The decline of the Roman empire was a wild thing for the people actually living on the ground. Imagine you’re living in Alaska. You were born there and have never considered yourself anything but American. Your home is, as far as you’re concerned, completely inseparable from America and as American as any other part of the country.
One day you see an emergency press conference on the TV. It’s a press conference by governor. They’re announcing that they just received word from Washington. The message said:
“We’re sorry we have to do this. But the federal government just can no longer maintain our presence in Alaska. The country just can’t afford it anymore. The national finances are exhausted and the nation must consolidate down to focus on its core territories. You will no longer be federally taxed, all federal troops will be withdrawn from the state, no federal dollars will be spent on the state, and Alaska will no longer receive representation in Congress. Existing US citizens in Alaska will retain their citizenship, but new children born in Alaska will be subject to the same citizenship rules as those born to American expatriates living overseas. We are granting Alaska full independence. We wish you the best. Good luck. But you are on your own.”
Imagine what it would be like to be a resident of Alaska and to hear that message. How do you even respond to that? Do you stay in the US, leave Alaska, and move to the lower 48? Do you try to stick it out in the newly independent Alaskan nation? Can Alaska even survive as an independent nation?
In the modern world, we’re not used to national governments just packing up and leaving a state or province. Governments work so hard to suppress even the possibility of revolt that the idea of one just abandoning a state or territory is a strange concept. But historically this does happen with declining empires. It really wouldn’t even be that crazy of a move for a declining US. Alaska is a part of the US, but it isn’t a core territory. The lower 48 is really the core of the United States. Territories beyond this are mostly money sinks useful for either resource extraction or power projection. Nice things to have, but not the US’s core population and economic centers. I can foresee future scenarios where the US eventually just walks away from places like Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other territories not contiguous with the US mainland. No empire lasts forever, and collapse tends to move from the periphery inward. On the ground in the periphery, this looks like the national government just announcing you’re no longer part of the country.
You don’t have to look back that far. Austria 1918 was pretty much that, except that not a region on the edge was lost but the capital Vienna lost most of the hinterland with the remaining rump state not considered viable. One of the largest cities on earth, at the time, went from exponential growth into decline. Population size still has not recovered, 100 years later.
This is a good analogy. But Austrian part of the monarchy completley disintegrated, not just parts around Vienna. If we map that onto modern USA it would be like them scaling back to original 13 colonies.
By hinterland I was thinking really about the entire monarchy but especially the Austrian half. Much of the Austrian core realms remained but that wasn’t all that much to begin with. The 13 colonies would be an analogy, however they’d be much more viable than post WWI Austria.
Yes. But we’re talking about a scenario where the US is collapsing like every other empire before it has. Rome would have liked to keep hold of England, but they just couldn’t afford it anymore. Alaska is a nice thing to have strategically, but it’s not a core engine of the US economy or one of it’s major population centers. It doesn’t pay for itself. When empires decline, these far flung “nice to have” territories are the first to go.
I think the US annexes parts of BC and Yukon to make a land bridge to Alaska before it gives it up. I’d see it giving up on rural parts of Pennsylvania, all of WV, and Illinois first. I know there’s no mechanism for a state to secede, but what about splitting into parts and only one part keeps the state name/legal status, and the other part just becomes a landlocked entity that has to pay a protection racket but gets $0.00 in federal funding back?
Alaska with its oil, refineries, and spots to park radars make it too nice of a place to hold onto. If in some misguided attempt to Own the Libs or whatever the US did split off Alaska, then whenever someone got up there from CONUS again they’d find English as a third language, if it all, with Mandarin second and whatever native tongue as the first language.
Starting a war with Canada would just accelerate the collapse, kind like Russia invading Ukraine is doing.
Further, a land-bridge to Alaska actually adds to the problem that it costs as lot more money to maintain a military and administrative presence there than the money it generates because now you have to ALSO maintain a strong military presence in BC and Yukon all the while the locals are trying to fuck you up and the rest of Canada is engaged in guerrilla warfare not only there but also against the US presence in Alaska.
