To continue the analogy, the United Kingdom has "only" been a member of the EU and its predecessors for 47 years and it retained direct, non-delegated control over far more areas even after joining the EEC. Texas has been completely subservient to United States policy for four times as long and even if such a split were amicable, it would still be very messy.
The United States military has such a large presence in Texas because the United States Military is such a large organization, generally. There would be no reason for Texas to have such a comparatively large military, nor, I think, would an independent Texas be able to afford one. Killeen, for example, would probably still be an incorporated city but its population would be cut by two-thirds at best.
But the point of the thought exercise isn't to say whether or not it could happen; it's that Texans take an outsized view of whether it should happen and hold them/ourselves up on a false pedestal propped up by the idea of Texas being above/different/better-than the rest of the country when we're one of "the several States which may be included within this Union."
Texans already pay the federal taxes that purportedly fund the US military, though. I’m not sure if the US has more military assets in Texas than Texas itself can afford to pay for, but Texas is a big, rich state so I’d say there’s a chance that they’re effectively subsidizing some of the military bases in other states.
Texas could and likely would contribute military forces to various US-led coalition efforts at times.
https://taxfoundation.org/federal-taxes-paid-vs-federal-spen...
As our “very stable genius” of a President likes to point out, Germany and South Korea don’t exactly pay us back for stationing troops there either.
Unless the leaving party has a lot of somethings that the party they are leaving from wants, they don't really have much of a position to bargain.
Everyone seems to think that a (relatively) small unit of land and their people can 'take care of themselves', but unless you want to go back to just before the industrial revolution it really doesn't work that way. Almost everything everyone touches every day has some form of link to 'the outside world'.
Giving up interconnectivity really doesn't give anything back in return. (including self-regulation, unless you'd start living under a dome, or on the moon)
An independent Texas might find that an unequal deal with the US, in which the US gets to make all the major economic decisions and Texas just has to accept them, might actually put them in a better economic position than a more equal deal with greater trade barriers.
It isn't clear that Texas has that much of a say at the present anyway. For the last twenty to thirty years, it has been considered safe Republican territory, which given the nature of the US political system means it gets far less say than a swing state does. (That said, Texas used to be a swing state, and probably is going to become one again at some point, which will restore to it a lot of the political power it currently lacks.)
Absolutely not. The US has a huge military with a budget that exceeds the next top-8 or so military spender states in the world. And - almost all of its activity is foreign deployment for proto/pseudo-colonialism, occupations, pressuring other states with the threat of force etc. Texas wouldn't need any of that stuff. Now, obviously it would not be able to militarily defend itself from the US, so if it seceded at all its military would be mostly focused on Mexico, if at all. So - try 1% of asset and 2% of personnel maybe.
Why is that obvious? Nuclear weapons are state assets like anything else, and if you're going to follow your logic that a seceding state gets its part of the greater federal it should get some proportion of the nuclear weapons stockpile too.
The US is allied with at least three nuclear weapon states whose population is on the order of the population of Texas.
Besides, if you're going to setup a system where states can secede and seceding states have to hand over all their nukes you've created an absurd system where the last state to secede gets all the nukes.
> Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness come from being part of the U.S.
If Texas seceeded from the United States, it could always do so as part of a customs union, or even single market, with the United States. That assumes the US of course that agreed to that (but it would be in the economic best interests of the US to agree). It would take away Texas' ability to run an independent trade policy, and Texas would basically have to accept various policies being dictated to it by the much more powerful and bigger US. But, there is nothing in principle impossible about such an arrangement. Indeed, the UK could end up with such an arrangement with the EU ("Norway plus customs union") – the latest Brexit deal doesn't have such an arrangement, but that is not because the EU is opposed, it is because the Johnson government is opposed. (If Corbyn was PM, it might actually happen.)
Likewise, freedom of movement of people and absence of border controls could be maintained if Texas and the US agreed. See the Schengen agreement, or the British-Irish Common Travel Area, for existing examples.
> Metro areas like Killeen and a good chunk of San Antonio would simply cease to exist if the military left.
If Texas seceeded from the US, it would need its own military. Given it has roughly 8% of US population, why could it not claim roughly 8% of the US military's assets and personnel? Obviously, the US would have to agree to that; but, it seems plausible to me that in a peaceful and legal secession, the US and Texas governments would sit down and negotiate a transfer of some US federal assets and personnel to Texas, including sections of the US military. Probably, any individual service member who had personal connections with Texas would be given the choice between transferring to Texas or remaining in the US. It wouldn't necessarily be exactly 8%, but it probably wouldn't be 0%. (Obviously certain capabilities, such as nuclear weapons, would be entirely excluded.)
> (Never mind that a lot of that oil that Texans are so proud of us dragging out of the ground has to go on pipelines that cross the U.S.)
International oil and gas pipelines are not unheard of.