United States
Joel Garreau of the Washington Post reports on the Russian pundit Igor Panarin, who is forecasting that “the United States will break into six parts in June or July of 2010.”
He notes that
Panarin’s disintegration divination comes complete with a map. In it, Alaska goes to Russia. Hawaii goes to Japan or China. “The California Republic” — the West from Utah and Arizona to the Pacific — goes to China. “The Texas Republic” — the South from New Mexico to Florida — goes to Mexico. “Atlantic America” — the Northeast from Tennessee and South Carolina up to Maine — joins the European Union. And “The Central North-American Republic” — the Plains from Ohio to Montana — goes to Canada.
Garreau suggests that Russians may be happily projecting their own past experiences — or future worries — onto the US. And, in fact, Russia is more likely to lose parts than is the US.
Overall, the likelihood of secession in the US seems low. This is the FutureAtlas.com estimate:
And, as Garreau and others point out, Panarin’s divisions are oddly chosen. A more likely division might look something like this:
The most plausible fracture line is the “red-blue” one, as the largest font of true extremism in the US comes from the so-called “Christian right.” One can imagine a scenario in which the Republican Party or a Christan-right splinter of it can no longer win national elections, turns radical, and seeks a split, taking the South, the Great Plains, and the northern Rockies. (Or it might just involve the South, if the Republicans become a regional, Southern party.)
Overall, though, this is unlikely, as American national identity is strong, all parts of the country are somewhat ideologically mixed, and all but the most extreme evangelical Christians seem to understand the realities of living in pluralist, diverse America.
(Who knows what Alaska might do in this circumstance? It might stay in the US, join the red secession, or opt for independence. It would not revert to Russia however.)
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In a New York Times article by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, analysts say that Al Qaeda has lashed out at President-elect Obama in a new video because he “challenged its worldview,” with his multiracial, multicultural background.
Mazzetti and Shane wrote, “American antiterrorism officials and other experts dismissed the video as a desperate tactic by a terrorist group that suffered a defeat in the global war of ideas with Mr. Obama’s election.”
They quote Dr. Ronald Walters: ““You’re talking about someone who looks like the rest of the world, and that’s got to be threatening to them.”
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com and usable with attribution and link)
The October issue of Alaska Magazine covers the Alaska independence movement in all its gradations.
In “The Country of Alaska,” Rebecca Luczycki’s portrait suggests that serious secessionists are rare, and even many members of the Alaska Independence Party (the state’s third-largest) are really just libertarians. The founder of the party may have said, “I’m an Alaskan, not an American,” but many Alaskan “nationalists” seem to want more state-level control and less “interference” from the federal government.
Alaskan independence is very low-probability, not least because of the culture of dependence that has developed. Luczycki quotes Sara Chambers, a member of the Juneau city assembly: “Alaskans are not necessarily dedicated to freedom, but have become dedicated to free stuff.”
A group of American Indian activists has declared independence from the US.
The small group, claiming to be acting on behalf of the Lakota, will claim parts of South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming.
This is more a political stunt than a serious movement: genuine separatism is rare among American Indians, and their populations are too small and dispersed to create viable independent entities.
Only the Navajo and Hopi are partial exceptions in the lower 48 states; native peoples of Alaska, with large swaths of territory and, in some cases, oil wealth, might also be more likely candidates for independence movements.
Overall, the probability of a successful Native American succession movement is very low for the foreseeable future.
A Pew report released yesterday suggests that concerns about an end to assimilation are still misplaced.
The central fact:
The surveys show that fewer than one-in-four (23%) Latino immigrants report being able to speak English very well. However, fully 88% of their U.S.-born adult children report that they speak English very well. Among later generations of Hispanic adults, the figure rises to 94%.
Potential indicators of future instability for the United States have been in the news lately. They are all weak signals of future trouble, but each has at least a low probability of becoming significant, and they are also all potentially mutually reinforcing:
- Americans increasingly see themselves as divided between haves and have-nots, according to a new Pew study. Crucially, twice as many (34%) see themselves as have-nots than did 20 years ago, a significant departure from the American vision of a broadly middle-class society.
- Income inequality is increasing, and wealth is increasingly concentrated at the very top of the income pyramid, meaning that the elite can more easily disengage from the rest of society.
