Civil War Comes to the West

Article author: 
David Betz - King's College London, Department of War Studies
Article publisher: 
Military Strategy Magazine
Article date: 
14 March 2025
Article category: 
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body: 

... 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...

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...

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...

... 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 [multiculturalism] ghettoises people into minority and majority groups with no common identity.’...

Additionally, ‘political polarisation’ has been enhanced by social media and identity politics...

... 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...

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.

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...

... 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...

... 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)...

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There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
Theodore Roosevelt