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