

The same guy who predicted collapse of USSR, is predicting the collapse of U.S. - vaksel
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

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lionheart
As an American who was born in the USSR, I can confidently say that this
prediction is completely based on the typical Russian misunderstanding of the
culture of the United States.

He seems to think that the United States is exactly like the USSR in 1990,
which couldn't be further from the truth.

Just look at his map. Its hilarious.

The USSR was a conglomeration of formerly separate countries who were
culturally distinct, constantly bickered and fought. This was was mostly
because the USSR wasn't around long enough for people to forget what
independence for their country was like.

So yes, at the first sign of weakness of the central government each
previously independent country eagerly broke away. They even had their old
government systems to dredge up and fall back on when they wanted.

The 50 states, on the other hand, have never been separate countries (with one
or two minor exceptions).

The Texans, while they might complain about the Californians, do not consider
themselves a different ethnicity.

And the map's ideas of what countries will control what parts? Is he kidding
me?

How can China possibly control the west coast? Its insane. The language and
cultural barrier is insurmountable. And Mexico controlling Texas and the south
east? Are you kidding me?

This shows a complete ignorance of the cultural issues of the region.

~~~
jon_dahl
I'm involved with a business that does quite a lot of work in Russia and
neighboring countries (or did until credit markets collapsed there this fall).
What I've learned is that Russia fundamentally misunderstands the US, and the
US fundamentally misunderstands Russia.

Our biggest mistake is that we both project our own experiences on the other.
This article is a great example of this, as lionheart points out. In the other
direction, we were wrong in thinking that the most likely alternative in 1991
to Soviet communism was US-style democracy.

While this guy's ideas are laughable, I understand how they could spread. I
can imagine a similar book being written in the US about the Muslim world -
playing on our fears, outlining some crazy scenario for the Middle East with
no real basis in reality, and completely misunderstanding the differences
between Iran and Egypt, Palestine and Turkey, etc.

~~~
qw
I couldn't agree more. There are lots of Americans who thinks of Europe in the
same way as the US. Just because most of western Europe is in the EU and share
a continent, doesn't mean that you can say something about one country just
because you have visited another. And we're talking about Europe here. I can
only imagine the kinds of misconceptions we (both Europeans and Americans)
have about the Middle East

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larryfreeman
Actually, your title is not correct. Igor Panarin predicts the collapse of the
US. Emmanuel Todd predicted the collapse of the USSR in 1976. They are two
different people.

~~~
peakok
I'm French and I know Todd, the title sounds correct to me. Todd predicted the
collapse of USSR (when it was a minority position among intellectuals), and it
has been several years he is "predicting" the collapse of the U.S (way before
the current crisis). His main prediction is the collapse of the U.S dollar.

A very important thing to note is that he believes the U.S is gone as the sole
superpower. What he really means by collapse is about the same fate that
endured the British Empire.

~~~
jerf
Is anybody actually _predicting_ the US will remain the sole superpower for...
crud, I can't even come up with a decent time specification for this
question... 100 years?

Even assuming the US doesn't have anything called a "collapse", it's obvious
to anybody with eyes that there are a number of countries that will inevitably
grow to superpower status over time. This is normal, and arguably good, since
the alternative ("everybody stays poor") is probably bad. Singulatarians would
argue that tech is moving such that people, or at least small collections of
people (on the order of tens of people), may become "superpowers" by modern
standards.

Even the most optimistic predictions of continued US success don't have it
coming at the expense of other success, and the economic phenomenon that less
developed countries have much more low-hanging fruit, allowing them to grow to
modern standards much faster than the leaders, will not stop anytime soon.

Seems to me the question of whether the US will "collapse" is distinct from
the question of whether it will be the "sole superpower" across any timespan
past 10 or 20 years. (Slightly later edit: And the collapse of the US won't
make China a superpower, it will mean there simply isn't one for a while.
Superpower is ill-defined, but it definitely has something to do with being
able to project force around the world, and China can't do that yet, except
with nukes, and if that makes a superpower, than they are already there, along
with numerous others.)

