I’d say a fascist regime caused by the ramifications of a collapsing economy. Large military + small economy = nothing good. Even then however, it wouldn’t necessarily be the “collapse of the US” anymore than the introduction of the Third Reich was the collapse of Germany. Although there is of course the possibility that the regime change becomes more permanent, such as the case with China. A situation such as the fall of the Roman Empire is highly unlikely in today’s globally connected society. It is still in everyone’s best interest (now) that the U.S survive. Whether that will be the case in the future and how the U.S chooses to survive, I don’t know.
As was foreshadowed by Der the consequence of the US collapsing could very well be the end of humanity. A few crazy, desperate people with their fingers on the buttons and this little 100k year experiment could easily be over.
The military and the two oceans would stop it, millions of civilians with guns would have nothing to do with it.
You are seriously underestimating the devastation a strategic nuclear exchange would cause. The survival or non-survival of the president and the line of succession would be largely irrelevant, and there would be no state governments or militaries left. Every military base and major population center in the country would be visited by at least one mushroom cloud. Those that survived would have wide spread famine, pestilence and fallout to look forward to; all of the transportation and communications infrastructure in the country would be gone. For example at the height of the cold war the US SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) planned for nuking 16,000 targets in the USSR and Eastern Europe in 1986. There’s a reason Mutual Assured Destruction and overkill are associated with nuclear warfare.
Hmm . . . as of 2010 Russia’s nuclear stockpile was about 10,000 strong which I guess would do quite a bit of damage. China’s stock is much smaller, but maybe I should move away from that Air Force Base to be safe . . .
So a mass nuking would be very effective at doing us in, but not very likely.
Problem with looking at the raw numbers of nukes is that only a fraction of those would actually hit key US targets. For instance, the Russians certainly still have a lot of nukes, but even leaving aside how many still work (both the rockets and the nukes themselves) they arent all targeted here. A large non-zero number are pointed at China, Europe and gods know where else (a bunch at US military installations located outside of the US). Of the ones targeted here, many are pointed at military targets, not civilian or distribution/infrastructure (this is moot in many cases, granted, when military installations are close to civilian targets).
It would be moot in an all out attack, of course…even if only 10% actually work and if even only half are targeted on the US, 500 nuclear bombs going off would still be enough to do us in, depending on where they hit. But short of a full on exchange, we might surviv as a county.
-XT
I think we need to define what we mean by “collapse” here. Even the Roman Empire didn’t so much “collapse” as slowly transform over a couple of centuries.
Really what we are talking about is the end of the United States of America as a single political and economic entity. To us, that seems extremely unlikely as we have a strong Federal government with an effective beurocracy and national infrastructure. In spite of all the “save American’s infrastructure” complaining, no one has a problem getting from any major location in the country to any other major location. And we have a pretty flexible and dynamic system of leadership succession and change.
For the US to collapse, one of two things would need to happen:
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Some event (war, meteor strike, zombie appocalypse, whatever) would need to litterally destroy most of the Federal government as well as disrupt communications, services and infrastructure throughout the country. With a lack of any sort of strong Federal government, cities and states would tend to take on more local significance. If enough time goes by, they may evolve into regional powers with each one claiming to be the “legitimate” national government. The short-lived TV series Jericho sort of dealt with this scenario.
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Some polarizing issue (ie slavery circa 1861) divides the country along geographic boundaries. Whether through violent civil war or peaceful succession, the United States of America would no longer be a political entity.
A third possibility is the absorbtion of the USA into a larger political entity. Like if it was decided for some reason that the USA, Canada and Mexico should just combine to form Normarica or something. Not really a “collapse” though.
JASON report on Impacts of Severe Space Weather on the Electric Grid. The worst case “Kappenman” scenario is probably unlikely, but even partial damage could result in rolling blackouts and localized power fluctuations and loss of service that could result in tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of economic impact.
However, I doubt even a complete loss of power would result in catastrophic collapse of the United States as a national entity. While FEMA may not be able to cope with even a regional catastrophe very effectively, the United States government apparatus and the military have the separate logistical and communications infrastructure to remain functional for months without external supply. Genuine collapse would require some catastrophic event that would disrupt the production and agricultural systems to the point that the United States could no longer be self-sufficient.
Between 1945 and 1949, Germany as a state (either whole or in parts) essentially did not exist in any national form. The reformulated (and post-1990, reunified) Germany is not any kind of continuation or convolution of the German Empire, Weimar Republic, or the Third Reich, e.g. the laws (other than traditional common law), governing personalities, and essential national identity is not continuous. A similar, although less robust claim could be made in regard to post-WWII Italy and Greece (although clearly the cultural and linguistic continuity exists).
Similarly, with Yugoslavia, while you may be able to make the argument that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is at least a geographic and cultural successor of the pre-WWII Kingdom of Yugoslavia and part of the so-called socio-economic “Yugo-sphere”, the successor “rump state” of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was not really acknowledged as a successor state, the subsequent breakup of individual nations with largely distinct political, cultural, and linguistic identities.
The historical state of Palestine was dissolved in 1948 with the Partition, and no real successor state that was generally recognized emerged for four decades, although there is some degree of social continuity in the Palestinian people and leadership. And can point to a number of nations in Africa, Central Asia, and the Pacific that have essentially disappeared in their extant form, albeit to be replaced by new convolutions of national authority.
