Russian nut-job predicts Balkanization of U.S.

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Russian academic Igor Panarin predicts the U.S. will break up amid economic crisis and civil war in the next two years.

Panarikn, 50, is a former KGB analyst, and is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats.

"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.

Panarin believes mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war this 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.

"Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Panarin's theories are absurd.

Panarin's résumé includes many years in the KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. He says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."

In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.

"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."

At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.

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 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.

"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.

Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.

Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.

For Panarin, Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.

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. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Panarin.

It's stunning that this clown is being taken seriously by anyone. His perceptions of the U.S. are obviously colored by the wildly disparate cultures that were strongarmed into submission under the Soviet yoke. If he had spent much time in the U.S., he would know that the ancient tribal rivalries and hatreds that emerged when the U.S.S.R. disintegrated simply don't exist in the U.S.

The Soviet Union, his model for this scenario, existed just 69 years - from 1922 to 1991. The United States has been around, constantly reinventing itself, for 232 years - more than three times the lifespan of the fatally flawed Soviet system. We are united by a common history, language, customs and traditions. No such commonalities were shared among the subject states of the U.S.S.R.

And the idea that the various regional "republics" would submit to rule by Russia, Mexico, China, Japan, or Canada is absolute lunacy.