- At least in some local jurisdictions, Hispanics are feeling threatened by the anti-illegal immigration campaign now playing out (and the anti-immigrant sentiment that underlies it), and are uniting in the face of the threat. This drives exactly the kind of scenario of unified, estranged Hispanics that anti-immigrant groups fear.
- Actual secessionist groups, albeit fringe groups, met this month to discuss possible secession by both “red” and “blue” states.
Earlier this month Lee Kuan Yew, who effectively created the nation of Singapore based on his personal vision, suggested to the New York Times that the United States–unlike China–was not effectively preparing for the future in Asia:
One of his concerns now, Mr. Lee said, is that the United States has become so preoccupied with the Middle East that it is failing to look ahead and plan in this part of the world. “I think it’s a real drag slowing down adjusting to the new situation,” he said, describing what he called a lapse that worries Southeast Asian countries that count on Washington to balance the rising economic and diplomatic power of China. “Without this draining of energy, attention and resources for Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, there would have been deep thinking about the long-term trends — working out possible options that the U.S. could exercise to change the direction of long-term trends more in its favor,” Mr. Lee said. As the United States focuses on the Middle East, Mr. Lee said, the Chinese are busy refining their policies and building the foundations of more cooperative long-term relationships in Asia. “They are making strategic decisions on their relations with the region,” he said.
Mr. Lee also notes a pattern that suggests Singaporean cultural power vastly disproportionate to its small size: China’s ministers meet with Singapore’s twice a year “to learn from their experience,” and “50 mayors of Chinese cities visit every three months for courses in city management.”
Last week Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote that he would “bet on America” when forecasting the dominant world power of 50 years from now.
He recites the “declinist” case, but argues that
The evidence for our nation’s downward spiral isn’t sufficient to rule out the very opposite possibility: that the United States will become, in purely geopolitical terms, even stronger in coming decades. The mistake we make is not so much overestimating our problems, but underestimating the problems of our potential rivals.
Achenbach notes the weaknesses of potential rivals:
- China’s economy is currently much smaller than that of the US, and the country is beset by environmental problems. It’s population is aging rapidly, and it “will be the first country to get old before it gets rich.”
- Russia, Japan, and Germany also all face demographic decline; Russia is already shrinking.
- The European Union lacks a level of unity basic to an effective nation-state.
The US, meanwhile, has completely unrivaled military power.
Achenbach does suggest these caveats:
- The American “machine for wealth creation has also been a machine for income inequality;” “geopolitical dominance doesn’t guarantee that we’ll have a country we can be proud of.”
- “Globalization may make the nation-state increasingly irrelevant.”
- As Joseph Nye Jr. puts it, “by traditional measures of hard power …. the United States will remain number one, but being number one ain’t going be what it used to be.”
Achenbach is correct the the US has the strongest shot at remaining number one for decades.
European nations and Japan are under fundamental constraints. China–and India too, though it is unmentioned in this article–are both more likely to stumble or even melt down than is the United States.
But 50 years is a long time. By 2050, some models project the Chinese economy to be considerably larger than that of the United States. India may have caught up by then as well.
Power follows economics. For those sure of America’s perpetual ascendancy, consider a statement at the start of the 20th century by the First Lord of the Admiralty of a then-dominant Britain, as he observed economic trends: “The United Kingdom by itself will not be strong enough to hold its proper place alongside of the U.S., or Russia, and probably not Germany. We shall be thrust aside by sheer weight.” (Quoted in Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 229.)
The Washington Post today covered travel destinations threatened by climate change. They include:
- Glacier Bay, Alaska
- the reefs of Belize
- Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
- Scott’s hut, Antarctica
- the low-lying Maldives islands
- the Great Barrier Reef, Australia
- Arctic polar bears
- the glaciers of Glacier National Park, Montana
- the Outer Banks barrier islands, North Carolina
- Chan Chan archaeological site, Peru
The Washington Post yesterday reported on another example of sub-national governmental action on climate change (seen also at the state/province level).
Some 522 mayors representing 65 million Americans have signed a climate change agreement in the face of federal foot-dragging on the issue.
One driver: a third of Americans in an April poll now say that climate change is the world’s most serious environmental problem, double the number from 2006, the Post reports.
City-level action is particularly striking given that climate change is a global issue, beyond the reach of even national governments to manage on their own.