Can you imagine resettling the whole Mormon population of Idaho to the furthest corners of Alaska? A knock on the door awakens you. You're given half an hour to pack a single suitcase, and then your whole family is pushed into a cattle wagon going to Alaska. No food beyond a slice of bread per day, no other supplies while traveling there over three weeks. If babies die, their bodies are just thrown overboard by soldiers. When you arrive, you're assigned a mine to work in for free as slave labor and a dirt mound to sleep in.
That's what took in Eastern Europe to seek isolation from Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
If the Pacific Northwest broke off tomorrow and tried to join Canada, I may still be opposed to war simply out of pacifism, but I wouldn't be terribly shocked if we had a Civil War II over the issue.
If the Pacific Northwest broke off tomorrow, the largest remaining Federal-ish government in the formerly United States recognized it as an independent country, and then thirty years from now it was contemplating an alliance with Canada...
However, in this admittedly flawed analogy, I thought it was pretty clear that Washington, Oregon, and Idaho were meant to be analogous to the multiple NATO countries already sharing borders with Russia.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a dastardly war crime, but it didn't happen in a vacuum either. Was attempting to explain the (shitty) reasoning behind Putin's actions.
You're not loving it, you want to make some sharp moves to prevent more states from considering it, and you'd like to get those states back somehow in the long run.
This is a wildly imperfect analogy, but...