Leaders of the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) — which openly calls for the Lone Star State to secede from the United States and become an independent nation again — appear to have surpassed the threshold to put a secession ballot initiative on the 2024 Republican primary ballot this March.Newsweek…
Texans love to talk about leaving the Union, but they get really upset if you say you agree.
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No, but they sure need the US federal government.
Yes and no, Texas is actually one of the few red states that contribute more in taxes than they take in from federal programs.
Now, that surplus is present for a lot of reasons, some of which is the refusal to take part in some programs that would actually help, and some of which is due to fossil fuel deposits.
They still need the federal government in 100 other ways
I was talking more about how they like to take in federal aid after any disaster, rely on blaming the federal government in order to garner votes, etc.
3rd largest port in the US IIRC. Houston (well, really south of there, but) NASA stuff. Various oil and gas. Actually a lot of cancer research and treatment.
Various oil and gas. Actually a lot of cancer research and treatment
The former causing the latter
The only thing they can do is make oil and gas more expensive, no one is going to like that, no even America.
That’s okay. If they secede, the US government can simply resort to blunt force like we often do when oil is involved. I don’t see The Republic of Texas joining OPEC.
Texas does indeed have the most, largest refiners in the US, but not all of them. However, things would get complicated fast. The biggest refinery in the US is the Motiva refinery and it is owned and wholly controlled by Saudi Aramco as of 2017. I’d give it maybe a week tops before Saudi Arabia indicated that the refinery be in US control or they’d shut the plant down. So Texas would have a very hard call on their hands because an attempt by an “independent” Texas to control the refinery would be an invasion of Saudi Arabia and trigger all kinds of “fun” international ramifications.
The next biggest are Beaumont Refinery and Galveston Bay Refinery. Beaumont is owned by Exxon and Galveston is owned by Marathon. They would have similar asks… Because let’s face it, none of the oil companies want to get involved in a US/Texas spat. But as I was saying they would have similar asks to keep operating under the US as Exxon is HQ in New Jersey and Marathon is HQ in Ohio, which if they’re not joining Texas in the whole leaving part, then Texas controlling the refineries is about the only way they get to make life bad for the US via oil.
Now taking control of those two isn’t quite the affair that taking Motiva would be. But both companies would absolutely have legal claim to challenge Texas’ hostile takeover which, highly likely, Texas would largely ignore any kind of legal summons to answer for. The entire point is that Texas doesn’t get to keep the refineries as most of them are private property and Texas would have to (since we’re talking about an independent Texas here) nationalize them. Which would trigger all kinds of havoc that Texas wouldn’t be able to surmount. So Texas would (hopefully they’re smart enough to understand this, but I don’t give them that much credit) understand that any attempt to monopolize the oil would basically be a scorched Earth approach and not a “let’s use the oil to get rich!”.
And if we’re wondering how the US would enforce that, it’s a pretty simple approach. If the US cannot have them, Texas sure as shit doesn’t get to keep them. It’s not like their position is unknown to the US, and because of their nature, all of them are easily located on the Gulf Coast easily within SM-2 range. It would be an average Thursday for the Navy to level all of them in a few hours to very fiery piles of metal. It would take an independent Texas a lifetime to rebuild them, especially since them attempting to, what amounts to, stealing them would nix them off the International oil markets.
Also the lack of access to the USD would hurt their ability to trade the oil on the market. They would need bilateral trade deals. And it wouldn’t be like their current situation is some big secret, every bilateral deal would absolutely not be in their favor because every other nation would know they’re selling the oil because their hurting. That’s literally the position Russia is current in with their oil trades, which is why India is buying it up like a fat kid in a free chocolate cake store. India was buying at $80/bbl when the G7 set caps at $60/bbl which obviously had India come November to start getting Russia oil well below the $60/bbl set by the G7. That would be Texas, but way worse.
So Texas would have two calls, let US companies continue to operate the oil under the US (which would still hurt consumers but not quite as much) or attempt to take them over and no one gets them (which would really hurt consumers). There’s not a third option there. Texas would never be allowed to take profit on the oil and no nation that’s an ally of the US would buy from them.
So even if the worse happened and we had to blow up the refineries in Texas, the US has the capital to build them elsewhere, Texas does not. And yes, prices would sky rocket because the refineries in California, Louisiana, and New York running at full blast would provide nowhere near enough gasoline for everyone, building more ports has always been on the schedule for the US and now they would have great reasons to pull those plans out. And the oil companies would enjoy the new grants to build new facilities. Texas would be bankrupt trying to rebuild anything near the size of Motiva. Not to mention, Motiva’s current input isn’t even North American oil, it’s input is 100% OPEC oil and mostly Saudi Arabian oil, they literally boat it from the other side of the world to that site for processing.
Texas wouldn’t have a lot of say on oil and would have a lot to lose if an “independent” Texas didn’t at least play economic ball with the US while the US settled the spat in court. The upside is that it would likely increase demand for EVs and remove a lot of barriers to Lithium mining in the US (likely to the destruction of wildlife RE: McDermitt Caldera).
One. Texas cannot secede from the United States legally. This means that there is only one method for Texas to secede and that is to murder everyone in Washington DC. That’s it.
So knowing this, the United States in the event that Texas had thought it seceded from the United States would in turn end the lives of a whole lot of folks who supported this notion of secession. Of course there would be resistance to this whole dying idea from a lot of Texans and that would lead to a lot of US military also dying, not nearly anywhere near the amount of Texans dying, but a non-zero number none-the-less.
