[https://i.imgur.com/4YRUVtf.png]
I created a cool flag, and decided I wanted a backstory for it. Thus, this:
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Waging a nuclear war is like playing tic-tac-toe.
The only way to win is to go first and hope your opponent makes a mistake.
Only scattered information persists from the time immediately following the third world war, but historians generally agree on one thing-- that North Korea threw the first stone, but the United States made the first strike. Early, overwhelming force destroyed much of the world's nuclear stockpiles and orbital weaponry, and anti-missile technologies outperformed expectations by neutralizing hundreds of warheads by variously destroying their launch systems or shooting down warheads in their terminal phase. But hundreds of nuclear weapons still went through, devastating the greatest cities of the United States, along with its military and infrastructure. Subsequently, nuclear winter and the use of biological weapons decimated what was left of the populace. The post-atomic age was one of famine, plague, and destitution.
Some places fared better than others, however. In particular, the Argentine-Brazilian Commonwealth, Australasian Confederation, West African Federation, Zaire, and the Union of the Cape would eventually flourish. Their technology stagnated in the immediate aftermath of WW3, of course, but they seemed almost immune to the technological regression and outright luddism that beset the rest of the world as they rose into becoming the great powers of the new world order. In North America, however, things were more bleak. While not as devastated as the Russian State, China, Integralist Turkey, or the Peninsula of the Dead, the United States had still fared slightly worse than the British Republic, European Union, and Republic of India. Only one spot of hope still shone bright against the great darkness that had befallen North America-- Des Moines, Iowa.
With Russia long since fractured into thousands of functionally anarchist or neo-feudal statelets, and China once more shattered and then subjugated under the Mongolian boot, no one is left with an answer to the question: "why was Des Moines spared?" Perhaps the weapons aimed towards it were destroyed by the US's first strike. Perhaps the conventional hypersonic missiles launched at it by China had been all the Eurasian Powers could spare against Des Moines while there were still more important targets to nuke. Perhaps faulty intelligence due to a lack of satellite network had given the Chinese the impression that it had, in fact, been successfully nuked. Perhaps it simply hadn't been targeted in the first place, due to its incredible irrelevance.
But while Des Moines hadn't initially been the United State's most populous city following the Third World War (Fort Wayne, Indiana still stood), the devastating nuclear winter immediately following WW3 left it the most populous city in North America. It suffered tens of thousands of deaths, but Iowa's plentiful farmland and ample reserves of pigs, chickens, corn, and soybeans allowed its populace to barely sustain itself through the Great Famine, and a hasty quarantine (plus its position far inland from the algae-covered coasts) mitigated the pandemics sweeping America.
Des Moines emerged the Nuclear Winter a bare shell of its pre-war self. The rubble left by its few skyscrapers seemed to symbolize how debased both Iowa and America at large had been.
Despite that, with its surviving state government, Des Moines became by default the largest legitimist faction within the former United States. It would expand peacefully into the "six sisters," that is, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, and Dakota, welcomed by their residents as a claimant to the mantle of the United States of America. And to its credit, it did indeed re-incorporate those states, or at least what was left of them, and allowed them full participation within its nascent inter-state congress. But the experience of the great war had left Iowans changed. Its populace viewed the paternal authoritarianism of the state government with not just acceptance, but outright affection.
As the so called Provisional United States of America spread, and native Iowans went from an outright majority to merely a plurality within what they had begun to perceive as "their" nation, they began to feel an increasing divide between true-blue heartlanders, such as themselves, and the increasingly "foreign" cultures of the rust belt, wild west, and canadian prairie. This was not helped along by the staggering rise of regional subcultures after the end of WW3.
A revolt in Indiana brought this early age of peaceful expansion and consolidation to an end.
It had been the policy of the Iowan government to expand in three stages. To push military forces into an area, to re-establish infrastructure (in particular, by rebuilding the increasingly legendary I-80), and then, finally, to grant political rights. This was viewed as only natural-- it was impossible to count votes from a region without reliable lines of communication with the capital, after all. And so far, the strategy had worked. Communities across the midwest had been more than willing to accept temporary territorial status in return for a return to law, order, and running water.
But by the time Iowa reached Indiana, communities had already started to rebuild all on their own, and while they weren't against re-joining the US, per se, they increasingly resisted the indignity of having self-rule taken away from them by distant Des Moines. As I-80 penetrated into northern Indiana, the Iowan National guard (now rebranded as the Federal Guard) faced complaints, then protests, and then riots. They retaliated in kind, as soldiers are wont to do, and exaggerated tales of brutality spread like wildfire throughout Indiana.
Finally, the Indianans had had enough. Fort Wayne was still only a bare remnant of its pre-war self, but as one of the largest cities in North America, its residents viewed themselves as residing in a peer to Des Moines, and demanded not just immediate self-rule (which Des Moines would have granted, reluctantly), but also that it would become a co-equal capital to Des Moines, hosting the legislature on alternate years.
