Jim,
It doesn’t have to be either or. It is foolish to not have resources stored. It also makes sense to be prepared to make a retreat to another country where you have friends and resources. My family’s plans and preparations include personal contacts and pre-positioned resources in two countries. I can show up unannounced in two other countries, and be assured of a warm welcome and assistance in integrating into the country. I have lesser contacts in a number of other countries. In the country where we live we have stockpiled over a years worth of food, and have the land, seeds, tools and expertise to feed our family indefinitely. We are not a wealthy family in terms of net worth as it is usually measured. I’m only worth about $100,000 USD. But I have no debts, own productive land, hold other land via long term lease agreement, have invested in several small businesses. But the crown jewel of my resources is the international network of contacts held together by friendship, common faith, family ties and economic interests. Louis L’Amour fans might think about Barnabas Sackett’s network of contacts and the blessing it was to his sons. – Andrew B. (Somewhere in the southern end of the Redoubt.)
Gents,
While I do understand what Peter was getting at, I think there were some serious elements missing in his theory.
For starters, if the US collapses, odds are excellent that most other nations will have either followed suit or soon will. Even China, touted as the world’s most powerful economy, is completely reliant on exports – exports to countries like the US, which will have collapsed, no? The global economy is too interconnected to assume that some regions would fall without other regions following suit. Even as far back as the 1920’s-1930’s, the world economy at large suffered in chain reaction, and that was back when many nations were still largely isolationist in nature! This leaves you with a question of where to go… even tiny nations that appear to be isolated are heavily reliant on imports to maintain any real standard of living (and in some cases, any living at all). Case in point would be the Bahamas… nice and isolated, but without a massive desalinization/groundwater extraction infrastructure (and imported fuel to feed the pumps), most folks there would be SOL for drinking water. Same story with most tiny island nations – without imports (that would dry up when SHTF), survival would be sketchy at best for the current populations residing on them.
Long story short, you’d still have to survive collapse, but now you have the added bonus of surviving it in a foreign land, and with no supplies.
Secondly, under such a scenario, the amount of time you would have to bug out to your chosen remote nation of choice and get set up there would be vanishingly small. In order to fly out under such circumstances, you would have to be already there, perfectly lucky, perfectly psychic, or own a transcontinental-range private jet. Why? Because I sincerely doubt that buying a plane ticket is going to be possible while everything is turning into chaos. You could do it by ship, but finding one and getting passage on it is going to be harder still.
Third, the gringo has a bit of an identity problem… most non-English-speaking nations, while nominally friendly to the typical US tourist (who brings money), would get pretty hostile on an interpersonal level once word got out that the US was no longer functioning. Nationalists of all stripes would rise up and make you out to be the scapegoat for all his nation’s ills. As most nations have strict weapons laws for foreigners (that would be you), you get to face the mobs unarmed. What friends you do have aren’t going to risk their wife/kids/parents to save your butt, and shame on you for thinking they will. I strongly suspect that even nations such as Mexico would suddenly become a dangerous place to be an American in if/when America ceased to be.
Next up? Medical issues. In most places today, drinking the local water is a guaranteed 3-day trip on the Toilet-Ride Of Pain. Post-collapse, it would be a guaranteed death sentence if you weren’t already used to drinking it. Oh, and now you get to contend with strange local diseases that you didn’t have time to get vaccinated against before you hurriedly left home. While not everyone will experience issues with it, I guarantee that unless you’ve gotten used to it and are already acclimated? It’s going to hurt, and coupled with the stress of bugging out of an entire country as it’s collapsing? It’ll likely kill you if you catch anything at all.
And then there is climate. Bugging out to Canada? Hope you can deal with the extreme winters. Australia? Cool, but most of it is hostile desert and scrub… the good parts are already occupied fully by the current population. New Zealand? Given their current immigration requirements and small size, I doubt they’d let you in.
Finally, there’s the money thing. A collapse of the world’s biggest economies would mean that all economies would suffer greatly. So, even if you did manage to convert those greenbacks to the local swag before the crash? The local money may well become worthless too – just as you’re trying to use it as a means to buy all the stuff you didn’t stockpile on.
Not even going to mention the language differences, lack of local knowledge on some rather vital subjects (edible plants, animals, etc), lack of local political knowledge (yes, it’s kind of important to have that), etc.
All that said, I get the theory, and if you planned carefully, and bugged-out well in advance, you would have a shot at riding out the collapse in relative ease. You would have to pick a country that isn’t going to go all hostile on you as an American, a country with enough local resources to largely support its current population minus civilization, and one that has some hope of functioning in some fashion in spite of the rest of the world going to hell.
It is entirely possible to find a safe haven, but in my opinion? It would require a ton of research, and quite frankly, you’d better already be living there. – T.J.M.