How Red and Blue America Can Stay Together by Pulling Apart

In earlier essays, I argued that America’s political division has grown so deep that a peaceful “American Union” of two sovereign nations — one broadly red, one broadly blue — is worth considering. I also argued that relocation fears are overstated, that cooperation could increase economic prosperity, and that separation could help heal the lingering wounds of the Civil War.

But how would this all actually work? What happens to the national debt? Who gets the military bases, federal lands, and nuclear weapons? Will Social Security be protected? Could two nations share the dollar, defend themselves together, and resolve their disagreements?

These are serious concerns, but they can be addressed. Other countries have already built the tools an American Union would need: common markets, shared currencies, defense pacts, financial settlements, and negotiated asset division.

This is not a finished blueprint — specialists would need years to settle the formulas and mechanics — but it offers evidence that a workable approach exists.

If red and blue America are so divided, some will ask, why do we think they would cooperate within a joint central bank, defense council, or strategic command? The answer is that shared institutions would focus on the interests both would still have every reason to protect, and on which Americans have long broadly agreed — namely security, a stable currency, and an integrated market — not the areas of stark social division that set the two apart.

Political economists Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore describe a tradeoff between large and small states. Large countries gain from scale — bigger markets, stronger militaries, costs spread across more people. Smaller ones often govern closer to citizens’ preferences; when a population disagrees sharply, the cost of staying in one state rises.

Globalization has eroded the advantages of size: as trade expands, small countries reach large markets without sharing a government.

The result is more political jurisdictions with deeper economic integration. In 1945, the United Nations had 51 member states; today it has 193, even as global trade has expanded. Fragmentation and integration often advance together — making an American Union less an anomaly than a continuation of a global pattern.

The clearest modern example is the European Union. Its members remain sovereign — their own governments, taxes, languages, and social programs — yet share a common market with free movement of goods, capital, services, and people; many share the euro; and many of the same countries cooperate militarily through NATO.

Though not flawless, the E.U. demonstrates that sovereign states can integrate economically and militarily without merging politically.

An American Union would begin from a far stronger foundation. Europe had to integrate nations with 24 different official languages, legal and cultural traditions, and histories of armed conflict. The United States already shares a language, a currency, an integrated market, common citizenship, military institutions, and two centuries of civic identity. The A.U. would not be creating integration after a long separation, but preserving one that exists — while giving red and blue America greater self-government.

The American Union would keep the existing U.S. common market intact. Trade would stay tariff-free, businesses would operate across the border as across state lines, and goods, capital, and labor would move freely. As in the E.U., citizens of both nations could live and work anywhere within the A.U. — essential to keeping the shared market, and the people in it, free.

To manage those interests, an American Union would need a limited set of common institutions, not a new national government.

An “American Union Council,” with representatives from both nations, would supervise the framework and approve common budgets. Each function would have its own expert body — a Federal Reserve successor for the dollar, a continental defense council, and joint commissions for other cross-border systems.

Shared rules mean each nation will sometimes abide by decisions it would not have made alone. But, as a practical matter, this is already something Americans endure. Texas and California today both live under one monetary policy and one defense posture neither controls — a compromise that often fully satisfies neither but that both can tolerate.

The difference is that such compromise would be confined to the dollar and common defense, not extended to every social and moral question.

Importantly and beneficially, shared control insulates these decisions from any single nation’s politics. A central bank and continental defense structure answerable to two governments are far harder for one president or party to capture. Recent controversies over presidential pressure on the Federal Reserve and unilateral military action show why institutional checks matter. In an American Union, neither management of the dollar nor shared strategic force would rest with one nation’s executive.

The United States today maintains one of the world’s most integrated military and nuclear command structures, and an American Union would preserve the parts necessary for continental defense — though not every asset or decision would be shared.

Here the A.U. would preserve an architecture built over generations, overseen by a new “American Union Defense Council” of civilian leaders from both governments, with a unified professional command for continental defense, nuclear deterrence, cyber and space operations, and alliances.

A longstanding model for continental defense is the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) — the defense alliance between the United States and Canada — that could be updated to include red America and blue America along with Canada.

NORAD already shows that sovereign countries can cooperate through a binational command for North American defense while each remains subject to its own laws, policies, and directives. The updated NORAD model would continue to operate under pre-approved rules of engagement, including ones that allow rapid response when minutes matter.

Each nation would keep its own forces and sovereign authority over ordinary military decisions — a rescue mission, peacekeeping deployment, or limited overseas operation — while North American defense would proceed under jointly approved standing rules, as NORAD does today.

What neither could do is use shared AU assets — nuclear weapons, joint intelligence, missile defense, continental command — for offensive action, or trigger common defense obligations, without the procedures the founding compact would set. Above all, that compact would bar the two new republics from turning force on each other — the entire premise of a new peaceful union.

