Is America's pain Russia's gain?

Matt Drudge goes on to explain Prof. Panarin's reasoning for the alleged imminent collapse of America:

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.

The part about Chinese immigrants plotting to secede must be news to Seattleites, who are more familiar with the plot of the 1975 environmentalist novel Ecotopia, in which the Cascadia region (British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon and Northern California) secedes from the United States and Canada to form an ecological utopia. More recently, after 9/11, Seattle resident Robert Ferrigno penned a novel, Prayers for the Assassin, set in a future Pacific Northwest where the U.S. has lost the war against global jihadists and much of the population has been converted to radical Islam.

As for Texas, it's true that the Republic of Texas movement, which refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the handover of sovereignty to the Union in 1845, is still going strong among a handful of tax-evading adherents in West Texas. But Texans continue to serve in the American military in huge numbers, and the state is enjoying an influx of migrants and continued economic growth amidst the general U.S. recession.

Professor Panin may be right that the U.S. has overextended itself -- in financial, diplomatic, and military terms -- particularly in Russia's near abroad. But claiming that the U.S. is in imminent danger of collapse just like the USSR in the early 1990s is at best, a form of projection, and at worst, a spiteful statement based more on anti-Americanism than reality.

In spite of its recent economic resurgence, Russia remains in a steep demographic decline, with even President Medvedev hinting at anxiety in the Kremlin over whether the country will be able to retain sovereignty over the sparsely populated Far East by the late 21st century. Russia's demographic situation and the deep unpopularity of its army draft have left the government with no choice but to transition to a much smaller all-volunteer force as soon as possible. According to the Moscow Times, this means that as much as 80% of the general staff and officer corps could find be facing early retirement or layoffs in the next several years. Without a huge boost to the defense budget -- which will not happen in this economic environment -- Russia lacks the manpower to secure its borders, and will pose no serious conventional military threat to NATO.

All of this is relevant to U.S. national security because a weak, imploding Russia invites the threats of resurgent separatism, transnational crime, and Islamist radicalism in Central Asia. If anyone doubts this scenario, look at how quickly the decline of modern navies - U.S., European, and Russian - has invited the return of piracy and other lawless behavior on the high seas, from West Africa to the Phillipines. Ironically, only the expansion of the Indian and Chinese fleets -- an outcome many American neocons have long feared -- may stave off the threat to an increasingly ennervated and self-loathing West. Unlike say, the British navy, the Chinese and Indians don't seem overly concerned about captured pirates applying for political asylum or alleging maltreatment with lawsuits.

In spite of the popularized notion that emerging markets - led by Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRICs, were going to "decouple" from established markets in the U.S., Japan and Europe, they too, have experienced severe declines in their stock markets and economic slowdowns in 2008. Natural resource wealth may have provided Russia with some cushion against systematic economic shocks, in the form of the $500 billion Stabilization Fund, but even this bulwark has been eroded by the Kremlin's efforts to stabilize the ruble and prevent a painful surge in inflation. Russia still depends on European and Latin American imports for a huge share of its foodstuffs, as Russian agriculture recovers from decades of Soviet mismanagement and the neglect of the 1990s. Thus, a renewed bout of high inflation would hit the weakest and most vulnerable members of Russian society again, just as it did in 1998, compounding the country's demographic problems.

As then-President Vladimir Putin observed in his interview with Time magazine for the 2007 Person of the Year Award, the U.S. and Russia have frequently been rivals, but always seem to come together when their backs are pressed to the wall. Putin may have been referring to American and Soviet cooperation in defeating the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese in World War II, or the informal global alliance against the Taliban after 9/11, but he could easily be making the same argument now. Sniping over missile defense systems, U.S. embarassment over its support for Georgia's increasingly discredited President Mikheil Saakashvili, the controversy over proposed NATO expansion into Ukraine -- all seem suddenly irrelevant in the face of a prolonged economic crisis and serious provocations from terrorists and criminals. The U.S. and Russia quite sensibly need to bury the hatchet, and concentrate on common interests rather than engaging in a useless war of words.

Charles Ganske is the former editor of Russia Blog, the website of the Seattle-based Real Russia Project. The views expressed here are his own.