Gloom and Doom from Russia

Russian academic Igor Panarin is predicting that the United States will split up into several different nations in 2010, the Wall Street Journal reports today. The article states:

“There’s a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. “One could rejoice in that process,” he adds, poker-faced. “But if we’re talking reasonably, it’s not the best scenario — for Russia.” Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

Panarin’s prediction seems farfetched. The U.S. economy is nowhere near the depths of the Great Depression and there is no quarter-century “superbubble,” as left-wing philanthropist and financier George Soros self-servingly suggests. We are not living in Weimar Germany or in the Soviet Union circa 1988.

But there is at least a grain of truth to the concerns that Panarin raises. If the U.S. refuses to get government spending under control, scale back its commitments overseas, and deal with its ever-growing multi-trillion dollar unfunded liabilities, there will be added tension throughout the land as the economy and Americans’ standard of living fall into the abyss. It’s the kind of tension that could lead to widespread civil unrest and a breakdown in law and order.