I tried this topic a few years ago and it got derailed. This time I’m going to be a little more specific about the debate topic and hope the thread fares better.
How long will the United States last in its present form? By “present form” I mean maintaining roughly its current geographical boundaries and functioning as a sovereign democratic republic with the current Constitution as its basis. And when the United States comes to an end, will the mechanism be:
Absorbed into a larger political unit?
Fragmented into smaller regional powers?
Maintain its current boundaries under a different form of government?
The last one is a bit tricky. Rome retained the trappings of the Republic for centuries after Augustus became Emperor. But the power of the Senate was broken.
Here are some answers that I’d like people to avoid, mostly because they’re boring:
All human life will come to an end first.
The United States has already come to an end you just haven’t noticed.
The United States will endure for all time.
All things come to an end. Maybe it will take 10,000 years, but at some point the United States will exist only in history books.
I think the USA will lose significance in the world long before its geographical borders change. After a few hundred years without resentment toward the world dominating superpower, the rest of North America might be willing to enter a union similar to the E.U., which would probably last for a really, really long time afterwards.
oh, I thought you were talking about the area… I would say the end of the U.S. would be at the most far west of Alaska. But that’s not what you were referring to, is it…
If the U.S. establishes some sort of quasi-benevolent hegemony over the rest of the world, would that count?
It seems to me that within the next 50 years or so, somebody will develop AGI (artificial general intelligence). Whoever does so will be able to dominate the world. There is an excellent chance that the US will win this race.
My best guess is 80% the US does it, 10% it happens in Europe (or an English-speaking country outside of Europe), and 5% it happens in Israel.
If the US develops AGI first, we will be in a position to involve ourselves in other countries at an unprecedented level. Given our history, it seems likely that we will do so.
Only if it winds up changing the U.S. itself to the point that it’s unrecognizable as the democratic nation we live in today. Does the United States continue to function as a representative democracy with the rest of the nations as client states? Or does a dictator rule over the whole shebang with the current territory of the U.S. just one more province in the grand empire? Do people in the rest of the world get to vote for our leaders?
My guess is that we merge into some kind of union with others, and other people get votes, such as they are. The sovereignty and independence of the U.S. fades away much like the sovereignty and independence of U.S. states is fading away.
What makes you think others would want to merge into some kind of union with you?
Seriously. Canada has its deficit under control, we are paying down debt on a fiscal schedule, we don’t have the same short-term loan issues, we are huge in natural resources. I completely get it that the U.S. has been the major stabilizing force in the last 50 years, but that’s changing and you guys aren’t looking very well poised for the 21st century at present.
Yeah, that’s true of Canada today. We’re not talking about today, though, we’re talking about a hypothetical future in which global politics and economics have radically changed from the current status quo. I mean, the US isn’t particularly interested in entering into a union with Canada, either. It’s pretty unlikely that the situation in the US would change so drastically to make a union appealing to us, without also drastically changing the situation in Canada.
True enough. The times are always changing, but countries with a deficit under control and who are also rich in natural resources seem quite likely to outperform those on the flip side in the coming century. I can’t imagine that’s debatable.
The United States will collapse by the end of this century and very possibly by the middle of it, from uncontrolled immigration, economic mismanagement, ideological rigidity both left and right, and imperial overreach. It will look a lot like the Soviet collapse, only much bloodier.
Something called the United States may continue to exist for quite some time, but it will bear little resemblance to the nation we know.
You’re asking the wrong question. There will be a gradual move to a global economic order where Nationality is going to become less and less important to people until finally it’s not much different than knowing what state you’re from.
Answers like this always make these threads sort of silly. People make these bold predictions of, “It’ll take a few hundred years for XXX to happen”, when the Industrial Revolution was only 150 years ago, and the current world order wasn’t even fathomable around the time of my Grandmother’s birth before the Bolshevik Revolution.
Hint: NAFTA is a step toward being somewhat similar to the EU. In fact the US is the prototype for projects like the EU to exist.
Any prediction of 'It’ll take hundreds of years for a significant change in the world order.", shows a profound ignorance of the changes in the world order over the past few hundred years. A few hundred years ago the United States as a colony of England.
People REALLY REALLY REALLY need to read “A New World Order” by Anne Marie Slaughter. It’s a bit stuffy and academic, as it’s written by a Princeton Law Professor but it’s worthwhile. It talks about the increasing interconnectivity of government resources as world governments continue to share information with sister agencies in other nations, such as intelligence agencies, banking systems, customs agencies. The rise of the multinational corporation is what will make the state go down. The US isn’t falling behind other nations it is being outpaced by its own institutions. We still consider a company American even if it has employees all over the world, multinational stockholders, owns property in several companies and has a worldwide consumer base.
If more nations become Democracies America’s success will be its downfall, because what gives us our identity is the sense of being special, unique, the shining city on the hill. If we are just another nation among many it won’t matter as much. When the competing institutions in other nations rise to a comparable level to where it is equally stable to do business in many other nations, doing business mainly in the US won’t be as big of a draw. This won’t be a decline per se, as much as it will be a stratification of resources. We’re already seeing it now.
