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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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I swear the US is fucked at this point. We're watching the collapse of the American empire in real-time. I expect a USSR style split in my lifetime, and a whole lot of upset rubes who thought that they could just pretend reality didn't exist and things would go well for them.
I just don't know which state(s) are going to split off first. Will it be the western states together, a handful of north eastern states, or will some bastard grouping of southern states decide they've had enough. Stay tuned!
We can't split up, all too interdependent. For example, I see people on here telling the red states to fuck off to themselves. Good luck eating food.
How about military presence? Trying to split down on that is a hard stop, not even thinkable. The federal government ain't going to allow it, no matter what.
Any Southerners wanting to try again are getting stomped far faster than last time. Even then, you got armed libs like me embedded in the countryside. And yes, it's worth my life to shoot "red shirts". (And that's easy for me to say. I'm older and understood my history classes.)
A third of vegetables grown in the US come from California and an even higher percentage of fruits and nuts.
Yep. Though until California can pull pure water from salt water, Utah will stop water from coming in. Though in Colorado, we’ll just block it off before it gets there as we battle out our own red vs blue. Fuckem.
Good luck growing anything after succeeding. It would severely limit California's access to the Colorado river and considering California is already in a water crisis being self sustainable wouldn't last very long
Eh I doubt Colorado would block water rights to CA. AZ and UT are kind of the wild cats. I would expect them all to just let it keep flowing because someone up stream of them could do the same. It’s kind of like having nukes and having alliances.
But is the same sort of thoughts when I lived in the Great Lakes area. It was thought to be a good area for dirty bombs and to pollute the hell out of it because it feeds the rest of the country’s water.
Was always told The Perry nuclear power plant was a target because of that
You're assuming that if they break apart, they wouldn't trade with each other anymore. That's not what happened with the USSR, and it's not what happened with Brexit, and it's not what would happen if the US split apart.
The federal government won't be able to do jack shit if California, Oregon(maybe not), and Washington decide to stop giving it money. Sending in the military wouldn't work, there's far too many conflicts of interest within the troops. People who were born there, or have family there, or friends.
Seceding from the union is illegal. They would just arrest the organizers in the state government and replace them with acceptable politicians to bring them back in line.
Seceding from the union is illegal, unless we all agree that this is going to happen.
But there's plenty of other geographical issues with this idea. It's hard to draw lines around liberal cities and conservative rural areas.
Ah yes, that's definitely stopped countries from breaking up before.
Yeah, it stopped the United States from breaking up before. What better case study than the exact same scenario. Just this time its a much much stronger union army against a much much poorer economic system for the seceding army.
Other countries would not supply the secessionists with any military equipment and they almost certainly wouldn't purchase any products from them either. International sanctions against the seceding states would end the "war" before it even began.
I think you fail to realize how big and important of a country the west coast of the US would be if it broke off. Countries wouldn't have an option on sanctions, because the headquarters of some pretty foundational companies are located there (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Netflix, etc.)
California, Oregon, Washington together could split off, and it would be the third largest economy in the world behind only the remaining US and China.
It wouldn't be as ugly as you assume, the rest of the country would kind of be forced to accept it. It would look far more like Brexit than the US civil war.
I recognize that, but even if they were to still somehow navigate the economic situation, the government officials would immediately be charged with sedition and a warrant would be issued for their arrest. They wouldn't be able to flee the country because any allied country would extradite them to the formal United States government. So the only other option would be to stay and forcefully defend their arrest. That brings in the national guard and any escalation would drive us toward a true civil war. MAYBE secession becomes so popular amongst the population that they also are willing to defend their secessionists political leaders with force, but I doubt it. Even in the event of it becoming a true civil war, the rest of the United States is absolutely massive. There'd be no way of defending against all of the avenues of attack. Air superiority would be established immediately by surrounding AFBs, mobile AA systems, and returning aircraft carriers. Naval blockade would prevent any foreign aid from reaching the West Coast. Lack of any real microchip processing plants would make the proliferation of modern arms impossible....
I just can't see any other outcome than those government leaders being arrested, replaced, then any secession being nullified and reversed by the newly installed government officials. Though if you are able to think of something, I'd be open to thinking of a potential rebuttal.
Its not going to be a couple of politicians doing it on their own. It would likely be a referendum with popular support from the citizens (again like Brexit)
The Federal government really has no recourse against "we aren't sending you money any more" they can't send in the military to make sure the money gets transferred. The military can't achieve that particular objective.
They could try to make an example of some key politicians, but with popular support for such a split that would likely lead to some bad outcomes for anyone who tried to enforce it.
They don't have any sort of legal method of replacing those people either. Anyone appointed from out of state would just promptly be ignored.
This isn't the same as a lot of situations where there would need to be hard borders right away that need to be defended or objectives that could be captured. There's no need for military anything. Not that military intervention would work very well anyways, far too many soldiers would refuse orders. You'd see a lot of people refusing, walking away, or even subverting. Those states make up something like 20% of the US population, and if you add in people who have friends or families there it's probably 30-40% of the military that wouldn't be okay with attacking anything.
Starving them out with a blockade? Lol, not happening. Besides, both Mexico and Canada (both massive food suppliers) have direct land connections to those states. The rest of the US is going to threaten those two countries if they send in food? No way either of them listens to that threat. The remaining US doesn't have as much global power as you'd think.
More than half of everything grown in this country goes to agriculture.
Go fucking vegan!
Do you mean livestock?
si papi
no, it doesn't.
You're right -- its even more!!
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
that's not the amount of food we make: that's land use. much of it is grazing land.
Thank you for sharing this link, that was really helpful to understand the big picture.
One of the problems I see is that distilling it down more granularly at a state level is you have a huge urban/rural divide. That’s something you just can’t draw a clean line around. You would see a much messier civil war because it’d be “cities against farms”, not just state against state. That’s just one of the many, many issues that would arise.
The divide isn't between states, though. It's more rural vs urban, and that doesn't divide up well into individual countries. Illinois and New York, for example, will still be a core liberal city dominating their conservative rural areas. Likewise, Texas will still be a few core liberal cities dominated by conservative rural areas. There's not a good way to break any of those cases up.
"Balkanization" is the word, in case you're wondering
I was aware, but most people are not familiar with it so I dumbed it down.
I've been thinking about this for a long time. I'm quite interested to see how the national debt gets divided up and how that influences things.
When the USSR broke apart, the Russians made an international agreement to pay back some of the debt. Pretty much entirely so that at least some creditors would have confidence enough to put more money in.
So probably something similar.
That's what I mean, the states would have to come to an agreement on what everyone's share is. I don't expect every state to agree to pay $680 billion.
No, likely the broken off piece(s) would each negotiate with potential creditors separately.