US on the Brink of Civil War

By Alfredo Jalife-Rahme – Dec 23, 2021

After three US generals warned of a fractured Army, a civil war scenario, as a coup attempt after the 2024 presidential election, CIA consultant Barbara Walter judges that the US exhibits several signs that foretell a “pre-civil war” insurgency.

Three retired generals shocked public opinion in an article in The Washington Post, an establishment newspaper, that “the military should prepare now for an insurrection in 2024”.

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of the lethal insurrection on Capitol Hill, former Generals Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba and Steven Anderson display their “concern about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and its potential for lethal chaos in the Army.”

They also raise the likelihood of a “coup d’état” and confess that during the 6/1 insurrection – which Gen. Mark Milley calls a domestic 9/11 – a “disturbing number of veterans and active members of the military were part of the attack on the Capitol.”

What’s more, “A group of 124 retired Army officers” dubbed Flag Officers 4 America released a missive endorsing Trump’s assertions of presidential election fraud.

The triad of generals exposed the defiance of Brigadier General Thomas Mancino, in charge of the Oklahoma National Guard – a southern bastion of Trumpism – who claims to obey his actual commander-in-chief, who is Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, rather than Biden’s orders on the controversial issue of mandatory vaccinations.

The triad of generals warned of the “potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along party lines in a scenario of another insurrection.” With the U.S. “still more divided than ever,” steps must be taken “to prepare for the worst.”

On the same day, University of California San Diego political scientist Barbara Walter, who sits on a CIA advisory panel – which anticipates when countries are sliding into civil war, weighing various factors such as “anti-democratic tendencies” – comments that “we are closer to civil war than any of us might believe.”

Dr. Walter is part of the Political Instability Task Force, formerly the government’s State Failure Task Force, which uses quantitative methods in hot spots around the globe. Walter focuses her controversial findings in her forthcoming book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them.

One of her crucial sentences, previewed by The Washington Post, reads as follows: “If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in the United States – in the same way you saw events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela – you would resort to a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make a civil war likely. And what you would find is that the U.S., a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

Based on the sui generis taxonomy of the Political Instability Task Force, she asserts that the US has already passed the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases, leaving the question of whether the capture of the Capitol on 6/1 is part of the “open insurgency” phase.

Dr. Walter dismantles the myth that the US constitutes a democracy and, based on quantitative criteria and factors, judges that the US brutally declined with Trump from the Polity Index score of 10 to 5 points, so that the US “ceased to be the world’s oldest and most continuous democracy”.

She categorized the US as an anocracy: an intermediate category between democracy and autocracy.

In my opinion, this is a reductionist definition that errs on the side of sociologism and does not take into account that the US, in reality, from the point of view of its preponderantly financialist system, has been reduced to a vulgar plutocracy, the government of the wealthiest, which would be even better defined in its current phase as a cyberbancocracy, where the gigabanks – BlackRock, Vanguard, StateStreet, Fidelity – that control the digital technological jewels of Wall Street and Silicon Valley predominate: GAFAM -Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft-, which I detailed in my book La Invisible Cárcel Cibernética GAFAM (Invisible Cyberspace Prison GAFAM).

According to Yale University political scientist Dana Milbank, who analyzes Walter’s position in The Washington Post, the US “is on the [first] rung of the open insurgency stage” of civil conflict. She quotes the University of California San Diego scholar that “once countries cross that threshold,” as the CIA predicts, we can expect “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks involving terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.”

How hyperbolic this sounds to an observer who ignores current US domestic politics and its ominous phase of deliquescence with centrifugal tendencies, which are overtaking centripetal forces, in a dynamic of dangerous proto-balkanization.

Dana Milbank answers himself and not without justification: “It is not an exaggeration to say that the survival of the United States is at risk”.

Karen and Gregory Treverton -Gregory belonged to the Rand Corporation thinktank, and Oxford Analytica, and was a powerful former head of the National Intelligence Council that publishes the famous Global Trends report every four years – published a disturbing premonitory article in the British Internet portal The Article, notoriously Trumpophobic: Civil war is coming, in which all that remains to be known is whether “it will be fought with legal suits and secessions or with AK15-S machine guns.”

Nevertheless, the Treverton couple, both from the Democratic Party, admit that the “warning clouds were already evident long before the Republican Party realized it could not win clean elections.”

The Treverton couple argues that “perhaps the breakup will take the form of a looser federation” when Republican supporters hold twice as many guns as their Democratic counterpart.

They failed to add that about 70% of the US Army is white and may succumb to Trumpian supremacism.

It sounds interesting that the notoriously anti-Trump multimedia would resort to the ominous specter of civil war when the controversial former president has returned to the electoral battlefield amid projections of a Republican win in the November 2022 midterm elections, when his party may control both the House and Senate, due more to the serious mistakes of President Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris – from the failed immigration issue, to the lousy handling of the pandemic, to the unstoppable hyperinflation – than to the successes of the Republicans.

The worst case scenario foresees the return of Trumpism, with or without Trump, as a preamble to an imminent civil war, on the part of the multimedia addicted to the Democratic Party, may become a self-fulfilling prophecy due to the fact that today the US carries in its core all the dissolving elements of its fractured society.

Alfredo Jalife-Rahme: Analyst of geopolitics and globalization. Columnist and commentator in several international newspapers, radio and television stations. Postgraduate professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Geopolitics and Globalization. Author of several books. Named by Voltaire Network of France as ‘Latin America’s leading geopolicologist’.

Featured image: An explosion caused by police ammunition on Capitol Hill in Washington. @LeahMillis Reuters

(Internationalist 360º)