Barbara F. Walter, civil conflict expert: ‘I see Trump provoking a foreign war to force a third term’
In her latest book ‘How Civil Wars Start,’ the sociologist analyzes what separates democracies from autocracies. She also looks at how this gray area, in which she places the United States, is conducive to fratricidal confrontation
During Donald Trump’s first term — particularly in the wake of the pandemic and the assault on the Capitol — she began to have the uneasy feeling that the “signs of instability” she had seen in places like Yugoslavia, Syria and Iraq were beginning to appear in her own neck of the woods. In 2023, the publication of her book, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, caused a considerable intellectual impact in the United States.
In the book, which includes interviews with civil war survivors and presents all the precedents to internal conflict with scientific rigor, before issuing a diagnosis, she argues that her country meets the two requirements that usually occur before a fratricidal conflict: the emergence of two factions — organized on either side of the lines marked by “race, religion, or identity” — and the fact that U.S. has fallen, for the first time since its founding, into the group of what the Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) calls “anocracies.” These regimes fall somewhere in the gray area between full democracies and pure autocracies… two systems that, for opposite reasons, never slide into civil war. This is a scale on which the former are rated +10 and the latter -10. In between are the “anocracies,” countries that rank between -5 and +5.
Some of these ideas — which generated an interesting debate and earned Walter accusations of alarmism and practicing the dangerous art of self-fulfilling prophecies — later entered pop culture with the film Civil War (2024), a dystopia that imagines a United States in the midst of a civil war between a despotic federal government and secessionist militias.
Walter gave this interview to EL PAÍS on Thursday, May 22, via videoconference from California.
Question. Did you enjoy the movie Civil War?
Answer. You know, they invited me to the premiere in New York… and I didn’t go because I didn’t want to be seen as legitimizing the movie. I would have bet [that it was] going to be a terrible movie, but I watched it and I thought they did a very, very good job of giving Americans the sense of what a civil war would feel like.
Q. It wouldn’t look like the first one: North versus South…
A. [There wouldn’t be] soldiers and tanks. I mean, that came at the end [of the film], but that middle section of the movie — when they’re traveling to Washington, DC and they’re stopping, for example, at a gas station and they see these men strung up — that’s what a 21st century civil war looks like. It’s anarchy that allows all these sub-plots and sub-fights to happen. So, you [may] have a rebel group fighting the government… but then you have energy at the local level, where, if your neighbor [wants] a piece of your farm, they just walk into your house and kill you. And Americans don’t realize that [a civil war] could unleash a whole series of micro-events. They just want to have hope that things will work out.
Q. It’s been two years since you published the book. What’s changed since then, with Trump’s return to the White House?
A. A lot has happened, but the conditions I describe [in the book] remain the same. Or worse. We are fully ensconced in an anocracy. With Trump’s return, there’s been a drastic decline in the quality of the [democratic] system. It’s happening quickly… and everything indicates that the president wants to weaken it further. If he can, he will eliminate the checks and balances on the executive branch. I can imagine a scenario in which he’s successful in creating a dictatorship.
Q. When did the United States join that anocratic club?
A. In December of 2020, we were at +5. It was the first time we hit it in the history of the United States. This lasted until early 2021, when it became clear that Trump would actually leave the presidency peacefully and that his successor (Joe Biden) wouldn’t try to exploit the undemocratic features of the U.S. system. We rose to +8. I’d now say we’re at +3, possibly lower.
The risk of civil war isn’t just if you’re in this [anocracy] zone — which we now are — but it’s exacerbated if you get there very rapidly, if you have a two-point or more change in this score. We had at least a five-point change in a matter of months. So, this is extraordinarily rapid, which tends to be quite destabilizing.
Q. In 2023, when your book came out in the U.S., the main risk for a civil war was a victory for the Democrats. Is the danger lessened now, given Trump’s victory?
A.The risk isn’t less, but it’s different. The way civil wars break out, [they’re] usually [started by] the group that’s losing power, or is out of power. So, if Biden [or Harris] had won, then [this group] would be Trump supporters in the far-right. The MAGA movement is heavily driven by white Christians: the declining population in the United States are whites. And so, had Biden won, historically, this would be the group that you would see mobilize. But they won, right?
