This is where I think the brazilian parallel becomes more interesting. You've shown how a California must secure the nearby states due to the Colorado River. Let's think about the implications of that. This means water rationing in times of climate change, most likely against the interests of the rest of the Colorado River states. This means finding a border with Texas and other states which might be carving their own sphere of influence. This game theory can blow into all out war, but doesn't have to. Just as it didn't in Brazil.

The First Republic followed the Brazilian Empire. The Monarchy, specifically during the reign of Pedro II, had morphed into what historians like the call the 'saquarema era', or the era of conservative consensus. All the hardpower in the first decades after independence had been in the hands of the landlord class. And they often tried, here and there, to carve their own countries, or to carve some autonomy for themselves. There had been many rebellions in the first decades of Brazil's existence. The ultimate victors were the factions closest to the capital, and they and their provincial supporters came to a simple conclusion: liberalism (federalization) doesn't work as it breeds more rebellion, and we have to stop and set up a highly centralized system to pacify this nation which, in reality, was a multitude of colonies wrestled into one.

So the Brazilian Empire had been a country where all power rested in the landlord's hands, and to maintain their economic means was why the regime existed. But actual rule was centralized away from the rural areas, into the capital and into the provincial capitals, and was vested on an urbanized bureaucracy. The abolition of the monarchy came into being as local oligarchies grew prosperous enough to outcompete the heavily indebted imperial boy's club in Rio, and as the monarchy itself also lost even the capital landlords' support after abolishing slavery but failing to enact federalism in the late 1880s.

All the monarchists believed that the end of the centralized regime would balkanize the country. It ultimately didn't. There are many reasons why, one of which that the monarchy had lasted long enough to create at least the foundation of a common brazilian national identity. And yet, in the turmoils after the military coup that ended the Empire, the oligarchies of the new United States of Brazil found themselves making the same game theory as we presume the oligarchs of California, and New York, and Texas all will. The result, was this: you notice that I said the First Republic was practically a confederacy, but formally it wasn't. What held it together was that part where I said that the Federal Government would not intervene in coups that happened inside the states. This was the so called Governor's Policy. The second informal policy that marked the era was 'Coffee and Milk' politics: the Federal Government thereafter was to be alternated between the two strongest states, São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Altogether what we have is an Oligarchic Republic with a pecking order. São Paulo and Minas Gerais are at the top; Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul are somewhere in the middle with their own provincial spheres of influence; Rio de Janeiro becomes an 'occupied capital' of sorts and lives off prestige and everyone else is at the bottom.

Can you imagine something similar in the US? California and Texas agree not to go to war over the Colorado because they can just do what oligarchs do and shake hands while hiding knives behind their backs? And so the country decentralizes and balkanizes in anything but name.