This is the first of two essays. It deals with the reasons why civil war is likely to dominate the military and strategic affairs of the West in the coming years, contrary to the typical expectations of the future war literature, and generally the strategic logic which shall underpin such wars. The next essay will address specifically the actions and strategies which existing military forces might pursue before and during these conflicts.
Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build—the three things together … Most of the rest of the world is a jungle…[i]
So said EU Foreign Affairs chief Josep Borrell in Bruges in October 2022. Future dictionaries will use it as an example of the definition of hubris.
That is because the major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today emanates from its own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and, in my view, elite pusillanimity. Some academics have begun to sound the alarm, notably Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start—and How to Stop Them, which is concerned primarily with the dwindling domestic stability of the United States.[ii] To judge from President Biden’s September 2022 speech in which he declared ‘MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’ governments are beginning to take heed, albeit cautiously and awkwardly.[iii]
The field of strategic studies, however, is largely silent on the issue, which is strange because it ought to be something of concern. Why is it correct to perceive the increasing danger of violent internal conflict erupting in the West? What are the strategies and tactics likely to be employed in the civil wars to come in the West and by whom? These are the questions which I shall address in this essay.
Causes
The literature on civil wars is united on two points. Firstly, they are not a concern of states that are rich and, secondly, nations which possess governmental stability are largely free of the phenomenon. There are degrees of equivocation on how much regime type matters, though most agree that securely-perceived-to-be-legitimate democracies and strong autocracies are stable. In the former, people do not rebel because they trust the political system works justly overall. In the latter, they do not because authorities identify and punish dissenters before they have a chance.
Factionalisation is another main concern, but extremely heterogeneous societies are not more prone to civil war than very homogenous ones. This is put down to the high ‘coordination costs’ between communities that exist in the former, which mitigate against the formation of mass movements. The most unstable are moderately homogenous societies, particularly when there is a perceived change in the status of a titular majority, or significant minority, which possesses the wherewithal to revolt on its own. By contrast, in societies comprised of many small minorities ‘divide and conquer’ can be an effective mechanism of controlling a population.[iv]
In my view, there is no good reason to fault the main thrust of extant theory on civil war causation as described above. The question, rather, is whether the assumption of the conditions which have traditionally placed Western nations outside the frame of analysis of people concerned with large-scale and persistent eruptions of violent civil discord are still valid.
The evidence strongly suggests that they are not. Indeed, as far back as the end of the Cold War some perceived that the culture which ‘won’ that conflict was itself beginning to fragment and degenerate. In 1991, Arthur Schlesinger argued in The Disuniting of America that the ‘cult of ethnicity’ increasingly endangered the unity of that society.[v] This was prescient.
Consider the striking findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer over the last twenty years. ‘Distrust’, it concluded recently, ‘is now society’s default emotion.’[vi] The situation in America, as shown in related research is acutely bad. As of 2019, even before the contested Biden election and the Covid-epidemic, 68 per cent of Americans agreed it was urgently necessary to repair levels of ‘confidence’ in society in government, with half averring that a ‘cultural sickness’ is what fading trust represented.[vii]
In sociological terms, what this collapse of trust reflects is a plunge in the stock of ‘social capital’, which is both a kind of ‘superglue’, a factor of societal cohesion, as well as a ‘lubricant’ that allows otherwise disparate groups in society to get along.[viii] That it is in decline is disputed by no one, and neither is anyone seriously unclear on the unhappy consequences.
There is dispute over its causation, however. Chancellor Angela Merkel once pointed the finger directly at multiculturalism, declaring that in Germany it had ‘utterly failed’, an idea that was echoed six months later by then Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain. He elaborated that ‘It ghettoises people into minority and majority groups with no common identity.’[ix] Such statements by leaders, both noteworthy centrists, of large, ostensibly politically stable, Western states cannot easily be dismissed as populist demagoguery.[x]
Additionally, ‘political polarisation’ has been enhanced by social media and identity politics, on which more below. Digital connectivity tends to drive societies towards greater depth and frequency of feelings of isolation in more tightly drawn affinity groups. Each of these is guarded by so-called ‘filter bubbles’, carefully constructed membranes of ideological disbelief that are constantly reinforced by active and passive curation of media consumption.[xi]
What might be described as ‘intertribal conflict’ is by no means confined to the virtual spaces of the Internet; rather, it manifests also in physical fighting in a self-reinforcing feedback cycle. Many examples of this from recent headlines might be given. A good one though, is the city of Leicester in Britain, which over the last year has witnessed recurring violence between the local Hindu and Muslim populations, both sides animated by intercommunal tensions in distant south Asia. A Hindu mob marched through the Muslim part of town chanting ‘Death to Pakistan’.[xii]
What this reflects above all is the considerable irrelevance of Britishness as an aspect of the pre-political loyalty of significant fraction of two of the largest minorities in Britain. Who wants to fight whom and over what? The answer in this case to this good strategic question has very little to do with the nominal nationality of the people who have observably already begun to fight.
