Zinsou personally knew more heads of state than anyone alive. He knew that the president was, if anything, underestimating the bloody tumult that would be unleashed were the truth of the Mobius Program ever to emerge. He pictured the prime ministers, presidents, premiers, party secretaries, emirs, and kings of a duped planet. The whole postwar entente would lay in tatters. Throughout the world’s trouble spots, scores of treaties and charters of conflict resolution would be falsified, invalidated, because their author would have been unmasked as an impostor—an American penetration agent. The peace treaty that Peter Novak negotiated in Cyprus? It would be shredded within hours, to mutual recriminations between the Turks and the Greeks. Each side would accuse the other of having known the truth all along; a pact that once seemed impartial would now be interpreted as subtly favoring the enemy. And elsewhere?

Your currency crisis in Malaysia? Terribly sorry, old chap. We did that. The little dip in the sterling seven years ago that caused the economy of Great Britain to lose a few points of GDP? Yes, our exploitation of that made a bad situation much, much worse. Awfully sorry, don’t know what we were thinking … .

An era of relative peace and prosperity would give way to one bereft of both. And what of the Liberty Foundation offices throughout the developing world and Eastern Europe—exposed now as an undercover American intelligence operation? Many cooperating governments would simply not survive the humiliation. Others, to maintain credibility among their citizens, would suspend all relations with the United States and designate the former ally as an adversary. American-owned businesses, even those unrelated to the Liberty Foundation, would be seized by governments, their assets frozen. World trade would be dealt a devastating blow. Meanwhile, the planet’s embittered and disaffected would, at last, have a casus belli; inchoate suspicions would find a catalyst. Among both official political parties and broader resistance movements, the revelations would provide a rallying cry against the American imperium. The semi-unified entity that was Europe would finally coalesce—around a new shared enemy, with a united Europe squaring off against the United States.

Who could defend it? Who would think to? Here was a country that had betrayed its closest and staunchest allies. A country that had secretly manipulated the levers of government across the planet. A country that would now incur the unmitigated wrath of billions. Even organizations that were dedicated to international cooperation would fall under suspicion. It would, very likely, spell the end of the United Nations, if not immediately, then in short order, in a tide of broadening rancor and suspicion.

And that would mean—what was the American expression?—a world of trouble.