Bald Eagle Nation, the White House.
After nearly a year of grueling work, the aircraft carrier that had blocked the White House's entrance for eleven full months had finally been cut apart and hauled away piece by piece.
The engineering crew from Norfolk Shipyard had worked day and night with five heavy-duty cutting machines to remove the carrier's wreckage from the White House grounds completely.
The severed steel plates had been loaded onto ships and sent to a scrap-processing center on the East Coast. All that remained was an enormous crater, several deep gouges, and a stretch of lawn crushed out of shape.
But the pressure the Bald Eagle president had faced over the past few months went far beyond that.
Ever since that day, Bald Eagle Nation's credibility among its global allies had suffered an unprecedented blow.
This former superpower had been utterly humiliated at the doorstep of its own capital by a single man. Its carrier had been dismantled, its carrier-based aircraft destroyed, and its port smashed-
And the other side had deployed no army, no fighter jet, and no guided weapon. Just one man.
As a result, many allies around the world had grown equivocal and wavering. Several joint military exercises in Europe had been postponed, Asia-Pacific allies had shown a rare softening of language in joint statements, and several traditional allies in the Middle East had even begun bypassing the Bald Eagle to contact Rabbit Nation.
Over the past few months, the president had devoted almost all his energy to diplomatic and domestic political negotiations, trying to hold together an alliance chain that kept coming loose.
Having just finished a remote video conference on troop deployments along NATO's eastern flank, the president leaned back in his office chair and rubbed his temples, slowly pressing his fingers