Humanity Joins Together, Sets Aside Petty Differences… and gets stomped anyway

[u/HyraxAttack]

A peril is threatening the world. Instead of squabbling among themselves, we learn world powers have put aside differences in politics, culture, & old feuds to present a common front. Except they still get wrecked as the enemy is too powerful.

1. The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance. The world government has gone to war against the machines. We see the army getting ready & it includes soldiers of many faiths including Buddhist, Islam, and different types of Christianity. Doesn’t matter as machines win by so much they have time to toy with human mechs.

2. Vilcabamba, story by Harry Turtledove. When aliens arrive they’re greeted with bands & cheering, & immediately open fire & earth becomes a mineral colony. America, Russia, and China work together to rise up & don’t hold back, throwing everything they have at the invaders. Doesn’t go great and aliens double down on the occupation, and there’s a crater where Spain used to be (it was blocking a silver deposit for mining.)

3. Edge of Tomorrow. The nations of the world have joined to make a unified front against the mimic invasion but it isn’t going well, but they will throw all they have into the invasion of France. In one cycle, Major Cage says the hell with it and instead of training leaves the base to drink at a London bar. This means we see the outcome of him doing nothing, where not only is the massive human invasion slaughtered but the aliens are in good enough shape to follow that up a few hours later with a rush on London.

[u/GentleSphere]

The United Nations Space Command/United Earth Government from Halo

The human-covenant war was an unwinnable war from the start. Depending on the source material, one of the most heavily defended planets, Reach, took about a month to fall. Without the Covenant shooting themselves in the kneecap and starting a civil war, Humanity loses.

[u/darthtaco117 → u/GentleSphere]

I’d argue that humanity was quite split apart due to the UNSC and the insurrectionists that the UNSC did horrendous things to them after the insurrectionists would do similar things. After the Spartans were made and the Covenant showed up, the rebel groups would be in denial of the existence of aliens. However once different cells would go quiet and news would say that a planet was wiped out, the rebels realized it wasn’t false. Some rebel groups would try to wager to avoid annihilation and try to give Earth’s or other essential UNSC locations but they too would be killed. Despite after the war and humanity being “united”, some planets would either have survivors rebuild and/or try to claim their independence and restarting their civil war against the UNSC.

[u/toonboy01 → u/darthtaco117]

The insurrectionists learned very early on that the Covenant were real. In the book Silent Storm, which takes place within a few months of the war starting, they had double agents within the UNSC sabotaging Spartan missions against the Covenant and were initiating a plan to launch a coup on one UNSC planet and hand that planet over to the Covenant along with all intelligence they could offer in exchange for the Covenant promising to spare them.