Finally, to this volatile social mix must be added the economic dimension, which can only be described as extremely worrisome. By common estimation, the West has already started another economic downturn, a long overdue recurrence of the 2008 financial crisis, combined with the fallout of the deindustrialisation of Western economies, a notable by-product of which is the progressive de-dollarisation of global trade that has been turbocharged by sanctions on Russia, which has also induced a ballistic rise in the costs of basic goods such as energy, food, and housing.[xiii]
In terms of economic financialization, debt issuance, and consumption, the West has reached the end of the line, which means that a gigantic gap in expectation of well-being is opening. If there is one other thing that the literature on revolution agrees upon it is that expectation gaps are dangerous.[xiv] Again, simply put, a time-honoured means of controlling the rise of incipient mobs is the provision by the ruling powers of ‘bread and circuses’, in other words basic consumption and cheap entertainment—the efficacy of both of which is rapidly attenuating in the present day.
To conclude this section, it can be said that a generation ago all Western countries could still be described as to a large degree cohesive nations, each with a greater or lesser sense of common identity and heritage. By contrast, all now are incohesive political entities, jigsaw puzzles of competing identity-based tribes, living in large part in virtually segregated ‘communities’ competing over diminishing societal resources increasingly obviously and violently. Moreover, their economies are mired in a structural malaise leading, inevitably in the view of several knowledgeable observers to systemic collapse.[xv]
Conduct
The intimacy of civil war, its political intensity, and its fundamentally social quality, plus the acute accessibility to attack on all sides of everyone’s weak points can make them particularly savage and miasmic. The Russian Civil War which followed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 is a particularly good example. It is a form of war in which people suffer raw cruelty and fanaticism not for what they have done but for what they are.[xvi]Perhaps civil wars in the West can be contained to the level of loathsomeness of those of Central America of the 1970s and 1980s. In which case ‘normal’ life will remain possible for the fraction of the population that is rich enough to insulate itself from the larger milieu of political assassinations, death squads and intercommunal reprisals, plus thriving criminal predation which typify a society in the process of tearing itself apart.[xvii]
The trouble is that the urge to fight, indeed the wish to accelerate towards conflict, is not confined to just one group—as one might gather from the recent alarm over far-Right populism—but is of a rather more general character, with radicalism increasingly visible in all sorts of communities.[xviii] Consider, for instance, the following lines from a French leftist tract published in 2007:
It’s well known that the streets teem with incivilities. The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable… Its flows amount to more than the transportation of people and commodities. Information and energy circulate via wire networks, fibres and channels, and these can be attacked. In our time of utter decadence, the only thing imposing about temples is the dismal truth that they are already ruins.[xix]
At this point in the history of conflict, it hardly seems necessary to explain the techniques of taking existing social divisions in society and tearing them into chasms because they have been widely studied.[xx] The defence establishments of the West are very familiar with such matters as they have presented themselves in the varied foreign theatres in which they have been embroiled as part of the so-called War on Terror.
