I want to call your attention to a new book, published just two days ago, that uses the same plotline as my sci-fi novel, SlimeWars, with the difference that my novel sold four copies, all to close friends, and his book will automatially be a best-seller. When you’re in teamplay, it doesn’t matter who makes the goal.
No one single person ever won a team sport trophy all by themselves.
The Breakup by Kurt Andersen, is a modern novel by the fellow who wrote Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses and co-founded Spy magazine. It’s a 576-page novel, but essentially a political/social thought experiment about what happens if the United States actually comes apart, as I’ve been predicting all along.
The setup is pretty interesting. It’s 2045. During the 2030s, domestic terrorist attacks have escalated into a two-year “Civil War II.” Eventually much of the country concludes that staying together isn’t worth it, and the United States begins a negotiated “Disunion.” A new country emerges called the Free American Republic (FAR), consisting largely of the red/conservative part of the former United States, while a smaller United States continues to exist. States—and apparently even individual counties—are still deciding which country they belong to.
Andersen does something clever with the structure: the country breaking up is mirrored by a marriage breaking up. Asher and Natalie have been married for 23 years. Natalie winds up in rural Tennessee, now part of the Free American Republic; Asher is in San Francisco, still part of the United States. Their 17-year-old child brings them back together for that most wonderfully mundane American ritual—a college-tour road trip through the fractured former USA.
There’s also a substantial AI angle. By 2045, AI is thoroughly woven into everyday existence, and Andersen is apparently using that alongside political fragmentation, extreme wealth and biotech as part of his picture of where present trends could lead.
The thing I find most interesting is that this apparently isn’t simply “America collapses—THE END.” Andersen seems more interested in the question: What happens afterward? People still have children, jobs, colleges, relationships, road trips and ordinary problems. The political catastrophe becomes the background against which people continue trying to live.
And that makes the title work three ways: the breakup of a marriage, the breakup of the United States, and the breakup of Americans’ idea of themselves as one people.
It isn’t being presented as a prediction, exactly. It’s speculative fiction—a deliberately plausible extrapolation of present polarization. Publishers Weekly calls it a near-future satire and says the political situation remains unsettled even years after the civil war. Kirkus calls it a politically charged vision of where current civil strife might lead.
Suppose the United States really did peacefully divide — which would be the long odds. So realistically, what would the map actually look like?
It almost certainly wouldn’t divide neatly into “red states over here, blue states over there.” California alone would become fascinating—coastal California and inland California are politically quite different, and Andersen’s idea that counties might choose sides makes the whole exercise considerably more interesting.
Pacifica, Atlantica, and USA. That makes much more sense to me than a simple red-state/blue-state divorce.
Pacifica would naturally form around the West Coast—California, Oregon, Washington, perhaps Hawaii—with the Pacific economy and ports pulling it together.
Atlantica would be the Northeast/Atlantic seaboard bloc—New England down through the New York–Washington corridor, with the interesting question of just how far south it extends.
And USA would remain the enormous central and southern continental nation, probably retaining much more of the old American cultural identity than either coastal successor.
The really fascinating part is the borders. They wouldn’t follow state lines cleanly. Northern and inland California, eastern Oregon and Washington, western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Virginia, perhaps even Illinois would create some very strange boundary questions.
And then there’s the monster question: who gets what? The dollar, national debt, Social Security, armed forces, nuclear weapons, federal land, interstate water, the power grid, military bases—and Washington, D.C.
That actually sounds like a hell of a thought experiment:
Who gets the nukes?
that’s probably the single hardest problem in the whole breakup scenario.
If “Pacifica”, “Atlantica”, and an inland empire called “the USA” separated peacefully, I think the most plausible outcome is that only one of them will inherit essentially the entire nuclear arsenal, rather than dividing the warheads three ways.
There’s a strong precedent. When the Soviet Union broke up, nuclear weapons were suddenly located in four new countries: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Eventually, Russia became the sole nuclear successor state, while the other three transferred or relinquished the weapons on their territory.
For an American breakup, geography makes the situation peculiar. The land-based ICBM fields are overwhelmingly in the interior West/Great Plains—Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. Those would presumably fall inside “USA”.
The ballistic-missile submarines complicate things. The two strategic-submarine bases are on opposite coasts: Kings Bay, Georgia, and Bangor in Washington State. If Washington joins Pacifica, Pacifica could wake up on independence day with a major part of the American nuclear deterrent sitting inside its territory.
But possession of the base isn’t necessarily possession of the weapons. The departing countries could negotiate something like:
“All strategic nuclear weapons and their command-and-control remain property of the successor; weapons are removed according to an agreed timetable.”
That’s what I’d bet on.
There’s another possibility that would make a terrific part of the thought experiment, though: Pacifica says, “We’re not giving up Bangor until our security is guaranteed.” Atlantica then says, “Wait a minute—if those two have nuclear guarantees, what guarantees our survival?”
Suddenly a peaceful divorce has stumbled into nuclear diplomacy.
And that’s the deeper problem. It isn’t really who gets the bombs. It’s who inherits the authority to launch them while the country is breaking apart.
You absolutely cannot have three governments simultaneously claiming that authority.
So if I were designing the breakup, nuclear command would be one of the things that could not be allowed to break up on Day One. I’d establish a temporary joint strategic authority, keep the existing military chain of command intact, prohibit movement or reassignment of nuclear weapons during negotiations, and ultimately consolidate them under one successor nuclear state—probably USA, or equally divided.
Incidentally, the real-world geography of the nuclear arsenal would make our hypothetical Pacifica–USA border negotiations downright hair-raising. Washington State matters enormously because of Bangor.
I think Washington, D.C. becomes a fourth thing—not quite a country, but an independent federal/international district.
If we’re imagining an amicable negotiated breakup into Pacifica, Atlantica and USA, giving D.C. outright to Atlantica would immediately create a symbolic problem: Atlantica would appear to have inherited the United States itself, while USA would be saying, “Hang on—we’re the USA!”
Geographically, of course, D.C. would almost certainly be surrounded by Atlantica territory if Maryland and northern Virginia went that way. So keeping it as the capital of USA would be awkward.
My favorite solution would be something like the District of Columbia Compact. For perhaps 10–20 years, Washington remains neutral territory jointly administered by the three successor governments. The Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, National Archives, Smithsonian, monuments, federal records and diplomatic quarter remain there while the divorce is sorted out.
Then each new nation develops its own capital. Atlantica could eventually absorb D.C., but it wouldn’t automatically inherit it simply because it’s on the Atlantic side.
And here’s where the symbolism gets delicious:
USA: perhaps keeps the name United States of America and establishes a new capital somewhere central—Kansas City would be an interesting candidate.
Pacifica: Sacramento initially, although Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles would all argue about it until approximately the year 2187, the Year of the Comet.
Atlantica: could eventually make Washington its capital—or choose somewhere like Philadelphia, which has enormous historical resonance.
D.C.: during the transition becomes essentially sort of the American Geneva—neutral ground, where the three independent Americas meet.
That also solves another nasty problem: who owns the Smithsonian, National Archives, Library of Congress, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and all the other objects belonging not merely to today’s government but to the shared history of all three successor nations?
They could remain in D.C. as the common inheritance of all Americans.
Actually, I like that idea quite a lot. The political union disappears, but Washington becomes the place where the common civilization remains physically intact.
However, the chances are that it will all be politicized and scrubbed clean by the time it gets popular acceptance. That’s always the way it is. I’m just sayin’.
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Here’s the Bardo bus now!
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