What Would a Second US Civil War Really Look Like?

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Video originally published on April 23, 2024.

This analysis examines What Would a Second US Civil War Really Look Like? in historical and strategic context. It traces how the core developments unfolded, which institutions and actors shaped outcomes, and what those decisions changed on the ground. Rather than repeating headline-level claims, it focuses on concrete mechanisms, constraints, and tradeoffs that explain the trajectory of events. The discussion moves from Key Developments through Strategic Implications to Risk and Uncertainty, then evaluates wider consequences. The goal is to clarify not only what happened, but why these developments still matter for current planning, risk assessment, and policy decisions.

Key Takeaways

Whole swathes of the South had been economically ruined. Great cities had gone up in flame.
Over half of self-described strong Republicans, and 40 percent of strong Democrats say it's on the cards.
To an alien monitoring Earth only through the media, it might look like civil conflict in the United States is inevitable.
Before we get into that, though, we need to make one thing clear.
(TITLE): 1861, Redux Back in the Trump years, when Civil War II discourse was at its peak, pretty much every article on the subject cautioned that a future conflict wouldn't feature large armies and vast battles.

Key Developments

Whole swathes of the South had been economically ruined. Great cities had gone up in flame. It was, in short, a pretty awful experience. One you would think no-one would ever want to repeat. Yet, polling tells us that a modern repeat of the Civil War is exactly what many Americans think will happen. YouGov reports that 43 percent estimate internal conflict is anywhere from “somewhat likely” to certain in the coming decade. YouGov reports that 43 percent estimate internal conflict is anywhere from “somewhat likely” to certain in the coming decade. Over half of self-described strong Republicans, and 40 percent of strong Democrats say it's on the cards. So, with the recent movie Civil War still in theaters, now seems a good time to dive into this. To ask what a sequel to America's deadliest conflict would really look like. Because almost no experts believe it will involve vast armies clashing by night. Instead, a modern Civil War would likely be far-stranger - and far-more horrifying - than you could ever imagine. To an alien monitoring Earth only through the media, it might look like civil conflict in the United States is inevitable. Household name politicians appear on TV, calling for a “national divorce”. Polling shows a quarter of respondents want their home state to break off from the union, while over four-in-ten think a conflict is coming. Bestseller lists carry titles like How Civil Wars Start, which warns the US is already sliding towards bloodshed, and The Next Civil War, whose author has declared: “the United States is a textbook example of a country headed towards civil war.” Reviews of the recent movie complain it's “not half as alarming” as the “real” war already underway. In short, a whole lot of Americans seem to feel like this will be the decade in which they pick up their guns and set off to murder their fellow countrymen. And it's an assumption we'll mostly be following, as we try to imagine how such a thing might actually unfold. Before we get into that, though, we need to make one thing clear. A massive war erupting in the United States in the near-future is incredibly unlikely. Unlike most nations that go up in flames - from Sudan to Myanmar - the US is neither in economic freefall, just emerging from dictatorship, nor stuck with an army that often meddles in politics. As the Economist has written: “America is not like the former Yugoslavia or other imploding states. No country as sophisticated, modern, liberal, and democratic as contemporary America has ever descended into civil war.” Nor is the country at an unprecedented crisis point. While Alexander Reid Ross, an academic who studies political violence, has told the Telegraph that a “low-intensity conflict could have been feasible” amid the lockdowns, riots, and contested election of 2020, things have since simmered down.

Strategic Implications

Over half of self-described strong Republicans, and 40 percent of strong Democrats say it's on the cards. So, with the recent movie Civil War still in theaters, now seems a good time to dive into this. To ask what a sequel to America's deadliest conflict would really look like. Because almost no experts believe it will involve vast armies clashing by night. Instead, a modern Civil War would likely be far-stranger - and far-more horrifying - than you could ever imagine. (TITLE): Broken Nation? Historically, the country has weathered far greater periods of division - like the unrest of the Civil Rights years - without turning into one big battle royale. So, yeah, take everything you hear about an upcoming American conflict with a whole shaker of salt. The point of this video is mostly to run a half-fun, half-serious thought experiment, not to suggest you should go out right now to stock up on ammunition. That being said, there are enough signifiers to suggest something is rotten in the US body politic that makes pondering a second American Civil War seem relevant in a way that - say - a video about a future Canadian or Australian civil war just wouldn't. Back in the Trump years, the New Yorker interviewed Keith Mines, a guy who'd worked for the State Department navigating multiple civil conflicts around the globe. Looking at the US even pre-2020, Mines concluded there was a 65-percent chance Americans would be fighting one another on the battlefield within fifteen years. Although an outlier, his number wasn't the only startling one floating around. In 2017, Foreign Policy asked groups of national security experts to rate the chances of an upcoming internal conflict, and received a chilling average of 35-percent. In explaining himself, Mines gave a list of five conditions he felt many countries experienced before fighting started. “Entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes.” If that description feels a tiny bit like modern America to you, you might just understand where Mines was coming from. Yet, not everyone agrees these are the only triggers required before everything erupts. Were the USA about to become the next Yugoslavia, you'd expect to see other stuff in place. Stuff - like a weakening dictatorship - that's alien to today's America. But also stuff - like extreme media polarization - that's already scarily evident. (TITLE): Flashpoints In her 2022 book, How Civil Wars Start, the academic Barbara Walter writes that “countries are most vulnerable to civil war when they are somewhere between dictatorship and liberal democracy.” In her telling, internal conflicts rarely ignite in true democracies, because people can express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box.

