MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media. [Prof. Panarin]
Igor Panarin
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."
Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.
A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.
"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.
Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."
Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.
Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.
The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."
In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.
"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."
At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.
"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.
Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.
For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.
The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.
If only these United States would break apart. The ensuing lawlessness would serve to slow down my trek. Why run if there are no marshalls following me? But then again it was never the lawman or his guns that frightened me, it was the sins of my past. So I guess regardless of the state of this country's laws, those glaring eyes will keep me movin'.
College professors call for the fall of the United States every day. The only difference with this story is that, typically, the professors doing so are in American universities.
I wouldn't put it on a timeframe for 2010, but Pat Buchanan has been predicting a similar fragmentation of the U.S. occurring more gradually over the next 3 decades.
He asserts, with statistical evidence, that Mexican immigration poses the greatest existential threat to the United States, as Mexican immigrants have been taught in their homeland schools that the U.S. "stole" the American Southwest (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada and Colorado). Their nationalist hostility toward the U.S., and retention of loyalty to their homeland over the U.S. ( in addition to having the lowest high school graduation rate, the highest crime rate, the highest ratio of gang membership, and the highest ratio of welfare use and imprisonment among nations immigrating to the U.S.) make them the least desireble immigrant group.
And that 58% of Mexicans polled think this land still belongs to them, and that former Mexican president Vicente Fox and his cabinet, and ongoing since that administration, are actively undermining U.S. sovereignty, encouraging dual citizenship, and encouraging both legal and illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S., to take the land back through sheer ethnic demographics. At some point, the U.S. Southwest will remain part of the U.S. only in name, and ethnically/culturally be overwhelmingly Mexican, and have nothing in common with the rest of the U.S. At which point they will be instrumental in leveraging us into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada (no more sovereign U.S.), or break off and merge with Mexico, or break off and become a separate ethnic-Mexican republic.
The Russian wet dream of taking back Alaska is highly unlikely. Russia is tied with Italy for having the lowest birth rate in Europe, somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2 births per woman average (about half of replacement population level, which means Russia's population will drop by half over the next 30 years).
And there are currently only about 6 million Russians in their Pacific coastal area (the Amur river region, bordering China, an area that is being inundated by Chinese immigrants that the Russians are powerless to stop). That 6 million Russians is expected to fall to 2 million over the next 30 years, and Russia will have its hands full just trying to keep Russia itself, let alone take Alaska. Immigrants will drift north into Russia from Khazakstan and other islamic former-Soviet states, just as Europe is being inundated from Africa and the Middle East. In addition to the Chinese moving north into regions further east, a demographic scenario the Russians call "Catastroika", where they will be overwhelmed by non-Russians.
Likewise, Europe is already being overtaken by Islamic immigration, as its European/Christian birthrate has fallen for the last 40 years, as muslim immigrants have been brought into Europe to fill the void of Europe's declining population.
These are not wild predictions on Buchanan's part, they have been statistically tracked as occurring for 40 years of declining European birthrates globally, and rampant third-world immigration into the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia, to fill the void. All that has to happen is for the trend to continue, as it has for the last 40 years, for this inundation of our culture to occur.
Regardless of what the Russian professor thinks, his nation is in an even more dire position than the U.S. Some of what he predicts seems like pure science fiction to me, but the ethnic fragmentation of the U.S. into 2 parts, at least, has some validity.
Significantly, Obama plans to trash the border fence, and further open us up to Mexican invasion.
In [former] Soviet Russia, the Professors call for death of other nations, not their own. What a country.
I can't quite identify your point in saying this.
If you mean that the Russians have a sense of self preservation for their nation, while we in liberal/multicultural America --suicidally-- do not, then I agree.
I was youtubing and came across this Pat Buchanan radio interview, with a lot of demographic information regarding the immigration crisis, its fragmenting of America along ethnic lines, liberal encouragement of non-assimilation and retaining other-than-American ethnic/cultural identity that deters assimilation, and how this crisis can be averted.
Again, while the Russian professor's predictions for 2010 are wildly speculative, some of the points he makes --about the danger to U.S. sovereignty and national unity-- have some considerable basis in fact. As Buchanan's listed demographics make clear, the U.S. has been demonstrably moving toward national fragmentation (along the same lines as the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Kosovo) for 30 years.
I've been doing some more digging and I found some more Pat Buchanan quotes. Anyway, it all reconfirms that the Mexicans are smuggling in weapons across the unprotected borders in their big hats. The liberals in power turn a blind eye, because to them it's only violence if the white man starts it. They think they can just sneak over and start some unlawful annexation called Aztlan. Might as well call it Beaner heaven with the way infrastructure is declining. He also says that the niggers might take some larger cities, but the white man will hopefully turn those cities into what the serbs did to Sarajevo or the Russians to Grozny.
Pat Buchanan is always right so heed his words. If we don't keep these liberals and minorities down, they'll think they are equal. Disgusting
broken! Again! 
