world to war in the first place, but it also planned to drop the bomb itself to ensure its return on investment.
In the video game series, Vault-Tec was merely one of many unscrupulous companies that operated prior to the apocalypse, occupying a supporting antagonistic role. But now, the television version of Fallout pins the blame for the apocalypse solely on an American company—rather than on a Chinese government that presumably ordered a nuclear strike.
Given the current state of U.S.-China relations, and China’s place in the Fallout canon up to this point, the move is a little confusing. In a world beset by anarchy and slavery, why turn Vault-Tec into the villain when it had been previously implied that governments were responsible for the apocalypse? Why completely omit China from any mention of conflict?
The cynics among us may be quick to assume that this move indicates the showrunners’ desire to appeal to Chinese audiences, as is the case with many Hollywood films that have sought to access the Chinese box office. But China already blocks Prime Video, and Amazon MGM—the studio behind Fallout—has no known corporate links to Chinese investment. Given that, there’s reason to believe something more interesting is potentially underway, particularly given the current political climate.
Over the past decade, political rhetoric against China has become totalizing, and the 2024 U.S. presidential election is poised to become a competition of which candidate will be “tougher on China.” Commentators have long noted that the U.S. discourse on China is unproductive, can limit diplomatic options for de-escalation, and may contribute to anti-Asian racism. Yet both Democrats and Republicans, especially in battleground states, continue to frame beating China as a central tenet of their foreign-policy agendas.
If both U.S. President Joe Biden’s and former President Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric are to be taken at face value, Americans should theoretically be primed for a story that implicates China in the downfall of American well-being.
Instead, Fallout’s choice of villain may be tapping into an uncomfortable truth: Americans appear to be far less anxious about threats coming from beyond our borders than governance failures at home.
While public concerns about China have undoubtedly risen, most Americans are actually more worried about domestic issues. In its 2023 survey, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found a significant majority—81 percent of those surveyed—expressed greater concern about internal threats than external ones. Chapman University’s annual Survey of American Fears found in 2023 that Americans’ top fears were about “corrupt government officials” and “economic/financial collapse.”
Almost a decade after its hazy origins in the 2016 presidential election cycle, it seems that the political fixation on China is misplaced in the eyes of voters. Pew Research Center polling from earlier this year found that, despite their otherwise polarized views, both Democratic- and Republican-leaning respondents agreed that making Social Security more financially sound, creating more jobs, reducing the influence of money in politics, and improving education should be among the United States’ top policy priorities.
Fallout’s narratives have often resonated as political critique. Fallout 3, released in 2008, made remnants of the U.S. government the villains of its story, explicitly describing how American leaders left their citizens to die while they hid in bunkers. It was a villain appropriately reflective of its own time, amid tumbling public trust in a Bush administration that repeatedly lied to justify the war in Iraq and also appeared incapable of correcting the impending financial crisis. Amid real-life, high-profile scandals in the tech and science communities that made clear the hollowness of technocratic Utopian messaging, the antagonists of 2015’s Fallout 4 were, appropriately, a secretive faction of scientists that ran experiments on residents of the Wasteland.
By choosing Vault-Tec, a rapacious corporation feasting on defense contracts, as the show’s true antagonist—particularly while public perceptions of corporations are at historic lows—Fallout offers an acute reading of the current political moment. The series’ latest installation makes clear that the end of the world, in all its bizarre humor, is a product of the worst aspects of ourselves, not from some malevolent anti-American force. Even China, as an equal participant in the nuclear exchange that underwrites the entire premise of Fallout, is ultimately a distraction from the true horseman of the apocalypse: a private, unregulated capitalist body with every appalling feature of present-day American corporations rolled into one.
As American politicians make opposing China the foreign-policy mule to which they pin their election hopes, they will encounter a persistent, uncomfortable truth—that Americans in this decade might be more afraid of the failures of their own country than they are of the world.
The post The True Horseman of the ‘Fallout’ Apocalypse appeared first on Foreign Policy.