Even at best the US would be militarilly bogged down for DECADES in an Occupation of part of a country whose people look exactly like Americans and speak the same language whilst being extremelly pissed off, in a area with incredibly porous borders, borders which such action would have just extended to be far bigger and crossing even more far out and wilder land, all for the sake of a piece of land that even before such an extension and the necessary military occupation to hold it against the enemy next door thus created, did not actually pay enough for its upkeep.
Even more entertaining, whatever natural resource extraction that could be done to pay for it, can already be done since the Alaska is US territory (so there must be good reasons for that not to happen), only under such a scenario it and any transport links for whatever it extracted would be the target of Canadian drones, which it is not now.
Starting a war with Canada would just accelerate the collapse
you have to ALSO maintain a strong military presence in BC and Yukon all the while the locals are trying to fuck you up and the rest of Canada is engaged in guerrilla warfare not only there but also against the US presence in Alaska
the US would be militarilly bogged down for DECADES
I agree with you, but I would wager that Canada’s participation in the F-35 program has more to do with not having the land bridge than your points. We’re already doing our version of “little green men” in Greenlands, so it’s hard to use history or what makes fiscal sense as a guide.
I’m on team No Land Bridge, but I also see the US never giving up Alaska.
The thing with collapsing empires is that it’s not really a choice. You can print all the money you want, your economy only has so much productive potential. The core problem empires encounter is they build their economies and political system based on growth. Rome for example built a slave empire and military machine off the spoils of war. They used the proceeds from one war to fund the next. The slaves captured in one conquest provided the surplus disposable labor to grow the economy to fund further conquest. And its political system was never properly designed to govern such a large area with any degree of stability. The wealth of empire allowed the political instability to be bandaged for a time. But nothing can grow forever. And when an empire fundamentally built and sustained by growth reaches the limits of its growth? It doesn’t just stabilize and level off. Growth was the only thing keeping the whole house of cards stable. Once growth stops, collapse begins.
The problem with collapse is that it works in just the opposite form of imperial expansion. As the economy falters, military spending has to decline. A larger share of the budget could go to the military, but that has to be funded by taxes, spending cuts, or more inflation. These just add to the political instability and shrink the economy further. The needs for the military can be reduced by withdrawing troops from distant theaters, but then those areas become more vulnerable to enemies. As collapse continues, you have to give up territories or lose them to rebellion or conquest. You can neglect your periphery, not invest in it, and lightly defend it, but that just makes those regions likely to rebel. As you lose territories, your economic potential shrinks even further. This collapse snowballs until the whole system disappears entirely, or the empire collapses down to its heartland. That core territory, the one that originally expanded outward to conquer a vast empire, can then stabilize and remain as normal nation.
The US has been on a continuous expansion phase since its founding. Up until WW2 or so that meant actual territorial expansion. After WW2, the expansion has been in the form of an expanding trade empire and an ever-expanding overseas military presence. And up until the last generation or so, that growth served to paper over a lot of the internal contradictions and instability inside the US. The US was pretty unique in its founding in that it was founded through a revolution, but only a political revolution, not an economic one. The leaders of the American Revolution were American merchants and Southern nobles that wanted to kick the king out, seize political control, but keep the existing economic system the same. Contrast this to the French Revolution and most subsequent ones that featured extensive political and economic issues.
The US’s political system has a lot of bugs that cannot be easily patched. The presidency had built-in dictatorial potential from the start. The Constitution is designed to be deliberately difficult to amend. The Supreme Court is poorly designed. There’s no proportional representation, the House and Senate both favor land over population, and on and on. We’ve been trying to patch the system as best we can with amendments and reform laws. But the political system is clearly in decline. The original concept of checks and balances is completely broken. Congress has completely lost the power to declare war. The Supreme Court has become openly corrupt. And the oligarchs have completely subjugated the government to serve their narrow self-interest.
