The question “Is the US the next USSR?” keeps resurfacing on the Chinese internet. A recent long-form post by Zhihu author Mask’s Little Tavern pushed it back into discussion threads. Rather than offering a verdict, the piece starts from the institutional design at America’s founding and lays out three threads — federalism, debt and the military — to show what real-world basis the hypothesis might have.
What makes it worth attention is that it is not about a single election or administration but about long-term institutional strain: can a federation that leaves vast power to the states hold together under fiscal stress and political polarization?
A design of “each managing its own affairs”
The essay goes back to the arrangement after the thirteen colonies won independence: states kept internal governing authority and ceded only foreign affairs, defense and currency to the federal government. The author calls this a pragmatic choice at the time — the territory was too large for a central government to administer. More than two centuries later, the side effects have surfaced: fifty states run their own laws, taxes, health care and education, and on issues like abortion and gun control they are practically two different worlds. Beyond grants and exhortation, the federal government lacks routine means to make states comply.
In 2024, Texas strung razor wire along the border to block illegal immigration and faced off with federal law enforcement, which the author uses as an example: the governor invoked constitutional self-defense, and nearly half the nation’s governors publicly took sides. In the author’s view, this is not a weak administration but a federal government that never had that power in the first place.
Debt is the harder constraint
The figures the essay cites: federal debt has passed $40 trillion; the fiscal 2026 deficit is about $1.99 trillion, or 6.2% of GDP; revenue is $5.4 trillion against $7.4 trillion in spending, and interest on the debt alone runs $1.36 trillion a year — roughly a quarter of revenue and more than annual defense spending. The author’s analogy is blunt: out of four dollars of income, one goes to interest before a cent of principal is repaid.
Tax hikes, benefit cuts and military spending cuts all face opposition, leaving more borrowing as the remaining option. From this the essay draws a judgment: the difficulty of federalism is that prosperity can be shared but hardship cannot. Once borrowing stalls, states will recalculate the cost of taking orders from Washington.
Who gets the military and the nuclear weapons
The author argues the truly thorny issue is armed force. The US relies on an all-volunteer military, and states have their own National Guards; on the surface the military answers to the federation, and Texas attacking California is not going to happen. But if the federal government loses legitimacy, and soldiers come from every state, whether orders to move against their home regions would be carried out becomes an open question.
Harder still are assets like nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers and overseas bases. The essay notes that when the Soviet Union collapsed, nuclear weapons ended up in Russia because Moscow took over most of the Soviet military command system; whether the US has a comparable takeover path, the author does not answer.
A scenario, not a prophecy
The essay lands here: if the federation keeps weakening, the USA could split into multiple political entities, and a peaceful divorce would be hard — California and Texas have opposite political cultures, the states in between are pulled both ways, and water, energy and military bases would each become a contested item.
The scenario has force, especially the point that interest payments are squeezing fiscal room, which can be checked against data. But the chain from fiscal pressure to national breakup is long, and history offers no case of two major powers dissolving by the same script. Treating it as a set of variables to keep watching is more useful than treating it as a conclusion.
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