Russian Scholar Predicts The USA Will End In 2010

We have earlier blogged about Igar Panarin, a respected Russian scholar, who has been saying that just as the collapse of communism resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the current collapse of capitalism will mean the dissolution of the United States. Here is his latest:

If you’re inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn’t mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.

Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry’s school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia’s state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.

“There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010,” Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy—a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The Associated Press and other foreign media to attend. . . .

He said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other “social and cultural phenomena” led him to nail down a specific timeframe for “The End”—when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.

Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington’s bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

“I was there recently and things are far from good,” he said. “What’s happened is the collapse of the American dream.”

Martial law THIS YEAR? The dissolution of the country NEXT YEAR? I think he is indulging in projection and wishful thinking, assuming that the American union is no different qualitatively from the Soviet union. But I wonder what the end of America would look like. Surely not what he says, with Mexico taking the Southwest, the North joining Canada, China taking the West Coast, etc. But what would it be like if America–like other great nations–would someday cease to exist? Reversion to state and local governments, or a massive Empire that repudiates the Constitution?