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henning
Eh. The thing with predictions is that all you have to do is have tons of
people making predictions about every imaginable frightening, unlikely
scenario and some of them will eventually wind up coming true. Predicting that
a country in a recession will "collapse" is a pretty reasonable thing to do if
you're in the business of making wild predictions no one is going to call you
on if they turn out to be incorrect.

~~~
mixmax
Excellent point. This dynamic has also led to doomsday sayers such as Peter
Schiff being heralded as the genius that saw what noone else saw, when in
reality he might just have been lucky. There are probably 100 Peter Schiff's
out there whose predictions didn't hold up, and who we subsequently don't
herald as heroes.

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petercooper
The American people are too united by a love of their nation for this to
occur.

While Soviets often had a patriotic admiration of their country, it was often
framed in the sense of the USSR being better than someone else, rather than on
its own merits. Also, people were more locally pariotic: Russians were more
Russian and Ukrainians more Ukrainian than Soviet.

Do Americans strongly identify themselves by their home state? In my
experience (as an outsider) they do in a somewhat relaxed manner, but nowhere
near the extremes of their pride and hope in the United States of America as a
country. The strong inter-state migration also appears to support this.

~~~
ralph
Separate from the collective mind of Americans is the status of the US Dollar
as a "reserve currency", i.e. one that people are happy to hold in times of
trouble. If that goes then, given the USA is bankrupt, it'll be in trouble.
It's only because it's a reserve currency that the USA can afford to chuck
bills from helicopters; elsewhere, doing that has caused the currency to fall
dramatically, e.g. that idiot Gordon Brown in the UK.

China holds quite a few dollars and is wary of the USA's plans on trying to
spend its way out of this recession in case their value slumps. There's an
argument that all these rescue plans are just prolonging the inevitable, just
as the boom was stretched by Greenspan's actions making it a huge bust to
mirror the huge boom. What's needed is a hard crash in asset prices, houses,
stocks, commodities, etc., until buyers are convinced that a hard bottom has
been found. Then they'll be interested in buying again. And companies going to
the wall in that time is a good thing; it culls the weak.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction>

There's still worried talk of deflation. I think they're over concerned.
There's some things I must buy, even if they're a bit cheaper tomorrow, e.g.
food, and if my TV breaks, I'll replace it. By over-compensating for fear of
deflation, we're facing high double-digit inflation in a year or so.

Reminds me of that old matra: For deflation, hold cash. For inflation, hold
gold. For hyper-inflation, hold guns.

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thomasmallen
The WSJ is officially yellow journalism.

This map is a real trip. South Carolina splitting from Georgia? Mexico owning
New Mexico but not Arizona? If he's going to prop up ridiculous fantasies, at
least he could try harder.

What pains the the Russians to no end is that the very idea of the nation
state is disentigrating in the US, Europe, and South America. Only their
backward, so-called "democracy" and a handful of nations in east Asia take it
very seriously anymore, while the concept is used to pit regions against one
another in Africa (see the US interference in Ethiopia and Somalia for a good
case study). Make no mistake, "India vs. Pakistan" and "Iran vs. the Middle
East" are culture wars with borders providing the necessary tension.

~~~
dilap
Nah, it's not yellow journalism -- it's from the WSJ's middle column, a place
for quirky character profiles (which this story is) and human-interest
stories. Previous topics have included truck-driving competitions and the
wild-boar infestation of Berlin.

~~~
tokenadult
"Nah, it's not yellow journalism -- it's from the WSJ's middle column, a place
for quirky character profiles (which this story is) and human-interest
stories. Previous topics have included truck-driving competitions and the
wild-boar infestation of Berlin."

Good point. CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT. The article was published to start
interesting conversations like the one in this thread.

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vaksel
Although based on his "map"....I have no idea how anyone is taking him
seriously.

~~~
Prrometheus
Yeah, it looks pretty dumb.

On a somewhat related note, if we folded the federal government and signed a
free-trade and migration pact between the 50 states, would we miss anything?

~~~
Xichekolas
Well there are economies of scale when you only have to maintain one standing
army rather than 50 separate ones.

~~~
gaius
Actually, you only need 2, one for each coast. The Founding Fathers did not
approve of expeditionary warfare.

~~~
jerf
As much as I love me some Founding Fathers, when they lived, 40 minutes got
you a few miles away if you traveled with all available speed. Today, the
other side of the world is only 40 minutes away on a ballistic trajectory.
(And I'm not even counting information warfare where it's less than a second
away.)

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lampy
For some reason ex-Sovient Union population still thinks US is out to get
them.

I know because I grew up there and still talk to old friends.

