Suppose the 50 States (plus D.C., Puerto Rico, and whatever else the U.S. claims sovereignty over) magically split into separate entities overnight and left to their own devices.
Which states would survive? Which states would get taken over by their neighbors?
Try to substantiate your answer with cites whenever possible.
(Mods, if you feel this is better in another board, feel free to move it.)
Japanese would take over Hawaii IF all the US Military were pulled out. If not, I think it would be pretty much the same and the native Hawaiians would still be protesting.
California would prosper more than any of the other states. We are, by ourselves, the 5th largest economy on the planet. Oregon would be quickly annexed and stripped for its resources. Nevada would be next, as a buffer against those maniacal Mormons. We would have to come to an agreement with Arizona over water usage, but a couple of nukes would take them out no problem. 
And we wouldn’t want to lose Vegas. It’s practically a second home to many Californians.
Exactly!
Always with the negative vibes, man. Can’t we all just get along?
Oh, yeah. We also grow a lot of weed.
Awesome idea, but that would only happen if someone executed all the politicians in Sacramento. You know, the ones that can’t get a budget in on time, and are to busy naming an official State Dirt to actually do things that need to get done?
Heinlein’s ‘Friday’ posited something like this.
But the one in there I agreed with most was the formation of a ‘Chicago Imperium’. Remove the federal government and God help Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and for sure St. Louis.
I would suspect that Utah would start trying to annex land to form a Greater Deseret. Eastern Idaho would be added at a minimum, and I suspect that northern Arizona, much of the “empty quarter” of Nevada, western Colorado, and any other bordering area with a substantial Mormon population would be added, or, at least, by attempted to added.
As for those commenting on California: The north has a substantial piece of leverage over the South, so I’d be careful about approach.
The Navajo Reservation in the Four Corners area might attempt to reclaim sovereignty if the Federal Government collapsed, but I’m not sure how they’d handle the Hopi.
I would also suspect that there would be people trying to consolidate New England and the former Confederacy in case the Federal Government ended, but this is both speculative and with no idea about the level of success.
See? I warned you about those Mormons!
As for the NorCal wussies…we give them all of Oregon to play with. That keeps them busy hugging trees and kissing owls while we jack all the water. As for the State Assembly…without the Feds to intervene, the Governator will make short work of those who stand in the way of the California Empire!
There have been a several books written which assert the US is 6, or 8, or 10, distinct cultural regions and it should be reorganized so state boundaries track the cultural boundaries.
If true, that would describe one force which would cause the 50 states to reform into fewer, larger, but novel, structures.
Unlike Europe, a lot of US states are not really equipped to be countries. They have too much dependency on neighboring states for various economic categories. If for example, all the states around Iowa closed their borders, the Iowan’s economy would crash amongst vast areas of cows & corn when all the petroleum ran out 3 days later. Then the cows begin to starve & the corn is only edible at harvest time.
And so it goes.
The largest most diversified states would be the winners. If everybody got antsy to close borders to keep Them out, the smaller less diversified states quickly turn into Bosnias. The idea of “taking over” a neighbor has a lot of appeal to megalomaniacal politicians, but doesn’t do much for the common man in the victor’s state, much less the loser’s state.
How would California really be better after it took over Arizona & had to continue to fight all the Minutemen rebels that would surely appear? Better to leave the AZ folks to sizzle in the heat.
Are nukes stored in all US states? What about air bases, naval bases and the like? My guess would be they’re not distributed equally across the states, and my guess is also that those states that were first in line when they were distributing the nukes and the bases and the military-industrial complex sites would come out on top.
This doesn’t make any sense: Bosnia turned into a proverbial Bosnia because it was the most, not the least diversified part of Yugoslavia. That said, it looks to me that Americans are too similar in their social identities for any political conflict to start right off the bat - it would take one or two generations for such antagonism to grow.
Probably a poor choice of example. I intended to refer to an area too small to be economically or politically viable such that the locals quickly turned to simply fighting one another (probably along ethnic /cultural lines) for the few remaining scraps, quickly returning the place to little more than subsistence agriculture.
Perhaps South Ossetia or Abkhazia would have been better examples.
I didn’t say we should take over Arizona, just make sure they didn’t interfere with our water supply. Why would we want to take them over? There’s no there there. Besides, without the Imperial Valley and the rest of Californias agriculture, Arizona starves.
I for one welcome our new North Dakota overlords.
Svejk, I should point out that the link leads to a satirical website. However, the statistic they use is, as far as I can tell, accurate.
“South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” - James L. Petigru
Some additional comments:
I suspect that there would be a fight for Oregon between California and Washington.
Washington would probably annex the Idaho Panhandle if Utah annexes eastern Idaho.
Texas would either break into pieces or engage in annexations, with southeastern New Mexico as the most likely annex.
I think that the area stretching from West Virginia to western North Carolina might try to form its own country, but I’m not sure that it would last.
Perhaps Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania will join forces as the New Amish Republic.