That’s what a seceding Texas and the United States would have in store for itself. A lot of dead people. And that’s the full extent of a Texas leaving the United States would look like. Dead people. Not riches, not freedom, not utopia, just dead people and lots of them. Because there’s not a legal manner by which Texas can leave.
Two. So let’s say Texas somehow finds out how to leave the United States. They have a pretty strong economy, but running yourself as a wholly independent nation is vastly different than running a State and right out the gate, there’s a massive level of doubt that the Texas Legislature could pull off such a feat.
Additionally, the thing that triggered the first civil war would come back. The whole United States telling every nation on the planet Earth that they were not allowed to treat the Confederacy as an independent nation. It’s really hard to conduct international trade of any sorts if zero people on the planet accept your currency. Now the TNM think they’ll be able to score bilateral deals on their oil products. No one will trade with them at market rates, right out the gate that’s the first thing the US will tell everyone. Texas in order to sell would need to sell to nations that weren’t friendly to the US and those nations themselves would only do so at greatly reduced market rates. Nowhere near any kind of money for them to be a self sustaining nation.
Because on the International stage, if say Texas was trading with North Korea (for example), NK isn’t going to hand Texas enough money (even if they had it, which they do not) to make Texas a threat to NK. That’s being dumb. Internationally, you keep beholden nation, beholden. There are zero ways Texas does anything internationally because zero people will recognize their unit of money, which in turn means you cannot move goods outside your nation, which makes it very difficult to be an independent nation. Not to mention that given enough time, the US knows where the refineries are and hitting them with a missile is not some impossible task. That’s part of the asymmetry of this whole thought experiment. Shooting one missile is very cheap for the US, rebuilding an entire oil industry complex is very expensive, especially for a nation that will be cut off from most of the metals and material require to rebuild. And even if they rebuilt it after X number of years, it still only requires a single missile to destroy it.
Even if Texas could, which they cannot, leave the US, there are zero benefits for them to do so and they would almost immediately be taken advantage of by foreign powers to a point that whatever economic benefit they have today, would be gone in a matter of years. The state has goodwill on the International stage but only by the virtue of being a US State. Most first world nations wouldn’t trade with Texas just in principal and the US government would almost see to it that no nation on the planet traded with them. They do have a very strong domestic economy but it would stagnate easily two to five years in without international trade. Their median wage is just too low and their cost of living too high for them to coast on domestic consumption and production alone. Not to mention they would very likely be fighting a war with the US, which they would very likely be losing very badly.
They do not get to keep any airplane the US military bought and if they tried the US would just bomb it into dust. They don’t get to keep airports Federal dollars bought, the US would pit the runways. They don’t get to keep any ports facing the gulf, the US would set it on fire from their battleships. They don’t get to keep any of it, they have to build it all back themselves, and if they try to keep it, we do the thing the US does best, destroy it completely with the idea that we’ll just rebuild it back once we’ve killed everyone that’s needing to die. Anyone who has studied the Reconstruction era already knows this.
But none of this matters because Texas cannot leave the United States, full stop.
I don’t think all of your analysis is plausible, but I mainly disagree with your first and last points.
It not being legal for a state to secede is not an obstacle. Those same laws stop being applicable when the state stops recognising the sovereignty of the the US.
You should probably compare it to the Basquian independence referendum, where the same illegality applied, but it still prompted the state to take military action and quell any ideas of independence. No civil war, no legal battles, but temporary martial law and a long going political battle to keep them in the state.
You could also compare with the politics in Northern Ireland and Scotland and the efforts made to stabilise and keep the country integrated.
Not being legal means we would immediately be at war. There is no mechanism within our current constitution for a state/entity to legally secede. Texas is unlikely to survive a war with the rest of the US, especially since all current US assets would leave the state.
In practice, secession comes for good reason, and the long term optics and/or diplomatic relations of civil war are very bad.
If the public sentiment of Texas truly was that they feel disenfranchised and disconnected from the US, not even a civil war would keep them in line.
This is the real threat in the Basque and Northern Ireland, not the hundreds of lives lost in a one sided military action, but the divides in society, the armed and executive branches, as well as the growing public dissent over the distaste of oppressing your neighbour.
Thank you for this write-up, you raise a lot of good points that sound correct. I have no clue if you’re right but I appreciate the effort.
Good timing, right before the election. Maybe Trump can be their president.
Go on! Get!
Again, this is performative nonsense. Yes, we’d be happy to let them go, but there’s actually no legal method for them to leave.
And a big fucking precedent saying that they cannot. The end result of the civil war said no. States cannot leave the Union, not even Texas. They tried, they failed.
i really hope they make it. this would be very entertaining. theres nothing more fun than reminding texas they already lost once and a second take wont go any better.
they cant even keep their electrical grid goin and they are swimmming in oil, wind and fucking sun.
It would be absolutely hilarious if we built a wall around Texas.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Lol, Texas can barely handle keeping the power on in the winter, they’d starve in a few years if they had to do everything for themselves.
There is no way Texas would survive on its own in its current state. So many companies would instantly pull out and many of its citizens are on some sort of federal assistance.
Build a wall around Texas and make them pay for it. We don’t want them illegal Texicans here anyway.
So … Texit?
I would happily let them go and then laugh watching them be stuck between the US and Mexico with no working electricity because all their “leaders” are just crooks.
Texan here: this happens every year, and nothing happens.
Not even Mexico wants it back now.
Sounds like we might need to bring freedom to Texas so we can re-liberate their oil.
