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As someone who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, I find some images and reports coming out of the United States these days eerily familiar. But should anyone be looking forward to the disintegration of the US?
Rioting, tearing down of statues, senior officials openly defying the nation's chief executive...By the late 1980s the USSR was a declining superpower with inept leadership, torn apart by escalating internal contradictions and abjectly losing in the competition with another, much more successful, superpower. No wonder many in Russia are now asking the question if the US could meet the same fate as the USSR.
No longer a crackpot fantasyTo put the record straight, I don't believe the US disintegration is imminent or likely. On the contrary, America could emerge a reinvented and rejuvenated nation out of the current crisis. Nevertheless,
the scenario of US implosion has now definitely left the realm of the hypothetical. In 2008, I ridiculed a Russian political scientist, a KGB analyst in his former career, who prophesied a disintegration of the US into six pieces following a civil war triggered by mass immigration, economic decline, and moral
degradation. In 2016, when Donald Trump moved into the White House, I began to have second thoughts. By 2020, the idea of a US collapse no longer seems inconceivable.
Today it is not Russian, but rather American scholars who predict a rise of secessionism in the United States as
"the pandemic and protests have exposed the regional divides in the US." Some even argue that embracing the state secession movement should result in
"happier, less corrupt entities," confederated in a North American version of the
EU.
Comment: It seems the US' legacy of producing expensive junk continues in its projects with Japan: