Today's lesson: collapse of the US

Igor Panarin says the American dream has collapsed and the country is in moral decline. Photo / AP

MOSCOW – If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the United States will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.

Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.

"There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats this week at the Diplomatic Academy - a lecture the ministry pointedly invited the Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.

The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the US that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.

Putin, the former President who is now Prime Minister, has likened the US to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.

He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the US and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" - when the US will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.

Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in US gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."

Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a US collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the US dollar.

It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.

Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."

But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Centre who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.

IGOR PANARIN
* A dean at the Russian Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats.
* A former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency.
* Reportedly an ex-KGB analyst.

WHAT HE BELIEVES
* The US will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.
* Russia and China will emerge from the economic turmoil to take the leading role in the world.

- AP