David Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London where he heads the MA War Studies program. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He has written a two part article for Military Strategy Magazine on the high risk of civil war coming to a Western European countries or the United States, estimating that the chances of a civil war breaking out in one of these countries in the near future is 87-95%. Civil War Comes to the West and Civil War Comes the West, Part II: Strategic Realities. It’s a rather lengthy read, but worth your time. Here is a brief excerpt;
…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…
Lower Valley Assembly 