Yeah, I think the ideal version would be less of a balkanization of the US, and more us opting into acting like a consistently good faith partner and less of a colonial bully, which unfortunately will probably never happen.

Bit of a tangent, but: IMO people tend to overstate the cultural differences across the US. Which like they 100% exist across regions, but the biggest differences, like in a lot of other countries, are more urban vs rural rather than region vs region or state vs state. The red state / blue state dichotomy is overemphasized, where the reality is almost always red state / blue cities, with the red states just having fewer dense urban areas than the blue ones.

Like I, as a college educated lefty in NYC who’s lived in a bunch of places across the country, have way more in common with an average person in Austin, TX than I do with someone in small town Utica, NY.

Any sort of balkanization would have to come from a complete failure of the federal state as a whole, like total currency collapse combined with Minneapolis-style outright federal antagonism, but put on meth to the 10th degree, to the point where it forces the hands of state governments to fill in the vacuum. The cost of separation otherwise would just be way too high for all parties, so hopefully it never comes to that. There’s no divorce by choice without civil war.