Anyhow, cutting to the chase: I think it’s likely the United States won’t exist in its current form in 2050, that we’ll split into two (or more) independent entities. I’d put the chances of breakup at the lower end of what classic CIA estimates define as “probable”—75 percent certain, “give or take about 12 percent.”

That’s a minority opinion in America. According to a survey conducted in March for this magazine, 83 percent of us think the United States 20 years from now will still consist of the current states under a single national government. Curiously, the same small fraction who think we will break apart (17 percent) said they wanted it to happen (18 percent). In an Economist/YouGov poll in August, 14 percent of people said they thought a civil war is “very likely” in the next 10 years, but another 29 percent consider it “somewhat likely.” A larger share of Republicans than Democrats and independents think it will happen.

So exactly how and when will a split occur? Exactly how would the reconstituted chunks of the United States coexist in 2050? We can only speculate, and I only have 1,000 words.

I think we’ll avoid civil war on the scale of those in Northern Ireland starting in the late 1960s, or in post-Soviet Yugoslavia in the 1990s, or in our own country in the 1860s. Translating the casualty numbers of those wars to our current population would mean, respectively, 700,000, or two million, or seven million Americans killed.

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