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
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