If Trump is successful in fixing elections — if he’s able to suppress the vote and if he’s able to purge voting rolls — it becomes very hard for Democrats to win again. This would be the [Viktor] Orbán model. If we have elections, but Trump always wins, or the Republicans always win, then you’ll probably have more than half the American population essentially excluded from government. They become the group that’s out of power. And I think they would eventually begin to mobilize to demand reform… [but if it became] clear that they were never going to go get back into power through nonviolent means, I could see extreme elements [emerge] within the Democratic Party.
Q. The expansion of executive power is one of the factors that — as you point out in the book — defines the progressive loss of democracy. Perhaps this trait is what most defines the early stages of Trump’s second presidency…
A. Anybody who studies democracy in the 21st century knows that there’s this new phenomenon, whereby autocrats have figured out that they don’t have to launch a coup. The easiest way to become a dictator is to run as a populist, get elected in a perfectly legal fashion and then, very slowly, behind the scenes, start to eliminate checks and balances on executive power. And Orbán [in Hungary] was really the first to do this. He created what people call the “authoritarian playbook.” And Trump was watching, Bolsonaro was watching, Duterte [was watching]...
Trump was very forthright that this is what he intended to do. He didn’t hide anything. And, oftentimes, these types of individuals don’t hide: [they demonstrate] bravado and their supporters often like that. And then, you know, he wrote his own playbook — or he had a team who wrote it for him — which was Project 25. Anybody who read that knew exactly what he was going to do. He’s following that exactly. This isn’t a surprise.
Q. In your book, you advise Americans to wake up to the reality that theirs is no longer the oldest uninterrupted democracy. Do you think they listened?
A. No, most American citizens don’t have any understanding of our political system, which is quite complex. They don’t know anything besides democracy. I think if I were to ask most Americans if they believe we’re still a democracy, they would say “of course.” And they would call me an alarmist. Nothing will stop Trump unless the American public is willing to take to the streets and demand that he stop.
Q. Is the dormant resistance we’ve seen in Trump’s first few months another characteristic of an anocracy?
A. It takes a while for people to protest. Most people, initially, are in shock… and Trump was smart about doing things very, very quickly, so that people didn’t quite understand what was going on.
When an individual or a business or a university is under attack, the first thing they do is try to protect themselves. They go inward. They’re like: “What do I have to do to preserve my institution, my university?” They take very self-interested measures. And of course, we know that, if everybody’s acting in their own self-interest, everybody ends up being worse off. So, they have to coordinate. University presidents should be getting together: they should have a coordinated strategy against the Trump administration. [This would] actually be much more effective than each of them making concessions to Trump, which only feeds the beast.
Q. What do you think of the decision by Professors Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley, three scholars of fascism, to leave Yale and move to Toronto?
A. They’re quite wealthy. And so, financially, it really didn’t hurt them. Now they’re in a situation where they’re living in a beautiful North American city and they don’t have that overhanging threat. They can write whatever they want, free of fear. That’s a nice place to be. I can completely understand why they did what they did. And they can be even more effective, in some ways, writing from Toronto than they could from New Haven.
I don’t trust universities to protect any of us, any of the academics who are out there criticizing the Trump administration. I suspect if Trump came after us, our universities would not protect us.
Q. Returning to the subject of the book: what can we expect — in a fratricidal scenario — from the 1,600 prisoners who attacked the Capitol, whom Trump pardoned on his first day in office?
A. If Trump decides to run for a third term — or if he loses the next election and doesn’t want to leave the White House — I definitely see them coming to his defense. They already did before… they would do so now, with even more reason. They’re not going to let their country be taken away from them.
Q. The Constitution doesn’t allow for a third term...
A. Everything about Trump indicates that there’s no reason he would ever want to give up power. We have a precedent for a third or fourth term, [under Franklin D. Roosevelt]. Now, that was at a time of war… but actually, the United States being at war with another country or some violent extremist group benefits Trump. I could imagine Trump using that strategy — which I think is a strategy [Israel’s Benjamin] Netanyahu has used, for example — to provoke an outside attack on the United States, or start a war against a weaker country. Then, he could declare emergency powers. [In such a scenario], the American public is more apt to rally around him and say, “Well, it’s too dangerous to change presidents right now. We need stability in the White House.”