Personally, I don’t see how this ever recovers. The Rubicon has been crossed to many times. It’s clear that when the president violates the law or a court ruling, there’s no real enforcement mechanism to stop them. The Founders fundamentally did not design or Constitution’s structure with political parties in mind.
Our system’s failures were present from the beginning, but growth can paper over a lot of failures. In the 19th century, giving away free land out West was a social pressure release valve. People who got tired of living under the low pay and high rents of the industrial cities back East could vote with their feet and go start a farm out West. In the 20th century, the automobile suburbs and the post war boom created a middle class that served to stabilize national politics. In the 90s and the era of globalization and the expanding US trade empire allowed cheap goods to flood into the country, buoying the lifestyles of that same middle class. (Those fortunate enough to not be in the Rust belt.) And rising home prices over the last 40 years have served to further reinforce that politically stabilizing middle class.
But it can’t go on forever. The US trade empire has hit its limits. Rising home prices helped the older generations, but in turn they made housing prices unaffordable for people starting out. And as a result the birth rate has tanked. For the first time in American history, subsequent generations are poorer than their parents. Real standards of living for most of the population are declining.
This is what collapse looks like. An empire built on growth is only stable while it’s growing. You cannot just stop growth at some point, level off, and stabilize. When growth hits its inevitable limits, the growth process starts working in reverse. The same snowballing process that enabled the empire to grow starts rolling backwards.
This is collapse. Every empire that has ever existed has gone through this expansion and collapse cycle. The US will be no exception. And this is only looking at it from the classic imperial political and economic lens. We haven’t even touched on environmental deterioration and the effects of a collapsing climate.
A land bridge wouldn’t really help with the finances. There’s already a few roads that go all the way up to Alaska. Most things going from the lower 48 to Alaska still are shipped by sea or air.
It’s not the fact that Alaska isn’t contiguous with the US that is the problem. The problem is that Alaska is very far from the US’s core population and economic centers, and Alaska itself has little population, and most of its land has extremely low economic value. Adding more low-productivity territory between Alaska and the US won’t change that equation. (Vancouver is definitely not a low-productivity territory, though capturing it by force would be a nightmare.)
Think of it this way. A country has economic engines and economic sinks. The engines provide the tax revenue to cover everything else. The engines are your major industrial cities, your big population centers, agricultural areas like the Mississippi Valley, etc. The engines are what provide the core material needs of the society. The sinks are territories you annex not to serve as economic engines, but because they provide non-economic value. Maybe they provide a place to station troops or naval forces, making it harder for an adversary to invade your core engines. Maybe they provide a vital strategic resource like oil. You can always trade for these resources, but owning the land they’re under means you can’t be cut off from these resources by a trade embargo. Maybe you annex a territory simply to prevent it from becoming a lawless failed state that would cause trouble to spill over your border.
You take on sinks because they increase the safety and stability of your core regions. Alaska does not pay for itself, not even close. It’s valuable to the US because it serves as a valuable place to station troops, and because its oil and other resources cannot be cut off through a trade embargo. And we’re better off having it rather than letting Russia having a foothold on the continent. If anyone proposed cutting off Alaska today, I would call them an idiot. Having Alaska is the US purchasing an insurance policy against future disruptions. But like any insurance policy, on average it costs you more than it pays out.
But in the scenario we were considering, the US simply can’t afford to maintain these “nice to have” territories anymore. It’s like when you lose your job and have to cut back on expenses, sometimes insurance is something that has to get cut.
If anyone proposed cutting off Alaska today, I would call them an idiot.
I agree.
A land bridge wouldn’t really help with the finances. There’s already a few roads that go all the way up to Alaska. Most things going from the lower 48 to Alaska still are shipped by sea or air.
We’re acting like finances are infinite already, and as long as people keep trading in dollars they are. And in this scenario we’re not considering what does/doesn’t make sense; we’re considering the idle thoughts of one person worried about his image.
