https://unherd.com/2021/11/would-america-survive-a-civil-war/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=ef88293ade&mc_eid=255974d087
![Malcom Kyeyune]()
Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden
November 12, 2021
Historically speaking, empires on average last for around 250 years, after which they tend to either slowly — or very, very quickly — fall apart due to overreach and internal conflict. Somewhat ominously, the 250th birthday of America is coming up in 2026.
Yet when, towards the end of Trump’s presidency, a radical friend of
mine told me that he thought America was headed for civil war, I
dismissed the argument out of hand. Why? How? It takes a unique
confluence of mistakes and crises for civil war to appear possible, and
an even longer list of mistakes, crises and elite screw-ups for them to
happen.
But 2021 is a different world to 2015. Talk of insurrection,
secession, civil conflict and civil war is no longer the chatter of the
gullible and the mentally ill. It’s entering the fringes of polite
society. Some support this ‘national divorce’;
others are opposed to it. Others claim they would actually prefer to
declare war on their recalcitrant countrymen rather than let them go
their own way unmolested.
None of this morbid interest in civil conflict is irrational, given
the times. The year 2021 has thus far been a spectacular year for signs
of political decline: the US has now seen all the notable “horsemen of
the apocalypse” that historically herald strife and revolution appear,
one after another. Political division among its elites, increasing loss
of legitimacy in the eyes of the population, military defeat abroad, and
a new and very ominous crisis in the real economy, with no end date in
sight.
Any one of these crises would be bad enough on their own; taken
together, they represent a truly serious threat to the stability of the
current order. Still, the question to be answered at the end of the day
is quite simple: how likely is civil war, or national divorce, or a ‘troubles scenario’ really? To answer this question accurately, a few misconceptions about it being impossible have to be dealt with.
One of the most worrisome aspects of contemporary American political
discussion is the sense one often gets that many participants are
possessed by a thinly-veiled bloodlust. Sometimes, that bloodlust is not
even thinly-veiled; after the unarmed USAF veteran Ashley Babbit was
fatally shot through a locked door in the Capitol building, many
anonymous (and some less anonymous) commentators intimated that perhaps
the problem with police violence in America wasn’t that officers were
shooting and killing too many unarmed people — but rather that maybe they just weren’t killing enough of them. Following
a wave of destructive riots that tore through many cities in the United
States last year, this turn toward open celebration of equally useless
violence when it is visited on the enemy team speaks to a dangerous sort of polarisation.
From this sort of bloodlust flows another very common assertion: that a civil war,
if waged on American soil, would be over quickly, and lead to a fairly
effortless massacre of any insurrectionists in flyover America. The idea
here is that the US military is so advanced, and has so many tanks,
gunships, fuel air bombs, and drones, that the federal government is
simply assured of victory. As such, a civil war is an unlikely or
impossible scenario, given the dramatic imbalance of power between the
state and even a numerically large, dissatisfied internal population.
But this is a dangerous misconception. While the US military is
indeed powerful and lavishly funded, it is a military designed to fight
other states. Warfare between states is bound by rules and regulations;
it is based on consent. This might seem a strange assertion to make, given that a country cannot just decline
a war declaration from an enemy, but it holds true. There’s a formal or
informal understanding of who is an actual combatant and who is not.
In contrast, warfare in primitive or tribal societies does not make
any distinction between a civilian and a soldier. There are just enemies;
ambushing and killing a 12-year-old girl drawing water at the creek is
seen as normal as killing an adult warrior. This is where the European
habit of calling uncivilised peoples “savages” comes from; rather than
merely being an _expression_ of racist chauvinism, Europeans were in fact
oftentimes shocked by the habit of Native Americans and other peoples to
‘not play by the rules’.
But playing by the rules is a mug’s game. An insurgency in America
has about as much reason as the Native Americans once did to follow the
rules of their enemies; they are under no compulsion to wear blinking
strobe lights to make themselves easier for the drones to target. And
that simple fact means that a counterinsurgency effort in the US is
almost certainly doomed to fail.