Risk and Uncertainty

To an alien monitoring Earth only through the media, it might look like civil conflict in the United States is inevitable. Household name politicians appear on TV, calling for a “national divorce”. Polling shows a quarter of respondents want their home state to break off from the union, while over four-in-ten think a conflict is coming. Bestseller lists carry titles like How Civil Wars Start, which warns the US is already sliding towards bloodshed, and The Next Civil War, whose author has declared: “the United States is a textbook example of a country headed towards civil war.” Reviews of the recent movie complain it's “not half as alarming” as the “real” war already underway. In short, a whole lot of Americans seem to feel like this will be the decade in which they pick up their guns and set off to murder their fellow countrymen. Equally, they're unlikely to erupt in strong dictatorships since the dictator will simply round up and shoot the insurrectionists. The danger comes when local democracy is weak and discredited, but there's no strong force at the center to keep people's anger in check. Does that describe the modern United States? Certainly, there's a feeling of deep mistrust in institutions. But America remains a functioning democracy in which even the 2021 Capitol Riot was ultimately followed by a swift transfer of power. Likewise, it's hard to see much evidence of one of Walter's other potential flashpoints: factionalism, either religious or ethnic in nature. The Economist writes that: “Since the end of the cold war, perhaps 75% of civil wars have been fought between ethnic and religious groups, rather than political ones. Here what matters is not how diverse a country is, but whether politics revolves around identity.” A prime example of this is Yugoslavia, where the post-Communist era was marked by the rapid rise of ethno-nationalist parties. More-recently, the Tigray War in Ethiopia erupted when the political party of one ethnic group began to clash violently with the central government. In today's America, such ethnic sorting is rare. White people vote for both Republicans and Democrats, and - while the Democrats hold an advantage among non-white voters - more Black and Hispanic voters have begun moving towards the GOP in recent years. On the other hand, there's evidence that long-term religious sorting is underway. Since the 1980s, those with strongly-held Christian beliefs - especially evangelicals - have moved ever-more firmly into the Republican camp. That could potentially lead to a fusion of religious and political identity, akin to what happened in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. But with no rival religious group embracing the Democrats, it seems less-likely. The next item on Barbara Walter's list, though, is much-more ominous. According to her research, media bubbles can turbocharge the arrival of bloodshed.

Outlook

Before we get into that, though, we need to make one thing clear. A massive war erupting in the United States in the near-future is incredibly unlikely. Unlike most nations that go up in flames - from Sudan to Myanmar - the US is neither in economic freefall, just emerging from dictatorship, nor stuck with an army that often meddles in politics. As the Economist has written: “America is not like the former Yugoslavia or other imploding states. No country as sophisticated, modern, liberal, and democratic as contemporary America has ever descended into civil war.” Nor is the country at an unprecedented crisis point. While Alexander Reid Ross, an academic who studies political violence, has told the Telegraph that a “low-intensity conflict could have been feasible” amid the lockdowns, riots, and contested election of 2020, things have since simmered down. In most of her examples, these bubbles were made worse by the poison cocktail of ethnic tensions: the Facebook algorithm that amplified anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar at the height of the genocide. The Serbian TV channels that claimed Bosniaks were literally feeding Serb babies to lions in Sarajevo zoo. But while ethnicity and religion aren't playing such a large role in today's America, you don't have to look hard to find grotesque claims on social media. Just substitute the words “Serb,” and “Bosniak” in that last example for “Republican” or “Democrat” and you'll easily be able to find something equally-disturbing. Then there's the way social media can amplify group fears by spreading images seemingly designed to spark panic or rage. Just think back to all those videos flying around at the height of the protests and riots in 2020. The way they convinced people living far from the action that gun-toting racists or antifa activists were about to show up at their homes and kill them. Not that social media alone could push an entire nation into meltdown. It would have to combine with some other factor. Possibly something like Walter's last flashpoint: when a large group fears it is losing status. The big example here are Sunni Arabs in Iraq, who went from being the elite under Saddam Hussein to outsiders during the post-war Occupation. It was from military men among their number that Islamic State would find its most-effective soldiers, turning IS into one of the deadliest insurgent groups of all time. These, then, are the flashpoints we should be looking for if we fear a new civil war. Ones that don't necessarily revolve around big, divisive issues like slavery or abortion, but rising tensions and mutual loathing between different factions. With that out of the way, we can now turn our attention to perhaps the more-interesting question. Once it had erupted, what a second Civil War actually look like?