I was working on an argument to try to justify having a big road all the way up through BC to Prudhoe Bay, and having a railway as well, but I can’t make it make sense with the pipeline already in place unless you just really wanted one or were trying to add a dependency on railway travel to that area. Greenland doesn’t make sense to me, either, and that’s apparently moving ahead.
But in the scenario we were considering, the US simply can’t afford to maintain these “nice to have” territories anymore. It’s like when you lose your job and have to cut back on expenses, sometimes insurance is something that has to get cut.
As long as there’s a market for US dollars the US doesn’t have to drop anything. I know I’ve made a dissatisfying, reductionist argument, but it is what it is. In the event that people still trade in dollars we can keep on as we have, and as long as we don’t go around alienating allies and threatening to not fulfill military treaties there’s no reason that should stop. If that did happen then going to war is a time tested way of giving the economy a boost.
Yep and whether or not the air crew tasked with vacating those areas will comply with an order to is a REALLY big IF, should the 50 states start separating
If I was from Omaha and currently flew jets out of Pearl Harbor…I think I’d stick to the coast
Something can be necessary and useful while still be an unprofitable money sink. I pay for water from my city’s utility. It’s a useful resource, but it’s still a money sink. I don’t earn any profit from the water I get from the city. In fact, it all goes down the drain in one form or another, and I have to pay even more money for the city to take the used water off my property! I absolutely need it; I couldn’t live in the home I do if the water was cut off. But it’s not a profit center for my household finances. Just because something is necessary and useful does not mean it is profitable.
It always goes back to rights and responsibilities. Assholes want all the rights, none of the responsibilities. You will see this pattern everywhere in life.
I don’t think this really captures what it would have felt like to be abandoned by Rome.
For all it’s ills Rome brought civilisation and technological advantages to the places it conquered.
When Rome withdrew I think the most keenly felt loss in many areas would have been to be cut off from that ordered civilisation.
One moment you’re a citizen of Rome, and the next your grain is looted and your daughters have been taken by barbarians.
It might be something more like, an announcement that it’s no longer profitable to maintain internet access for your entire country, so the network is simply being shut off, never to return.
As an aside, I’m in Western Australia. In terms of national identity I think many of us are fairly ambivalent to being “Australian” as opposed to being “Westralian”. 50 years ago there was a referendum about succession which actually won support - we chose to succeed from Australia. The Australian government saw sense after that and acquiesced to our demands, so it never went ahead. My point is though, if you live in a place and that place is cut off from the broader nation, do you lose your national identity or does your existing national identity just become more closely defined.
Honestly, by the time such a thing happens, it’s very likely as well that ambitious, smarter leadership were quick to grasp the reigns months or years in advance, so that there is some semblance of local governance when the hegemony disappears.
What’s as likely to happen is that American becomes it’s own Triumvirate with leaders ruling over seperate areas that rely oj each other for survival.
Think about what you are saying. Actually think through the scenario you are suggesting. So Rome withdraws all its military and officials from England, and still keeps collecting taxes…how exactly? When you withdraw from an area you lose the ability to collect taxes there.
I think you are both partially correct. Either the government, or some ambitious political grifter who sees the writing on the wall, and manipulates circumstances to his advantage, are going to keep collecting taxes for as long as possible, before finally leaving. It will be the very last thing they give up, long after they’ve given up everything else.
I never said they withdraw their full military and tax collecting officials. They leave a skeleton crew to collect taxes, and let everything else fall apart.
Matter of fact I’m pretty sure that’s an accurate description of the collapse of rome. Shit took a thousand years for a reason.
The decline of the Roman empire was a wild thing for the people actually living on the ground. Imagine you’re living in Alaska. You were born there and have never considered yourself anything but American. Your home is, as far as you’re concerned, completely inseparable from America and as American as any other part of the country.
