Below The Beltway

This story seems to be getting a lot more play than it deserves:

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 U.S. 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 Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy — a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard such things from Panarin; he was saying the same thing back in December and he even produced this handy-dandy map to show what he thought this new North America would look like:

Some of Panarin’s fellow Russians aren’t buying his theory at all, and think that Russia is the country that’s in danger of collapse:

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 Center who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.

“I can’t imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart,” Malashenko told the AP.

Dave Schuler also expressed skepticism about Panarin’s hypothesis in December and noted this:

Panarin isn’t an America specialist. He’s an information war specialist and I can see that the Soviet Union’s grand tradition of disinformation is alive and well and living in Mother Russia. More than anything else Panarin’s theories demonstrate that Russians who aren’t America specialists’ ideas about America aren’t any better than most Americans who aren’t Russia specialists’ notions about Russia.

That conclusion is reinforced by this bio of Panarin which I found via Jules Crittenden:

Doctor of political sciences, professor of the Diplomatic Academy Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia. Prof. PANARIN is the author of nine books, «Infowar and power”, “Infowar and world”, “Infowar and election”, and others, and of many political essays published in various journals.

Heck of a lot of Infowar huh ?

Which brings to mind this quote from the article posted today:

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 U.S. 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 United States to Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

At the most, this strikes me as little more than some Putin-inspired science fiction posing as scholarship.