You are perceptive Justa - perhaps you and I have had similar life experiences. Though the criminal elite can present the appearance of a unified front, they are nothing more than uneasy, part-time allies all stuffed together into a permanent camp. There is no honor among such thieves, are jealous of each other and do not play well together because everyone wants to be a chief if not THE chief and no one wants to be an indian. When things go sideways with the collapse of economies and governments, watch how fast they factionalize and square off against each other, with each faction trying to bully and manipulate the population to rally to and fight their battles for them. As usual, it's going to be the regular folk caught in the middle, having to choose a side if they are going to live and hope it's not the wrong side. It's on course to occur here, in this nation with the rise of regional tyrannical city-state regimes. "Secession" from the United States has already occurred - there are considerable sections of the nation under leftist rule that do not observe or function under the Constitution in many aspects and are actively expanding that disregard. The break-up of the US is already in progress. At some point in the future it will be a sliver of states that will be observing Constitutional law versus regions/states that do not. The leftists believe they have the oh-so-perfect strategy on how to domino the states into one-party rule under a centralized authority in D.C., but that plan relies on a lot of schemes going exactly right, but in reality it never works out that way, ever. There are always circumstances that throw the game. As history shows, when half-baked theories and plans collide with reality all that comes out the other end are messes for others to have to survive on one hand and clean up with the other. This kind of mess has been replayed over and over throughout the centuries - I guess our turn is coming.
World War II, which followed the Great Depression, rewrote a lot of nation boundaries. Also created some new nations. We are in the later days of our depression and are starting to see the internal civil conflicts erupting. These are followed by the nation to nation regional conflicts.