Wake up, Cold War ended decades ago and we live in a global economy now. No
matter what you see in movies you don't know anything about this country. You
need to live here for at least, I would say, 3 years to understand it.

The article is silly.

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sdurkin
Texas alone would be more powerful than Mexico.

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jackowayed
I predicted that a tower I made out of toothpicks would collapse a few years
ago. And it did.

Now I'm predicting that the Empire State Building will collapse. I must be
right, I've done it before.

Even if he is the guy who predicted the USSR's collapse, that's meaningless
now.

Also, Mexico is nowhere near powerful enough to control/influence that much of
the US, so that part is clearly wrong.

The other parts are at least theoretically possible but still pretty unlikely.

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kwamenum86
The guy seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of "how stuff works" and
seems to have predicted a future similar to the fate suffered by the USSR
although the circumstances under which each was forged are completely
different.

I also like how he tries to deliver this theory as completely devoid of anti-
American sentiment.

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siong1987
Bullshit.

I don't think I need any reason to support my claim. Anyone who read the
article will know why.

~~~
jmtame
I like that he's asking you to accept a theory of his, but I want to hear both
sides. Preferably, with evidence that makes sense, not just preconceived
notions.

Nations have fallen to civil wars and dissolution before. I'm a little skeptic
to just think that we're vulnerable to that, but at the same time, we're not
invincible either. It would be silly to think that nothing bad could happen to
the US.

Right now, it's just speculation based on classified information that may or
may not be true.

~~~
baguasquirrel
We've been through a Great Depression before. Economic and social lines were
at least as strong then as they are now. At least we don't have Jim Crow laws
now. Now, we have two coasts that are considered urban, not one, so it's
actually somewhat less of an urban vs. rural divide (remember that whole
Manifest Destiny thing?).

As a nation, the U.S. is more uniform than it is then so any such theory would
have to explain how this is to our detriment, how an increase in similarity
can actually provoke serious infighting, because the psychology research shows
that people who are more similar tend to get along together in the long run.
More than that, we just elected a uniter, who seems to pick good advisors no
less.

So in all, I really want to see this classified information, because we've
been through pretty bad times before (that's pretty good evidence, yes?) and
this country didn't break up then.

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raphar
quote: _But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of
the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from
instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis._ EOQ

I agree that the article is more 'fun' than 'news', but is the WSJ implying in
the sentence above that USA has nothing to see with the mentioned issues?

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amirnathoo
"The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more
seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says,
and been right."

I was going to say that this is obviously rubbish and if the professor is
spouting it then it reflects very badly on his hypothesis. But then I thought
about what I would say if some journalist asked an insightful question like
'this is all rubbish and can't possibly be true, right?'

The most charitable way of looking at it is: maybe he was trying to remind
people how wide the bounds of possibility are and that ruling out the
prediction without examining his methods would be premature.

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rgrieselhuber
Wasn't this a Choose Your Own Adventure novel in the 80s?

~~~
zandorg
Or a Children's Film Foundation film?

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tokenadult
The New York Times on the Russian natural gas monopoly, Gazprom:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/business/worldbusiness/30g...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/business/worldbusiness/30gazprom.html)

"That Russia’s largest state-run energy company needs a bailout so soon after
oil hit record highs last summer is a telling postscript to a turbulent
period. Once the emblem of the pride and the menace of a resurgent Russia,
Gazprom has become a symbol of this oil state’s rapid economic decline."

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tokenadult
I think Russia will win the race to the bottom.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia>

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lallysingh
There's an old joke about economists predicting 11 of the last 3 recessions...
Should we do it now for nations failing?

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jmtame
"He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts,
he says."

How credible is his source?

~~~
kragen
Impossible to say, since he doesn't tell us who they are.

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bprater
Supposing this happened: what part of the country would you choose to live in?

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Allocator2008
Huey Newton predicted the collapse of the nation state long ago, since he
correctly foresaw that the global economy would become more important than
particular nations. I live in Texas now, but I may well move to California, in
light of all this. A China controlled California would be economically better
off I would think than a Mexico controlled Texas Republic. Nothing against
Mexico, but I am just thinking in which of these new Republics I can get iPods
at a reasonable cost.

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ahoyhere
Methinks somebody has spent too much time reading Shadowrun novelizations.

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joubert
It would be OK if Russia gets Alaska, as long as they take Palin too.

