The room was sleeker, more stylish than the military’s command center. It also held a much larger group. Assembled today were dozens more than usual; the core Presidium membership had brought their aides and cronies. This was a triumphant moment, after all, one to be shared widely.

As Wang took his position at the front of the room, a large holographic banner fluttered behind him — the United Kingdom’s new red-and-white flag flapping in a nonexistent wind, the blue of Scotland having disappeared after the second independence referendum in the wake of the attack.

“Just one! In Europe, only one ally stands with the Americans: the no-longer-great Great Britain,” said Admiral Wang. NATO’s dissolution had been a long time coming, but the alliance’s sudden unraveling by a simple diplomatic vote was almost as big a shock to Washington as the Directorate’s surprise attack had been.

“And they have what to offer their Yankee allies? The very same F-35 fighter jets whose electronics we know well, and a carrier jointly owned with the French that Paris refuses to allow to go beyond the Atlantic.”

The flag receded into the corner of another flag.

“In the Pacific, who stands with the United States?” asked Admiral Wang. “Again, just one. Australia.” Wang eyed the audience. Most seemed attentive, a sign of their respect, and it was almost time for them to put on their viz glasses.

“How recently did they believe that our need for their minerals was a vise clamped around our balls? What good are they now? You are more skilled in business than I,” he said, knowing it was important to show deference to this audience. “But even a mere sailor like myself can understand that their entire economy is based on something that they can no longer sell without our consent. The blockade remains unbroken, and our mineral reserves are more than adequate. Soon enough, they will beg us to take what they once threatened to withhold.” Wang added, paraphrasing Sun-Tzu, “To subdue an enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

The last flag appeared: the American flag. He stepped forward, and the flag shrunk behind him, the symbolism not lost on the audience.

“Please put on your glasses,” said Admiral Wang. He donned a matte-black carbon-and-titanium mesh pair of Prada viz glasses, a Shanghai-only limited-edition model that his mistress had bought for him soon after the invasion of Hawaii. They were too flashy for his taste, but he knew they would go over well with this crowd.

The viz feed took them through the flag and into a sweeping tour of images collected from both intelligence sources and open-source feed. A line of F-35 fighter jets sat abandoned at Kadena airfield, the base now back under Japanese control as part of the neutrality deal. Then a line of American families waiting at a food-relief center in Indianapolis, all of them eyeing the neon-orange boxes on the other side of a taped blue line. The next image was the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, where lawmakers from the Second Congressional District of West Virginia and the Sixth Congressional District of Washington flailed at each other with liver-spotted fists. That was followed by a bed of wilting roses laid around the hooves of the famous bull sculpture on Wall Street, a gloomy reminder of the rash of trader suicides that had followed the stock market’s collapse.

“These images show the new reality the Americans are learning to live with. In time, they will see the advantage of their fate.”

The audience was then flung high into orbit alongside the Tiangong-3 space station. A collective gasp of awe followed, predictably. They gazed down at the Pacific, and then there was another wave of gasps as they began to freefall through the atmosphere, dropping all the way down to Pearl Harbor. Slowly, the audience took in a panoramic view of the harbor from the perspective of the second deck of a Chinese warship moored there, which allowed them both to catch their breath and see the at-ease sailors, who looked like they belonged there as much as at any home port in China. The Presidium members and their guests burst into applause at the journey and where it had ended, in evident victory.

“But the beginning of wisdom is to call things what they truly are. That was a magnificent tour of our achievement to date. Yet we must understand this: We are at a stasis point, not a completion point. We are no longer fighting battles, but the war is hardly over,” Wang said. “America’s conventional forces cannot reach Hawaii, let alone attack us here. But those facts don’t stop the Americans from harboring such ambitions.”

The scenes then flashed quickly: A company of American Marines in desert camouflage, a mix of shame and anger on their faces as they trudged down the stairway of one of the civilian passenger jets the United States had been forced to lease from Brazil in order to extricate its troops stranded in the Middle East. Next was a warship in San Francisco Bay covered with a ramshackle assortment of tarps and scaffolding, clearly undergoing some kind of refit. Then a time-lapse satellite image of a Connecticut shipyard making painfully slow progress constructing a single submarine. Then the sad face of a little girl as her father helped her place her pink tablet computer, decorated with ribbon, inside a handmade victory box at her school. The tablet would be taken apart for its microchips, which were no longer available from China.

“The combination of our opening strikes and your actions on the economic side since have been devastating,” said Admiral Wang. “But we must remain alert. I told you months back that we had no choice, and now they have no choice. Their dignity drives them to believe they must try once more. And this strike they prepare is one we should welcome, not fear. Only after it fails will they accept the new turn in history, theirs and ours.

“My reverence for Sun-Tzu is well known and so I will close with a quote that shows the journey yet to come. ‘To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.’ ”

The viz feed ended, and Admiral Wang removed his glasses. He felt a hand patting his shoulder in congratulations and turned to see Wu Han, the economics minister, who would be making the next presentation.

Sterling Wu had built his fortune through Macau’s gaming industry. During the transition, he had been a crucial source of intelligence and thus leverage against the old Communist Party bosses and their cronies, many of whom had been indebted to Wu in some financial or personal way.

Wu’s presentation lacked dancing girls but little else when it came to showmanship. The music built steadily as he discussed how the Directorate was beginning to gain more favorable trading concessions from countries in Latin America and Europe. It reached a crescendo as he announced that preparations to extract natural gas from the Mariana Trench site were ahead of schedule, while Mexican and Venezuelan oil imports were already increasing.

The economics minister largely steered clear of Admiral Wang’s purview until he reached the topic of the Panama Canal. It still remained a sore point between the two sides of the Directorate. Shutting down the Americans’ ability to swing forces easily between the oceans had been a necessary part of the attack plan, drawn from analyses Wang had commissioned about mistakes Japan had made during the previous world war. Their only other route through Cape Horn was thousands of miles beyond their air cover and being dealt with through a mix of submarine picket lines and a debt swap for basing deal with Argentina. But to the business side of the Presidium, the elegant military solution was viewed as an investment lost. The compromise the two sides had worked out was that the canal-repair costs would be included in the reparation demands that the Brazilians would pass on to the Americans.