“Rise and Decline of the State” by Martin van Creveld is also a good one to read on the topic. It’s not so much that things decline or disappear as that they are overtaken by a different institution format. Roman Republic became Empire became Feudalism became Christendom became Competing Monarchies became the State became the European Union. So rather than the uber-tribe that we know of as the nation-state, we’ll live in distributed economic zones, with massive conglomerates straddling the boundaries.
This one of the interesting things about the current debate with Barack Obama running on a sort of nationalist ticket, asserting a populist sovereignty against global capitalism.
In the near term, consolidation of the US in some kind of EU-type partnership among the USA, Mexico and Canada currently seems more likely than a split within the US, but an NA union doesn’t seem that strong a bet either.
The main problem with forecasting an end to the United States is that this would most likely be a process that follows the ‘tipping point’ model: an accumulation of individual factors that have little apparent effect, until some combination causes a relatively sudden fracture in the system. It took decades, after all, before the factors that eventually ended in the Civil War came to a head.
I’m not smart enough to be able to accurately forecast the potential causes of a rupture, but I suppose important contributing factors could be a severe shortage of energy for power and transportation, widespread failure of food crops or supplies of meats, a very large-scale natural disaster of some sort (such as a major tsunami in the Atlantic or an eruption of the Yellowstone caldera), or politically some sort split fomented between the more extreme elements of ‘left’ and ‘right’, however that may be defined. I discount immigration as a significant factor because recent immigrants are widely spread across the country and there is not the slightest sign that any large number of recent immigrants has a particular interest in creating an independent state within current US borders. I discount external invasion because it would simply be too difficult logistically for any country with the manpower to mount a large-scale invasion anywhere outside of the land border areas.
Given the uncertainties involved, I can’t put a time frame to any split, except that it doesn’t seem at all likely in the next twenty years or so; but, just going on past histories of nations, there could very well be major changes by 200 years from now. Assuming the tipping point is reached one way or another, the natural geographic or social dividing points would seem to be something along the borders of the 13 original colonies, the traditional (Civil War Era) south plus perhaps the grain-belt states, Texas as an independent entity, maybe with New Mexico and/or Oklahoma, states from the Front Range of the Rockies to the CA/OR/WA borders, and California with or without the other Pacific Coast states.
Just my opinion, for whatever paltry amount it’s worth.
While the OP explicitly rules out any apocalyptic scenarios, I’ll throw global warming into the mix - not as a terminating event, but as a mitigating factor.
Personally, I think it’s possible that in the next 50 years if the primary sources of pollution - China, US, and Russia - do not curtail energy demands, and continue the current consumption trends, trade partners who do adhere to global emissions agreements might enact economic sanctions to force the issue. Think about it - there are a lot of countries who have signed the Kyoto Protocol and other emission-reducing agreements, yet are powerless to affect real change if the larger polluters do nothing. Why should they suffer the ills of global warming when they’re doing their part to stop it?
If support is widespread and fully enforced, it would send the economy into a tailspin, especially if China plays ball by capitulating to the complainants, cutting growth and emissions, and pulling out all their investment in US currency and T-Bills in order to reel in some cash. Give this 25 years or so to percolate, and add in the attendant global skirmishes that would occur, especially if Russia does what mother bear does best, which is to steadfastly and stubbornly defend herself from perceived threats to her complete autonomy.
In this scenario, I think it’s likely that the US would become a remote subordinate state to a larger union like the EU, or maybe (albeit less-likely) an Americas-based treaty organization. We would have our own government, some high degree of sovereignity (maybe even superficially resembling our current form of gov’t), but we would be economically and politically dependent upon a larger body.
Now, I don’t actually beleive this will happen - I think our current obstinate course of action in the face of global consensus is in part a short-term effect of the current administration, and am confident the next administration will actively work to reverse this trend (pleaseohpleaseohplease). But it seems a remotely plausible end-of-the-US scenario.
Of all the fates, I think reorganization of North America along the lines of The Nine Nations of North America is the most likely. Just like slavery temporarily divided the nation, some other social issues may do the same. We might see parts of the country split over gay marriage or abortion or minority religious rights or gun control. New England may decide it can no longer tolerate bans on gay marriage that southerners might insist on. Westerners may not be able to live with gun control measures that the Great Lakes region might push through Congress. Texans may not like the environmental measures and energy restrictions pushed by the Pacific Northwest. A president even more divisive than Bush may cause half of their country to want to wash their hands of him/her and part ways with the half that elected him.
When is anyone’s guess. Not in the lifetime of anyone reading this. Perhaps by 2100, perhaps longer.
I agree with this. The country is really split along the irrational, Jesus worshipping south and middle and a few pockets of rational thought in the NE and NW. I am frigging tired of being jerked around by the mouth-breather states who complain that taxes are too high, and then are net importers of Govt spending. If McCain is elected I’m likely to start a secession movement for Western Oregon. Western Washington can join if they want. The NE will have to fend for themselves becuase they are too far away. They may be able to extend as far as Minnesota and Wisconsin, those guys are OK too.