Both nations would also keep using the dollar through a shared monetary authority, just as the eurozone and other currency unions do.

An American Reserve System would carry forward the Federal Reserve’s core functions — monetary policy, lender of last resort, bank supervision, and inflation control — with the regional Reserve Banks reorganized into districts serving both nations and an American Open Market Committee like today’s FOMC. Fiscal policy would stay separate, each nation setting its own taxes and budgets, but both would accept common rules to protect the currency: transparent debt reporting, coordinated supervision, and crisis procedures.

Another requirement would be dividing assets, debts, and institutions — and history again offers pertinent guidance. The peaceful 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia — the so-called “Velvet Divorce” — showed that a complicated modern federal state can divide sovereignty, property, and debt by negotiation, using formulas that often tracked population.

And while significantly smaller than that of America, at the time of separation the Czechoslovakian economy was still roughly that of a mid-sized U.S. state.

More recently, Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U. disentangled a multi-trillion-dollar economy — one of the world’s largest — from a deeply integrated system, yielding pertinent lessons on financial obligations, citizens’ rights, and regulatory continuity as well as a negotiated settlement of many outstanding obligations. An American Union would need similar formulas: federal debt apportioned by population, GDP, tax base, or some blend, with the same logic governing pensions, veterans’ benefits, and other earned commitments.

For most Americans a key question is whether the checks will keep coming. They would. The governing principle would be continuity — obligations to current beneficiaries honored without interruption, whichever nation a retiree lives in.

Trust funds for programs like Social Security — like other federal assets — would be allocated by an agreed formula reflecting contributions and beneficiary populations. Portability would be assured, as no worker should lose decades of credit by retiring across the line, and so-called “totalization agreements” — which already let people combine contributions from different countries — offer a template.

Going forward, each nation would design its own social welfare programs; what it could not do is repudiate what was already promised.

Federal land would generally be apportioned to the nation in which it sits, while some assets would need special handling: mineral and water rights, leases, royalties, and tribal rights preserved, and strategic resources like uranium and rare earths governed by supply guarantees and national security agreements.

Energy infrastructure would require joint management, building on rules that already govern cross-border flows of power, oil, and gas.

The United States and Canada already maintain a deeply interconnected energy system of cross-border pipelines and power lines, and the Nordic and Baltic states through Nord Pool as well as the six Central American nations linked by the SIEPAC grid provide other useful examples.

Ordinary military bases and ranges would pass to the host nation under shared use arrangements, while strategic assets stay within the common framework. Precedent is instructive: When the Soviet Union dissolved, the new states did not simply divide the nuclear arsenal among themselves. They consolidated control under a single successor framework, with international assurances in exchange. An American Union would face the same logic: nuclear control kept unified, not divided by map or party.

An American Union would, of course, need a neutral way to resolve inevitable disagreements, and the models are well established: the E.U.-U.K. Withdrawal Agreement routes disputes through a Joint Committee and then an independent arbitration panel; the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) uses arbitral panels; and the Permanent Court of Arbitration has served to help resolve inter-country disputes since 1899.

While most disagreements would be settled by the American Union Council — whose purpose would be to defuse friction before it hardens — the rest would go to a standing arbitration panel, with members each nation names in advance, plus a neutral chair from a pre-agreed roster, so no dispute lingers. Its rulings would bind both governments, with the founding agreement setting consequences for noncompliance, as trade agreements do.

None of this would happen overnight. It would unfold over many years — likely a decade or more — beginning with study and negotiation, then a commission to inventory assets, liabilities, and programs, and finally a comprehensive agreement covering the common market, currency, defense, benefits, and assets. All the while, existing structures would stay in place as successor institutions gradually take over.

Unlike Brexit, where a binding referendum came first and the terms of separation were settled afterward, against a ticking clock — an American Union would fix the terms in detail before any irreversible step, so citizens would know what separation meant before committing to it.

Step back from the mechanics, and what emerges is a new form of governance without a familiar name. The American Union would be neither the full political integration the country has today — one sovereign government over all — nor a clean break of two unrelated nations going entirely their own ways. It would sit deliberately between them: sovereign republics that stay bound where union still serves them and that govern separately where shared rule has only deepened social conflict.

Most arguments about America’s future assume a binary: hold together as we are or break apart for good. The American Union is a third path between them — union where union helps and autonomy where it heals.

How Red and Blue America Can Stay Together by Pulling Apart was originally published by The Western Journal and is republished with permission.

Jordan Karp is a lawyer and writer based in New York with a keen interest in American political culture, institutional reform, and civic life.