While everyone is watching the world stage and some are predicting WWIII, isn't there a good chance that the USA is getting close to some kind of civil war?
All the ingredients are there and it won’t take much to put it all together.
Tensions are definitely higher than last decade and the decade before. The collapse of the Soviet Union and relatively good economy of the 1990s relieved a lot of tension.
But we’re still a ways from WW3. We’re back into a pretty normal range for the Cold War. We know China and Russia have the will and the means to try and expand. But they know we have the will and the means to stop them in certain places. That’s important because the first two world wars have very different start points that we aren’t close to meeting.
World War 1 was started by chains of alliances between countries. They were meant to keep balance but they were decentralized. So there was no committee ruling on Article 5 or bringing new members in. Which is how anarchists in Serbia set off the alliances like a chain of explosives. Both the CSTO and NATO contain rules preventing such a thing. WW1 was helped by cultural views on war. Europe hadn’t had a proper industrialized war yet. So everyone thought it was going to be another affair with picnics and a couple large set piece battles.
World War 2 was started by a specific ideology in a country run by meth heads. Hitler was as high as he was crazy. There were a lot of problems left over from World War 1 that gave him an opening but at the core of it all, if he had made a level headed assessment he’d have known he could never win against the US/UK/RUS alliance.
Neither Russia nor China wants the economic devastation that would result from a World War 3. They aren’t meth heads and the glory of war is long dead. There’s some rumors too that the Chinese are looking at what western equipment can do in Ukraine and they’re currently purging some officers who insisted we were exaggerating our capabilities. (They built plans and bought equipment over decades on those recommendations). Russia couldn’t invade a cardboard box much less a NATO country at this point.
Now, American Civil War 2. It’s not likely for two reasons. One, fighting a war is far more complicated than it used to be. You could gather a bunch of rifles and cannons to have a serious force in 1861. Now days whoever the Army sides with will win in hours. It’s not an exaggeration to say a militia could run off a town’s police force, set up checkpoints, and take over. But while they were celebrating they’d get hit by air to ground missiles and 25mm rounds from a single helicopter they will never see or hear. And they certainly won’t see the special forces team in the woods designating targets. If for some reason they did need to be engaged by the regular infantry it would not go well for them at all. They need to deal with drones, snipers, mortars, artillery, and light tanks. Furthermore there have been head to head practice fights between veterans and militias. (Reality TV in the 2000’s got wild.) It never ended well for the militia. They would be outmaneuvered, pinned down, and dead, in about 5 minutes.
Two, the modern model is terrorism. In a Civil War you need a large percentage of support. You have to field whole divisions and the logistics therein. But for political violence you need support from 10 percent of the population in a region to have places to hide and logistics. Also, you can cause havoc with a force the size of a company.
I would say it’s highly likely we’ll see more political violence before we either come back together as a country or we allow a region to become autonomous or even independent.
That was an episode of preppers. I can’t remember if it was Discovery or History that ran the show. But yeah they thought they were going to blind night vision with flashlights. It didn’t work.
I was also trying to generalize personal experience where someone would bring their “friends” to mandatory fun paintball. Well now that became a lot more fun real quick.
Unlikely. The military has a weird culture. It’s far more likely to stake out a position in the center for as long as possible. Going after violent extremists on both sides. In the end though it will choose the Constitution over anything else. So if there’s one side still trying to use that, that’s whose going to get the military. For reference, the military was so supportive of Trump and his anti Constitution rhetoric that they voted blue in 2020. That’s not because it suddenly had more progressives or liberals. It’s because the conservatives in the military are Constitutionalists.
I played a little paintball, and the most impressive game was when I had sprinted along the perimeter to get a sniper angle on a path, wait 20 seconds, and have a Marine Recon AD barrel roll from behind a tree 30 feet from me that I never heard and put a single round in my goggles before I knew what was happening. It bounced but I wasn’t about to call that anything but legit AF.
I saw the military haircut and asked him after the round.
I’m great against paper targets…but that’s not the same as combat and I am crystal clear about it.
You don’t need the USA to be involved for a World War to start. If anything, a civil war in the USA could help spark one.
The peace built after World War II was mainly founded on American and Soviet force not intervening with each other, then American military dominance. Without a USA like power acting as a guarantor of the current international system, it is very likely that decades of pent up aggression will start to spill forward across the globe, including between other major powers.
From an outsiders perspective. I think USA is heading there, though probably way up there like 20-30 years from now. My reasoning, both side of parties refusal to compromise, government shutdowns, and radicalization of the both parties. Then there is Trump egging to be the first dictator. There is proud boys and antifa given time will eventually militarize. There is also increase in inequality. Eventually in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcers table.
Civil War? No. What is possible and already happening at State levels is following the direction of Hungry. Authoritarian judges, politicians are being installed across the US and progressive and even moderate laws being challenged. Roe vs Wade comes to mind. On the federal level we see the installment of far right federal judges and Supreme Court justices. All coming together to help install far right authoritarian in the executive and legislative branches. Yes, socially, Americans have been more divided in the past, but this time there’s is a deliberate attempt to change the governance of US from the inside through brute force.
Not really: for context, the civil rights movement in 50’s and 60’s was far more violent, like actually violent with military being called in across many American cities.
Civil wars happen when people are hungry, lack shelter and jobs. None of that is happening here right now. Protesting and rioting is nothing when people have homes to return to and McDonald’s to pick up on the way home.
As for causes of civil war, economic inequality plays a large role, as does political deprivation, both of which are rampant (you can thank late-stage capitalism for the first, and the far-right for the second). There are other factors at play, of course, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility for the US to go there.
600K people spread across the US really isn’t that many to deal with. Even if they were all in one place, they wouldn’t be able to do much damage to most of the country before being contained.
1 in 8 being food insecure also is not high enough. Choosing less nutritious food options is a measurement of it, so you could still be eating, just not good food because you live in the middle of a food desert. Most folks in the US are not food insecure.
You’re going to have to tick that number up to over half of the US not being able to eat once a day or more. Like the depression, or worse, but without any government assistance.
Sure hungry and starving are different. A large portion of our homeless have mental or drug addiction issues. They need help, but they’re not going to start a civil war.
However, the empirical evidence linking individual income inequality and civil conflict is mixed.
No one is starting a civil war because their boss makes 3 times what they do.
Yeah, there will be some domestic terrorist cells that pop up, but my bet is 90% of the people who want to participate would shit their pants and run the second bullets start flying.
Add comment