But they aren’t. States are states, it’s literally in the name. Almost all countries in the world have states or an analogy to states.
Again, only an American would consider each of the United States as seperate countries. Totally disconnected from reality.
Very many countries are more like many US states are with their subordinate counties: that is, a top level sovereign with general powers and negative limits with subordinate non-sovereign entities with limited positive powers granted by the top-level sovereigns.
Australia also has a similar setup to the USA, and has also managed to solve this problem.
I don’t know the inner workings of every country, but I assume there are more in the same position.
I’m sorry, but the USA is not in some crazy unique position that no other country has ever faced before. You just choose believe this inaccuracy.
"State" is the usual legal term for sovereign juridical entities with territory, while "country" is a less formal term that often corresponds to a state.
(And the "countries" that make up the UK aren't sovereign even in theory, though some of them have some degree of home rule granted by the central sovereign.)
> the USA is not in some crazy unique position
Unique? No.
But common? Also no.
And it structurally does make solving some problems quite hard, and it makes changing the structure to resolve those problems also hard.
Only 27 countries in the world are federal states, which is a very far cry from "almost all countries." The entire notion of a federal state is that both the federal government and the state government have independent loci of powers, and there are times when the state governments can tell the federal government to fuck off if the federal government wants it to do something. The exact degree to which this is possible varies from country to country.
For example, you seem to be comparing the US to the UK. But Scotland is not like a US state--it has far fewer powers than a US state, and what powers it does have is entirely dependent on what the UK parliament is willing to grant it. So trying to draw an analogue between a US state and a partially-devolved country within the UK is itself a mistake.