This morning Andrew Osborn at WSJ gives Igor Panarin substantially more attention than he deserves. I’ve seen Panarin quoted in various Russian news media over the last several years—he’s been predicting for about a decade that the U. S. would disintegrate in 2010.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls “The Californian Republic,” and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of “The Texas Republic,” a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an “Atlantic America” that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls “The Central North American Republic.” Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
The map above is a rendering of Panarin’s prediction. Do you think that Idaho and Utah will federate with California? Really? Or that the upper Midwest will fall under Canadian sway? Note that the population of Illinois alone is half that of all of Canada.
Panarin isn’t an America specialist. He’s an information war specialist and I can see that the Soviet Union’s grand tradition of disinformation is alive and well and living in Mother Russia. More than anything else Panarin’s theories demonstrate that Russians who aren’t America specialists’ ideas about America aren’t any better than most Americans who aren’t Russia specialists’ notions about Russia. There is one important kernel in the article, however, that bears considering: Russia is even more anti-American, if anything, than the old Soviet Union was.
Meanwhile, residents of the upper Midwest, rejoice! Things could be much worse than they are: you could be citizens of a country whose primary city was Chicago.
