a nutty (russian) professor stumbles into some (secession) truth?

From Doug Bandow at AntiWar.com...

Bandow focuses on the predictions of a Russian professor who has been predicting, for a decade, that the U.S. is going to fall apart in 2010-- and then uses that as a springboard to wrestle with secession....

Could America’s time be over? In fact, might not a Disunited States be better than the United States?

Prof. Panarin obviously is a bit of a nut....Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the US will break into six pieces – with Alaska reverting to Russian control." Indeed, he expects foreigners to take over everything else as well: California will go to China, Hawaii to China or Japan, the plains states and Midwest to Canada, the South to Mexico, and the Atlantic seaboard to the European Union....

Ironically, Panarin is Russian-- the recent baggage of which may explain his fertile imagination:

...the country which most recently found itself on the losing end of mass dissolution was Russia (which dominated the Soviet Union). The nation which most recently had to use force to prevent further secession was Russia (in Chechnya). And the state most dramatically shaken by the economic crisis was Russia (check oil prices, the stock market index, and the value of the Ruble these days)....

Still, the fact that Prof. Panarin is living in an alternative universe doesn’t mean that he is wrong in perceiving that the United States is not all that united. Why are Hawaii, Alaska, Texas, Michigan, and Massachusetts, along with everything else, stuck in the same nation? Even if they aren’t likely to break apart, maybe they should do so.

Secession gained a bad reputation in America from the Civil War, which actually was not a civil war, since the southern states were attempting to break away, not seize control of the central government. More important, the Southern cause was irrevocably tainted by the role of slavery...[The Civil War] was triumph of the centralized American state headquartered in Washington, DC...The destruction of slavery was a wonderful, unintended consequence of the war. But...

The United States is a wonderfully diverse country, and its outermost points – Hawaii, Alaska, California, Maine, and Florida – are among its most interesting parts. Yet much of today’s so-called culture war reflects attempts by different groups to dominate national policy. Where government is limited, individual rights are respected, and people are tolerant, a federal republic is much easier to maintain. But as power has been centralized in Washington, and a distant and largely unaccountable bureaucracy has asserted increasing control over ever more individual decisions, it becomes harder to share a political union with so many other people. (America’s foreign policy of almost unremitting militarism is one outgrowth of today’s centralization of power.)....

A simpler solution would be to return to America’s tradition of limited government and individual liberty – and the corresponding foreign policy of nonintervention....