Russian Analyst: US will have civil war in 2009

The picture on left published in the Wall Street Journal on December 29, 2008 depicts how the U.S. may split apart following a civil war as according to the predictions of a Russian professor Igor Panarin.

Reaction of course in the commentariat is that Panarin is just ignorant of the United States. Although I was aware of the sensation he created earlier in the Russian media, the article in the Wall Street Journal was one the first times he was mentioned in the mainstream U.S. media. Now as expected, his views have created a stir and which prompted myself to do a little research on who Panarin is and how he came about with this scenario. In another article, Panarin claims, "The dollar is not secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse."

Lets look at some facts:

• Igor Panarin is a professor of political sciences and expert on the U.S. as well as Dean of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.
• Panarin cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd who in 1976 predicted, the fall of the Soviet Union, based on indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates. Likewise, Todd predicted a similar fate for the United states in 2001.
• Similar to Todd's use of demographic date to calculate his predictions, Panarin based his forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts (Russia's equivilent of the National Security Agency) which is used to predict economic, financial and demographic trends.

One must also keep in mind that Panarin himself gives his predictions a 55-45% chance of happening. If you read in one of my previous posts you will also find that his predictions are not far off from some analysts in the United States as well. Other analysts offer other scenarios: The U.S. could prevent its economic collapse by becoming a dictatorship. Standards of living would decrease but the government could use military force to keep the country together and perhaps even succeed with implementing a union with Canada and Mexico and just replace the failed currency with a new one. But this is a topic for another day and another post!