The Soviet Union is actually an interesting counterexample, as while the Union (as controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) collapsed with undisputed completeness, the individual autonomous (or pseudo-autonomous) states comprising its members remained, many of which (or direct successors thereof) were governed by the same people and maintained or recovered past national identity. The collapse of the Soviet Union is probably better compared to the dissolution of the British Empire, and is not really a good example, especially as the Soviet republics and client states never really enjoyed any kind of Soviet national identity.
However, if the United States were to fragment into individual states, none of which embrace the essential principles of the United States, I would consider that to be collapse. I think the likelihood of this due to any man-made catastrophe (including a limit nuclear exchange, economic depression, or political swings) is unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Stranger
I think the US will go the way of the Roman Empire, a long slow decline, punctuated by several reversals and renaissances. A decline of power at the center leads to new and eventually autonomous power centers. The United States will be in many ways long after it has gone be remembered in N America like Rome is for Europe; like Rome the US is the first civilised, settled and hegemonic entity in N America.
Nukes don’t have to be pointed at only one target though. Even at their current arsenal sizes the US and Russian are more than capable of destroying each other with plenty of margin of error. There’s no telling what the future is going to bring either, it’s not impossible that another cold war-esque arms race awaits us 40 years from now; and as Winston Churchill commented on the arms race early on in the Cold War, “If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”
Or maybe the United States will end the same way the Chinese Empire did–by muddling through for thousands of years. We could argue that The People’s Republic of China of today isn’t the same national entity as Qin dyanasty state, or the Han, or the Song, or the Ming, or the Qing. Or maybe it is. Governments have rose and fell, foreigners have invaded and conquered and been absorbed or expelled, various crazy ideas have been embraced as national organizing ideas. China has been through several collapses as complete as the demographic and economic and political collapse of the Roman Empire, the difference is that successor states arose that re-unified the country. While the Eastern Empire got back some of the Western territory, it never reunified the empire, and was eventually completely extinguished in 1453.
This is why I complain about the idea of “collapse”. The Roman empire covered Europe and the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, then collapsed (except in the East), and 1500 years later we’re still talking about it. But the collapse of the Roman empire isn’t a very good model for the sorts of troubles that modern states find themselves in. No modern state has collapsed the same way as the Roman Empire did. Yes, plenty of states and empires have ceased to exist, plenty of states have been conquered and lost their independence temporarily or permanently, plenty of states have had economic dislocation, plenty of states have lost provinces or colonies to indepence or to conquest, plenty of states have had one ruling class replaced by another ruling class, plenty of states have changed their system of government. But no states have collapsed in such a way that the fall of the Roman Empire makes a useful comparison.
If we want to think about how future troubles will effect the United States, the fall of the Roman Empire shouldn’t be the first thing we want to think about. How about the collapse of France in 1938, the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the collapse of the British Empire, the collapse of Nationalist China in the 40s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the collapse of Czeckoslovakia, the collapse of Iraq. To a person living through those disasters, how many of them were usefully thinking, “Well, it’s 476 all over again!”?
France collapsed in 1938?
I think your “end of the United States of America as a single political and economic entity” works well.
I should have said 1940. Sorry.
I think massive EMP discharge (say, from high-altitude nuke) that fried all of our modern electronics would mess things up pretty badly. There would be (at least) tens of thousands of deaths as a result, if not many many more. Having modern cities and suburbs that rely on continuous electrical power for their minute-to-minute survival suddenly be thrown back into the early Federal period would be bad, to say the least. Yes, we had a government that functioned across hundreds of miles back then, but much less was expected of it. More importantly, though, I just can’t imagine we’d survive the initial shock intact, even if the government figured out how to operate with ponies and sealed letters. That first day/month/year would be ROUGH.
(Of course, such an attack is highly unlikely, but I think that’s the sort of thing you’d need to dissolve the US.)
We would survive the initial shock just fine. During the Northeast blackout of 2003 I was in NYC. It’s not like as soon as the lights go off, people picked up trash cans and toss them through store windows. Mostly people just walked home and hung out in their neighborhood bar as they sold off all their perishables. It lasted like that for several days.
The problem is when it becomes a sustained condition. After several weeks of people not being able to get to work or even do their work since 90% of us work with computers or other electricity powered equipment. Food and medicine not being able to get to where it needs to go. Lack of communications. So on and so forth.
The thing is, while an EMP pulse, while disasterous, would not create a permenant state of living in the dark ages. Not all electronics would be affected the same. Many could be repaired. I imagine rudimentary services could be restored in a couple of weeks.
A lot of it depends on the circumstances surrounding such a disaster and the consequences after. But I don’t think a few months of living in darkness would disolve the US.
Hasn’t representative democracy already gone?
Who do Senators and Congress people represent - you?
First of all, Republican tax cuts caused the debt problem. Until the presidency of Ronald Reagan the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product was being paid down. President Clinton left office with a budget surplus.
Second, Japan has the second highest public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product in the world.
No one seriously thinks Japan is about to collapse.
It is worth adding that the Scandinavian Social Democracies have lower public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product than the United States.
I can easily see a scenario of the fall of the United States, similar to the fall of the Soviet Union. It would result in the division of the United States into two or more mutually hostile countries.
First, there would be a double dip recession leading to double digit unemployment, and perhaps double digit inflation.
Second, President Obama would be assassinated. This could lead to open celebrations by whites in red parts of the country, followed by black ghetto riots more serious by several orders of magnitude than what followed the assassination of Martin Luther King.
:rolleyes:
Government communications would continue to function just fine after a single high altitude nuke by using military channels which are hardened against EMP; see Electromagnetic shielding and Faraday cage. The real problem would come from the thousands of nukes that would likely be accompanying that one high altitude blast.