Reinventing Collapse

One can of course overdo the parallels between the Soviet Union and the United States, and how the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than heralding the triumph of the United States's model, actually was the prologue to the collapse of high modernist states everywhere, including the United States. That's Dmitry Orlov's position, and it's a thought provoking one that just been echoed by a leading political analyst in Russia, who claims the U.S. is about to follow the exact same fate as did the Soviet Union:

US will collapse and break up, Russian analyst predicts

The United States will collapse under the burden of its financial crisis and fracture into six parts, a Russian political analyst has predicted.

By Tom Leonard in New York 

Last Updated: 10:58PM GMT 25 Nov 2008

Igor Panarin, a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian foreign affairs ministry, said the economic turmoil in the US had confirmed his long-held belief that the country was heading for extinction in its present form.

In an interview with the Russian newspaper Izvestia, he outlined how the US would divide along ethnic and cultural lines.

They are: the Pacific coast with its growing Chinese population; the increasingly Hispanic South; independence-minded Texas; the Atlantic Coast; a central state with a large Native American population; and the northern states where – he maintains – Canadian influence is strong.

Alaska could be claimed by Russia, he said, claiming that the region was "only granted on lease, after all".

Of course, writing such a line must give a Russian great schadenfreudeliche joy, but that doesn't make it true. The United States is a much more thoroughly integrated place than the Soviet Union was in the 1980s, and while a massive collapse and deglobalization of our economy is certainly possible, there aren't any centrifugal forces affecting the territorial integrity of the country. A race war or failed state is much more possible.