Historical Precedent: The American Civil War and Its Aftermath

(TITLE): 1861, Redux Back in the Trump years, when Civil War II discourse was at its peak, pretty much every article on the subject cautioned that a future conflict wouldn't feature large armies and vast battles. After all, that just wasn't the way such things unfolded in the 21st Century. As the New Yorker wrote: “Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence.” With hindsight, of course, that sentiment looks laughably wrong. Ethiopia, Sudan, and Myanmar have all since suffered catastrophic civil conflicts in which gigantic armies faced each other on battlefields. In fall of 2022, it was estimated that a million soldiers were in active combat in the Tigray War alone. Still, despite the resurgence of civil wars fought on an industrial scale, there are good reasons to think a second American showdown would be different. The main one being that there's no longer the clear geographic divide we saw in 1861. While large chunks of the South and Midwest reliably vote Republican, and many coastal states reliably vote Democrat, the internal makeup of individual states is a lot more mixed. Deep red Texas, for example, has big clusters of blue-voting districts, while sky-blue California harbors large pockets of overlooked Republicans. Now, can you imagine a hypothetical far future in which voter sorting has become so extreme that all the Texan democrats have moved to California, and vise-versa? But, right now, the geography is a lot more muddled than it was in the run-up to 1861. All of which is why the smart money is still on some sort of insurgency as the more-likely option. As to what that insurgency would look like, well history offers us a couple of useful models. But the one thing experts stress is that we, in all likelihood, wouldn't see it coming. Before most conflicts break out, countries go through what the CIA's Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency calls the “pre-insurgency” stage. The part where different groups are radicalizing, recruiting, and stockpiling weapons on the scale needed to fight a war. Oftentimes, this can be done so deeply in the shadows as to be near-invisible. It wasn't until days before the Easter Rising in 1916 that the British state realized many of its Irish subjects were going to try and throw off their shackles. Other times, it might be out in the open - but that doesn't mean we'll recognize the warning signs. The Economist tells the story of cosmopolitan Yugoslavs in places like Sarajevo, who were well aware that Serb militias were tooling up in the hills around them, but dismissed them as stupid yokels.

Polarization and the Current Crisis: Understanding the Warning Signs

Per the magazine: “One local writer recalls city folk joking about rustic Serbs “hating us because we knew about soap and water…and wearing clean socks”. Of course, that dismissiveness quickly changes once the spark is lit and the insurgency moves into the active phase. Speaking to the Telegraph, political violence researcher Alexander Reid Ross suggested the 2024 election as such a potential spark. But not just because of the threat of MAGA warriors taking up guns and attempting to re-storm the Capitol. According to the paper: “Ross believes that left-wing groups may also now tool up if trouble flares again. He fears the growth of American versions of far-left groups like Italy's Red Brigades, which killed nearly 50 people in kidnappings and robberies during the 1970s and 1980s.” In this telling, the specter of police brutality from 2020 sent certain left-wing activists into a traumatic spiral. One which has nurtured a buried sense of grievance which could be reactivated if Republicans sweep to power. They quote Ross as saying: “I do worry that if Trump gets elected again, it could spawn new left-wing formations who will not be constructive at all.” His comparison of today's far-left groups to Italy's Red Brigades also hints at a model for any such American insurgency: the Years of Lead. From the late-1960s through to the 1980s, Italy suffered a catastrophic spike in political violence. One in which the far-left carried out murders, the far-right bombed public places, politicians were assassinated, and parts of the military conspired to carry out coups. What made this era so violent wasn't just a proliferation of terrorist groups. It was the way far-left and far-right forces fed off one another, pushing one another to gruesome new heights. Foreign Policy describes the dynamics this way: “As the left grows more militant, influential, and strident in its demands, the right tries to inflame social tensions rather than defuse them.” In the Years of Lead, that “inflaming of social tensions” included a series of deadly bombings by fascist groups, including one at Bologna train station that killed over 80 people. Oftentimes, such as the Milan bank bombing of 1969, these attacks were designed to appear the work of far-left groups, which only added to the general sense of confusion and paranoia. For experts like Ross, this is the sort of civil conflict America should fear. One in which a small number of heavily armed domestic terrorists carry out competing strikes with such regularity that panic spreads through society, further radicalizing people. As Politico notes: “An army is not required to wreak sustained havoc and destabilize the country. In a deeply polarized environment, smaller pockets of armed unrest could easily ignite and spread disorder.” Bad as they were, though, the Years of Lead aren't the only insurgency that might serve as a model for the next Civil War.

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Jackson Reed

Jackson Reed creates and presents analysis focused on military doctrine, strategic competition, and conflict dynamics.

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