One day you see an emergency press conference on the TV. It’s a press conference by governor. They’re announcing that they just received word from Washington. The message said:
“We’re sorry we have to do this. But the federal government just can no longer maintain our presence in Alaska. The country just can’t afford it anymore. The national finances are exhausted and the nation must consolidate down to focus on its core territories. You will no longer be federally taxed, all federal troops will be withdrawn from the state, no federal dollars will be spent on the state, and Alaska will no longer receive representation in Congress. Existing US citizens in Alaska will retain their citizenship, but new children born in Alaska will be subject to the same citizenship rules as those born to American expatriates living overseas. We are granting Alaska full independence. We wish you the best. Good luck. But you are on your own.”
Imagine what it would be like to be a resident of Alaska and to hear that message. How do you even respond to that? Do you stay in the US, leave Alaska, and move to the lower 48? Do you try to stick it out in the newly independent Alaskan nation? Can Alaska even survive as an independent nation?
In the modern world, we’re not used to national governments just packing up and leaving a state or province. Governments work so hard to suppress even the possibility of revolt that the idea of one just abandoning a state or territory is a strange concept. But historically this does happen with declining empires. It really wouldn’t even be that crazy of a move for a declining US. Alaska is a part of the US, but it isn’t a core territory. The lower 48 is really the core of the United States. Territories beyond this are mostly money sinks useful for either resource extraction or power projection. Nice things to have, but not the US’s core population and economic centers. I can foresee future scenarios where the US eventually just walks away from places like Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other territories not contiguous with the US mainland. No empire lasts forever, and collapse tends to move from the periphery inward. On the ground in the periphery, this looks like the national government just announcing you’re no longer part of the country.
It should have been Canada all along anyway. Alaskans are just secret Canadians with a deed to the area.
Isn’t that what Malaysia did to Singapore in 1965?
Yeah, and did singapore even thank them for it? I think not!
They should, though, given today’s respective development levels.
Yes. Though that wasn’t really a case of imperial collapse.
You don’t have to look back that far. Austria 1918 was pretty much that, except that not a region on the edge was lost but the capital Vienna lost most of the hinterland with the remaining rump state not considered viable. One of the largest cities on earth, at the time, went from exponential growth into decline. Population size still has not recovered, 100 years later.
This is a good analogy. But Austrian part of the monarchy completley disintegrated, not just parts around Vienna. If we map that onto modern USA it would be like them scaling back to original 13 colonies.
By hinterland I was thinking really about the entire monarchy but especially the Austrian half. Much of the Austrian core realms remained but that wasn’t all that much to begin with. The 13 colonies would be an analogy, however they’d be much more viable than post WWI Austria.
FWIW, Alaska and Hawaii are both key strategic locations for the US military which is why they are currently under US control.
Yes. But we’re talking about a scenario where the US is collapsing like every other empire before it has. Rome would have liked to keep hold of England, but they just couldn’t afford it anymore. Alaska is a nice thing to have strategically, but it’s not a core engine of the US economy or one of it’s major population centers. It doesn’t pay for itself. When empires decline, these far flung “nice to have” territories are the first to go.
I think the US annexes parts of BC and Yukon to make a land bridge to Alaska before it gives it up. I’d see it giving up on rural parts of Pennsylvania, all of WV, and Illinois first. I know there’s no mechanism for a state to secede, but what about splitting into parts and only one part keeps the state name/legal status, and the other part just becomes a landlocked entity that has to pay a protection racket but gets $0.00 in federal funding back?
Alaska with its oil, refineries, and spots to park radars make it too nice of a place to hold onto. If in some misguided attempt to Own the Libs or whatever the US did split off Alaska, then whenever someone got up there from CONUS again they’d find English as a third language, if it all, with Mandarin second and whatever native tongue as the first language.
Starting a war with Canada would just accelerate the collapse, kind like Russia invading Ukraine is doing.
Further, a land-bridge to Alaska actually adds to the problem that it costs as lot more money to maintain a military and administrative presence there than the money it generates because now you have to ALSO maintain a strong military presence in BC and Yukon all the while the locals are trying to fuck you up and the rest of Canada is engaged in guerrilla warfare not only there but also against the US presence in Alaska.