Having grown used to the status of Des Moines as the premier city of the United States, and as the capital of the greatest power of North America (having recently surpassed the Empire of Belize in land area), this was viewed by the Desmoinesinians as unacceptable. And to boot, the height of ingratitude. Who had spent so much blood securing Indiana against bandits? Who had provided corn during famines, and pork during feasts? It was the height of ingratitude to demand more. Even the residents of the six sisters, while not quite so jingoistic, sympathized. After all, they had been patient enough to wait for representation, and received it perfectly on schedule.
The response of Des Moines was a flat "no."
And so, Indianan farmers picked up pitchforks and ancient guns and stormed garrisons of Iowan soldiers. In most cases, the soldiers were captured. But in several, they were slaughtered, sometimes to a man.
When news of this revolt reached Des Moines, the capital erupted in furor. Within hours, congress approved military action. From a podium in Woodland Cemetery, flanked on both sides by the white crosses of Iowa's civil war dead, the president-governor of Iowa and the Provisional United States of America (a recent amendment to the constitution had invested both offices within a single person) declared war on the "rebel state of Indiana." For the first time since the American Civil War, great hosts of men would once more stride the former United States to kill their countrymen. Other legitimist factions had gone to war before, of course, but these had typically amounted to little more than minor skirmishes; the rigors of WW3 and the subsequent broken back war had totally depleted the heavy weapons and strategic petroleum reserves that would-be conquerors would have used. But with Iowa's population not just equivalent, but in fact greater than its pre-war population (a testament to both the incredible carrying capacity of midwestern soil and the logistics capacity of the Iowan government), there was finally a faction capable of raising, equipping, and supplying a great army.
The war was bloody, but its outcome was a forgone conclusion.
The Empire of Des Moines was not declared during the First Indianan Revolt, or the second, or even the third. But as the Provisional United States of America expanded into increasingly hostile and self-sufficient territory its congress grew less and less willing to expand voting rights to "ungrateful outlanders." (That is, anyone other than a heartlander.) Instead, the Provisional United States began to expand using a new set of four steps. Step one was to occupy territory. Step two was to give territory self-governance, but without say in the federal congress. Step three was the major divergence. Instead of re-admitting states into the union as they were pacified, instead, pacified territory was slowly fed to the six sisters, expanding their borders outwards, while at the same time Iowa would slowly expand into its neighboring states, annexing communities that had been loyal to and reliant on Des Moines for so long that they now viewed *themselves* as being Iowan, rather than being loyal to whatever state they were physically located within.
Eventually, the entire nation had stopped thinking of itself as American, and started thinking of themselves as a new ethnic group-- the "Heartlanders." And in turn the position of president-governor had become, although not hereditary, a playing piece swapped between a small number of increasingly powerful families.
The declaration of the "Empire of Des Moines" was almost just a formality. No laws were changed, and no coronation was organized-- the president-governor simply styled herself as the governor-emperor instead, with the titles reversed to indicate that it was control of Iowa that lead to control of the empire, rather than the other way around. But it reflected a profound psychological change within the Desmoinesinian people. This change was best reflected by the Manifest Destiny they now espoused-- "From Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Belize, from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Long reign Des Moines! Our liberties we prize and our rights we will protect!"
The Empire of Belize is stagnant and decadent, and the great powers of the southern hemisphere are content to leave America be so long as their settler colonies in the Caribbean and the north american coasts are left undisturbed. Only the Most Serene Republic of Quebec, Acadie, and Nouvelle-Angleterre, and their coalition with the minor states within Appalachia, Dixie, and Texland stand in the way of Des Moines' appetite for continental hegemony.
But not all within the empire support it, and their revanchism for the lunar and martian territories once held by the United States of America, in particular Mare Tranquillitatis, which are now divided between the Southern Powers, might strangle the Empire of Des Moines before it can become anything more than the most successful pretender to the legacy of the United States of America. But with the right choices and the right allies, it could become a greater nation than the founding father of America could ever dream of inspiring.
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Chiefly inspired by EBR's Stars and Stripes Forever timeline and the Crusader Kings 2 mod After the End. Also takes some inspiration from /u/theaidanman's map of a United States in the throes of civil war.
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Vexilollogy notes:
At the center of the Desmoinesinian flag lies the governor-emperor's dynastic shield, taken from the pre-WW3 flag of Des Moines, which was in turn inspired by the flags of Iowa and France, as well as by the bridges that crossed the Des Moines river. Above the Shield lies the Eagle of Iowa, a fixture in local folkore reputed to have deflected any and all nuclear weapons aimed towards Des Moines with its great wingspan. A number of post-millenarialist cults worship it as a semi-deific figure. Behind the shield lies the grey of the Imperial Highway, once known as I-80, that transverses the Empire of Des Moines from east to west.
Within the eagle lies the Imperial hexagon, representing the six sisters-- Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, and Dakota, the integral territories of the Empire of Des Moines, whose residents have equal standing to any Iowan, and representation in the Imperial Congress. Some also speculate that it represents the only hole in the Eagle's defense, which allowed hypersonic missiles to strike downtown Des Moines. A literal and figurative "black spot" in the history of Des Moines. The black background of the flag, contrasting against the bright colors of Iowa's flag, represent the great darkness that befell North America following World War 3, in which only Des Moines served as a beacon of hope.