Is it a complete wonder that those lessons and ideas should have found their way back home? The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare co-written by MGEN Michael Flynn, former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency and President Trump’s initial National Security Advisor, is a well-designed handbook and explicit in its aim, which is to educate people in the West about revolt. In his own words, he wrote it because ‘I never dreamed the greatest battles to be waged would be right here in our homeland against subversive elements of our own government.’[xxi]
Over the last thirty years the West has preoccupied itself thanklessly in an expeditionary capacity in the invertebrate civil wars of others. It ought to have learned that it is impossible to maintain an integrated multi-valent society once neighbours start kidnapping each other’s children and murdering them with hand drills, blowing up each other’s cultural events, slaying each other’s teachers and religious leaders, and tearing down their icons. It is soberingly worth noting, moreover, that plenty of instances of all those things have occurred already in the West and all of them have occurred in France alone in the last five years.[xxii]
Scenarios, mostly focused on the United States, of what civil wars in the West would look like exist in the literature.[xxiii] They tend to share one thing in common particularly, which is the expectation as expressed by Peter Mansoor, professor of military history at Ohio State University, that they will,
…not be like the first [American] civil war, with armies manoeuvring on the battlefield [but] would very much be a free-for-all, neighbour-on-neighbour, based on beliefs and skin colour and religion. And it would be horrific.[xxiv]
Approximately 75 per cent of post-Cold War civil conflicts have been fought by ethnic factions.[xxv] Therefore, that civil war in the West will be likewise is unexceptional. The nature of the belief that Mansoor invokes as being important is, however, worth dwelling upon. I would suggest that the belief in question is the acceptance by all groups in society of the precepts of ‘identity politics’.
Identity politics may be defined as politics in which people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group. It is overtly post-national. It is this above all that makes civil conflict in the West not merely likely but practically inevitable, in my view.
The peculiarity of contemporary Western multiculturalism, relative to examples of other heterogenous societies, is threefold. Firstly, it is in the ‘sweet spot’ with respect to theories of civil war causation, specifically the supposed problem of coordination costs is diminished in a situation where White majorities (trending rapidly toward large minority status in some cases) live alongside multiple smaller minorities.
Secondly, thus far what has been practiced is a sort of ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ in which in-group preference, ethnic pride, and group solidarity—notably in voting—are acceptable for all groups except Whites for whom such things are considered to represent supremacist attitudes that are anathematic to social order.
Thirdly, because of the above what has emerged is a perception that the status quo is invidiously unbalanced, which provides an argument for revolt on the part of the White majority (or large minority) that is rooted in stirring language of justice. From a strategic communications perspective, a morally inflected narrative which has a clearly articulated grievance, a plausible and urgent remedy, and a receptive conscience community is powerful.[xxvi]....
....MUCH MORE
Spring, 2025 - Civil War Comes to the West, Part II: Strategic Realities
And the ETF? The Tuttle Capital Self Defense Index ETF, though we prefer concentrated direct exposure through Axon Enterprise, Inc.
Possibly also of interest:
May 2019 - "Money and trust. Amsterdam moneylenders and the rise of the modern state..."
It has always been about trust.
From the smallest group, immediate family, up through larger and larger populations, clans, tribes etc, to the nation state, and, some hope, transnational and global agglomerations.
When trust is lost people instinctively pull back to the group or even the individuals they believe they can trust.
July 2018 - Urban Warfare In A 'Smart City' Environment
May 2019 - "Feral Cities"
November 2019 - U.S. Army "Mad Scientist Blog: 'Three Futurist Urban Scenarios'".
December 2019 - "China tests killer drones for street-to-street urban warfare, plans sales overseas"
August 2020 - U.S. Army Mad Scientist Laboratory: "The Convergence—Political Tribalism and Cultural Disinformation with Samantha North"
March 2024 - "Feral Cities, Indirect Streets, and Soft Fortification"
October 2023 - Tribes and States: Human Self-Organization
And as noted in the introduction to 2020's "Tribalism":
The title of this piece was "Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?" but that seems an incorrect characterization.
It's all about trust, which is one of the reasons globalists have a problem convincing ordinary people to share their grand dreams and visions. Many of the things globalists have promised turned out not to be true so people go to the population size they feel they can trust.
Can't trust the U.N. after the Oil-for-Food frauds and the Rwandan genocides? Let's try nation-state.
Can't trust nation-states because one part of the populace cheats or shows themselves to be hypocrites?(And it is this very point, Orwell's “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” where globalists lose the masses)Let's try states.
And then city-states and if you can't trust your fellow metropolitans we'll go with blood relations, first tribes and if there are schisms there, to immediate family. Consanguinity and all that.
Tribalism isn't a "mal" anything, it's a survival mechanism for when you really, really have to increase the odds that you will be able to trust another person....