Even at best the US would be militarilly bogged down for DECADES in an Occupation of part of a country whose people look exactly like Americans and speak the same language whilst being extremelly pissed off, in a area with incredibly porous borders, borders which such action would have just extended to be far bigger and crossing even more far out and wilder land, all for the sake of a piece of land that even before such an extension and the necessary military occupation to hold it against the enemy next door thus created, did not actually pay enough for its upkeep.
Even more entertaining, whatever natural resource extraction that could be done to pay for it, can already be done since the Alaska is US territory (so there must be good reasons for that not to happen), only under such a scenario it and any transport links for whatever it extracted would be the target of Canadian drones, which it is not now.
I agree with you, but I would wager that Canada’s participation in the F-35 program has more to do with not having the land bridge than your points. We’re already doing our version of “little green men” in Greenlands, so it’s hard to use history or what makes fiscal sense as a guide.
I’m on team No Land Bridge, but I also see the US never giving up Alaska.
The thing with collapsing empires is that it’s not really a choice. You can print all the money you want, your economy only has so much productive potential. The core problem empires encounter is they build their economies and political system based on growth. Rome for example built a slave empire and military machine off the spoils of war. They used the proceeds from one war to fund the next. The slaves captured in one conquest provided the surplus disposable labor to grow the economy to fund further conquest. And its political system was never properly designed to govern such a large area with any degree of stability. The wealth of empire allowed the political instability to be bandaged for a time. But nothing can grow forever. And when an empire fundamentally built and sustained by growth reaches the limits of its growth? It doesn’t just stabilize and level off. Growth was the only thing keeping the whole house of cards stable. Once growth stops, collapse begins.
The problem with collapse is that it works in just the opposite form of imperial expansion. As the economy falters, military spending has to decline. A larger share of the budget could go to the military, but that has to be funded by taxes, spending cuts, or more inflation. These just add to the political instability and shrink the economy further. The needs for the military can be reduced by withdrawing troops from distant theaters, but then those areas become more vulnerable to enemies. As collapse continues, you have to give up territories or lose them to rebellion or conquest. You can neglect your periphery, not invest in it, and lightly defend it, but that just makes those regions likely to rebel. As you lose territories, your economic potential shrinks even further. This collapse snowballs until the whole system disappears entirely, or the empire collapses down to its heartland. That core territory, the one that originally expanded outward to conquer a vast empire, can then stabilize and remain as normal nation.
The US has been on a continuous expansion phase since its founding. Up until WW2 or so that meant actual territorial expansion. After WW2, the expansion has been in the form of an expanding trade empire and an ever-expanding overseas military presence. And up until the last generation or so, that growth served to paper over a lot of the internal contradictions and instability inside the US. The US was pretty unique in its founding in that it was founded through a revolution, but only a political revolution, not an economic one. The leaders of the American Revolution were American merchants and Southern nobles that wanted to kick the king out, seize political control, but keep the existing economic system the same. Contrast this to the French Revolution and most subsequent ones that featured extensive political and economic issues.
The US’s political system has a lot of bugs that cannot be easily patched. The presidency had built-in dictatorial potential from the start. The Constitution is designed to be deliberately difficult to amend. The Supreme Court is poorly designed. There’s no proportional representation, the House and Senate both favor land over population, and on and on. We’ve been trying to patch the system as best we can with amendments and reform laws. But the political system is clearly in decline. The original concept of checks and balances is completely broken. Congress has completely lost the power to declare war. The Supreme Court has become openly corrupt. And the oligarchs have completely subjugated the government to serve their narrow self-interest.
Personally, I don’t see how this ever recovers. The Rubicon has been crossed to many times. It’s clear that when the president violates the law or a court ruling, there’s no real enforcement mechanism to stop them. The Founders fundamentally did not design or Constitution’s structure with political parties in mind.