In counterinsurgency warfare, everything that makes the US armed
forces great — high-tech weapon platforms with immense destructive power
— are not just useless, but counterproductive. A tank parked outside a
shopping mall in Idaho will either spend its time shooting at nothing,
or be at a very high risk of killing innocent American civilians for the
high crime of ‘looking suspicious’. Droning American weddings, like
Afghan ones, does very little to advance the goals of a
counterinsurgency. If anything, it only makes the relatives of the dead
more likely to fight.
The US armed forces are also at least an order of magnitude too small
to do the job effectively. During Operation Banner, the British
military deployed at most 20,000 soldiers in Northern Ireland to keep a
lid on that wayward province. The US armed forces consist of about 1.3
million active duty personnel, but this is spread out over five branches
(Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard), and only a small
minority of military personnel are actually combat troops. It is thus
very unlikely that the armed forces could scramble more than 100,000
regulars willing to do the job of holding an M4 carbine and patrolling
down the main street of Anytown, Texas. To put that into perspective,
Northern Ireland is about 2% the size of Texas.
Then there’s the fact that the most significant political split in
America is between rural areas and coastal metropoles, and the armed
forces are reliant on the very areas it would be tasked with policing as
far as recruiting soldiers goes. Red America is overrepresented
within the armed forces, and this won’t change. As such, the US doesn’t
just have too few soldiers, it has potentially unreliable ones, and the
more brutality is used against recalcitrant red states, the more these
soldiers will be ordered to fight and kill their own friends and family —
a recipe for serious mutiny and disobedience.
Finally, there is an even greater elephant in the room. In the case
of an American drone pilot accidentally blowing up a wedding in
Afghanistan, the Afghan relatives of the slain have very little
recourse. If an American drone pilot blows up an American wedding,
however, that drone pilot and his or her family lives in the
United States. Given the likely unreliability of some significant parts
of the armed forces, the names and addresses of the most hated butchers
are unlikely to stay a secret for long.
In Northern Ireland, for example, the provisional IRA not only
attacked soldiers; they made a habit of assassinating the officers,
commanders and politicians both for revenge and as a display of might.
>From Lord Mountbatten to a near-miss against Margaret Thatcher herself,
to a score of less well-known targets, the IRA illustrates just how
difficult it is to protect against an enemy that can simply choose to
not wear a uniform before their enemies visit.
Now, with that all that said, how likely is it that there will be
some sort of civil conflict in the near or mid future for the United
States?
Unfortunately, the correct answer here may very well be that it is not terribly unlikely. What is significant about America today is not that it’s nearing its 250th
birthday, but rather the clear and advanced signs of sickness in the
body politic. The ranks of America’s military are now sullen and
battered after 20 years of failed nation-building, while its higher
officer corps is increasingly alienated from the world of its grunts,
mirroring that same cultural, economic and social divide that is
currently poisoning civilian life in the US.
The legitimacy of its elite has been shaken repeatedly, and faith in
the electoral process itself is now rapidly declining among large
segments of the electorate. America is currently a malarial swamp of
strange new faiths, creeds, soothsayers and itinerant prophets; from Q
to vaccine scientism to various forms of psuedo-gnosticism centered
around trans people. To a student of history, this should also be a
familiar — and quite ominous — sign: France in the 1780s had its own
scientism and mesmerism, and Russia in the 1910s and 1980s was rife with
soothsayers and itinerant preachers of new strange faiths.
Most ominously of all, however, looms the growing supply crisis. This
crisis would be tolerable if it merely implied a lack of variety at the
grocery store. In such a case, 2020s America might just have ushered in
a new golden age of Soviet-style political jokes. But it is also
creating havoc in the productive economy itself, denying farmers the
spare parts to run their harvesters and car manufacturers the metals
they need to make cars. The longer the crisis goes on, the more broken
the economy will become, and the more painful the necessary reforms will
be, once America’s elites truly wake up to the danger.
If there is one time throughout history where civil wars are
actually likely to occur, it is precisely when a delegitimated elite
undertakes necessary reforms after letting underlying problems fester
for decades. That is when states are at their weakest, and when they are
vulnerable to the worst forms of internal disasters. Sadly, that might
just be where America is headed today.