Our system’s failures were present from the beginning, but growth can paper over a lot of failures. In the 19th century, giving away free land out West was a social pressure release valve. People who got tired of living under the low pay and high rents of the industrial cities back East could vote with their feet and go start a farm out West. In the 20th century, the automobile suburbs and the post war boom created a middle class that served to stabilize national politics. In the 90s and the era of globalization and the expanding US trade empire allowed cheap goods to flood into the country, buoying the lifestyles of that same middle class. (Those fortunate enough to not be in the Rust belt.) And rising home prices over the last 40 years have served to further reinforce that politically stabilizing middle class.
But it can’t go on forever. The US trade empire has hit its limits. Rising home prices helped the older generations, but in turn they made housing prices unaffordable for people starting out. And as a result the birth rate has tanked. For the first time in American history, subsequent generations are poorer than their parents. Real standards of living for most of the population are declining.
This is what collapse looks like. An empire built on growth is only stable while it’s growing. You cannot just stop growth at some point, level off, and stabilize. When growth hits its inevitable limits, the growth process starts working in reverse. The same snowballing process that enabled the empire to grow starts rolling backwards.
This is collapse. Every empire that has ever existed has gone through this expansion and collapse cycle. The US will be no exception. And this is only looking at it from the classic imperial political and economic lens. We haven’t even touched on environmental deterioration and the effects of a collapsing climate.
A land bridge wouldn’t really help with the finances. There’s already a few roads that go all the way up to Alaska. Most things going from the lower 48 to Alaska still are shipped by sea or air.
It’s not the fact that Alaska isn’t contiguous with the US that is the problem. The problem is that Alaska is very far from the US’s core population and economic centers, and Alaska itself has little population, and most of its land has extremely low economic value. Adding more low-productivity territory between Alaska and the US won’t change that equation. (Vancouver is definitely not a low-productivity territory, though capturing it by force would be a nightmare.)
Think of it this way. A country has economic engines and economic sinks. The engines provide the tax revenue to cover everything else. The engines are your major industrial cities, your big population centers, agricultural areas like the Mississippi Valley, etc. The engines are what provide the core material needs of the society. The sinks are territories you annex not to serve as economic engines, but because they provide non-economic value. Maybe they provide a place to station troops or naval forces, making it harder for an adversary to invade your core engines. Maybe they provide a vital strategic resource like oil. You can always trade for these resources, but owning the land they’re under means you can’t be cut off from these resources by a trade embargo. Maybe you annex a territory simply to prevent it from becoming a lawless failed state that would cause trouble to spill over your border.
You take on sinks because they increase the safety and stability of your core regions. Alaska does not pay for itself, not even close. It’s valuable to the US because it serves as a valuable place to station troops, and because its oil and other resources cannot be cut off through a trade embargo. And we’re better off having it rather than letting Russia having a foothold on the continent. If anyone proposed cutting off Alaska today, I would call them an idiot. Having Alaska is the US purchasing an insurance policy against future disruptions. But like any insurance policy, on average it costs you more than it pays out.
But in the scenario we were considering, the US simply can’t afford to maintain these “nice to have” territories anymore. It’s like when you lose your job and have to cut back on expenses, sometimes insurance is something that has to get cut.
I agree.
We’re acting like finances are infinite already, and as long as people keep trading in dollars they are. And in this scenario we’re not considering what does/doesn’t make sense; we’re considering the idle thoughts of one person worried about his image.
I was working on an argument to try to justify having a big road all the way up through BC to Prudhoe Bay, and having a railway as well, but I can’t make it make sense with the pipeline already in place unless you just really wanted one or were trying to add a dependency on railway travel to that area. Greenland doesn’t make sense to me, either, and that’s apparently moving ahead.
As long as there’s a market for US dollars the US doesn’t have to drop anything. I know I’ve made a dissatisfying, reductionist argument, but it is what it is. In the event that people still trade in dollars we can keep on as we have, and as long as we don’t go around alienating allies and threatening to not fulfill military treaties there’s no reason that should stop. If that did happen then going to war is a time tested way of giving the economy a boost.
But Alaska gives a portion of oil revenue to every resident, $1-3K a year. Sounds like communism to me.
That’s the 2026 thinking cap at work!
Yep and whether or not the air crew tasked with vacating those areas will comply with an order to is a REALLY big IF, should the 50 states start separating
If I was from Omaha and currently flew jets out of Pearl Harbor…I think I’d stick to the coast
“Territories beyond this are mostly money sinks useful for either resource extraction or power projection.”
how can somewhere be both a money sink and useful for resource extraction? that’s just paying for resources
Something can be necessary and useful while still be an unprofitable money sink. I pay for water from my city’s utility. It’s a useful resource, but it’s still a money sink. I don’t earn any profit from the water I get from the city. In fact, it all goes down the drain in one form or another, and I have to pay even more money for the city to take the used water off my property! I absolutely need it; I couldn’t live in the home I do if the water was cut off. But it’s not a profit center for my household finances. Just because something is necessary and useful does not mean it is profitable.
It always goes back to rights and responsibilities. Assholes want all the rights, none of the responsibilities. You will see this pattern everywhere in life.
I don’t think this really captures what it would have felt like to be abandoned by Rome.
For all it’s ills Rome brought civilisation and technological advantages to the places it conquered.
When Rome withdrew I think the most keenly felt loss in many areas would have been to be cut off from that ordered civilisation.
One moment you’re a citizen of Rome, and the next your grain is looted and your daughters have been taken by barbarians.
It might be something more like, an announcement that it’s no longer profitable to maintain internet access for your entire country, so the network is simply being shut off, never to return.
As an aside, I’m in Western Australia. In terms of national identity I think many of us are fairly ambivalent to being “Australian” as opposed to being “Westralian”. 50 years ago there was a referendum about succession which actually won support - we chose to succeed from Australia. The Australian government saw sense after that and acquiesced to our demands, so it never went ahead. My point is though, if you live in a place and that place is cut off from the broader nation, do you lose your national identity or does your existing national identity just become more closely defined.
1933 referendum is a bit more than 50years ago by my count…
If you’re thinking of Lang Hancock’s campaign in the 70s there was no referendum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessionism_in_Western_Australia
BTW it’s secession and seceding - spelt with a u it means something totally different
In the modern world, some other country (Canada or maybe Russia, in your example) would immediately annex it.
Canada already has one province full of oil industry assholes, we don’t need another one.
Yeah, I don’t think so.
FTFY.
Checkmate, atheists energy.
The white empire is.vast. it first looks like countries like south Korea geopolitically realigning away from the USA and the military bases closing
Honestly, by the time such a thing happens, it’s very likely as well that ambitious, smarter leadership were quick to grasp the reigns months or years in advance, so that there is some semblance of local governance when the hegemony disappears.
What’s as likely to happen is that American becomes it’s own Triumvirate with leaders ruling over seperate areas that rely oj each other for survival.
You think anyone would ever announce that you nk longer owe taxes? Nah man rome still collected taxes. Probably stepped up the guards, too.
But they stopped maintaining everything else. Like the roads. And the bridges.
Think about what you are saying. Actually think through the scenario you are suggesting. So Rome withdraws all its military and officials from England, and still keeps collecting taxes…how exactly? When you withdraw from an area you lose the ability to collect taxes there.
I think you are both partially correct. Either the government, or some ambitious political grifter who sees the writing on the wall, and manipulates circumstances to his advantage, are going to keep collecting taxes for as long as possible, before finally leaving. It will be the very last thing they give up, long after they’ve given up everything else.
I’d wager that even when the government is no longer able to collect taxes, it won’t announce that you no longer owe them taxes.
I never said they withdraw their full military and tax collecting officials. They leave a skeleton crew to collect taxes, and let everything else fall apart.
Matter of fact I’m pretty sure that’s an accurate description of the collapse of rome. Shit took a thousand years for a reason.