LONDON, U.K.—A Danish proverb says, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future,” but still we make them, especially when we care about the future. Here are some about the future of the United States in the next three-and-a-bit years, expressed as probabilities, although you should not trust the numbers.

We can, for example, calculate the probability that a person will die within X years if we know their age, their sex, and a few other details. According to U.S. actuarial tables, a 79-year-old male American with a body mass index of around 30, like President Donald Trump, stands a 10-per-cent chance of dying before the end of 2028. But the tables can’t tell you whether Trump is in that 10 per cent.

Prediction is hardest when events have complex causes and more than two possible outcomes, but that includes most historical events you might be interested in. However, you can start by deciding whether an event is zero probability or non-zero probability.

If an event has zero probability, then we need not waste any further time on it. If some development seems at all possible, we can investigate the probability further by creating scenarios and considering their plausibility. For example, is there going to be a civil war in the U.S.?

“Budyet grazhdanskaya voyna (Will there be a civil war)?” was the question every foreign journalist got asked daily by ordinary Russians in the last years of the old Soviet Union. I would always say “no,” and that turned out to be right. I’m hearing the same question now with an American accent, so let’s try it again.

Like the civil war of 1861-1865, an American civil war in the 2020s would technically be about states’ rights. It would also have elements of religious war, race war, and old-fashioned left-right ideological struggle, but the main division would be between large blocs of “red” and “blue” states.

Most cities are “blue,” and one by one, they are coming under siege by the red-controlled federal government. The reds (Republicans) are hard right, and the blues (Democrats) are centre-left, although Trump and his friends call them a “radical left terror group.”

The U.S. army is generally complying with orders of questionable legality from the White House to assist in occupying blue cities. (The Judge Advocate General’s Department, which would normally provide soldiers with legal reasons to refuse illegal orders, has been gutted in recent months.) But National Guard citizen soldiers are no good for the hard stuff.

Trump’s shock troops are the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) troopers, a 20,000-strong masked-up private army directly answerable to Trump. The fourth blue city to be picked off, just last week, is Portland, Ore., which Trump described as “war ravaged” (i.e. there were demonstrators).

So what should Oregon Governor Tina Kotek do? (She told Trump “we don’t need help,” to no avail.) She and her fellow blue-state governors are the only source of constitutional authority that has not fallen under MAGA control. If they are arrested, it’s all over, and there are ICE offices in every state.

The governors almost certainly have contingency plans in place already to avoid arrest and work from hiding. They might not exercise that option if push came to shove, but they’d be foolish not to keep it in reserve.

This is not a likely scenario, but it is certainly plausible. And it’s America, where most people have guns, so the civil war could kick off right there. People find it hard to believe that it could come like that, practically overnight, but, in fact, big changes of that kind usually happen overnight. You wake up in a different world.

I’m not predicting that this will happen, but it is a non-zero possibility. Maybe a 10-per-cent probability, maybe less. But I’d be less confident about saying “no” to an American civil war than I was in the old Soviet Union because there I couldn’t figure out how people would choose sides. In the U.S., unfortunately, I can.

There are lots of less awful scenarios we could imagine, but few good ones. Turning the U.S. into an authoritarian state on the model of Hungary, with “free” but entirely predictable elections, would be a betrayal of a quarter-millenium of American history. (Probability 30 per cent?)

Invading the neighbours—Canada and Greenland—rarely works out well in the 21^st century. (Ten to 15 per cent.) Tariff wars end in tears all round. (Seventy per cent.) But the most depressing scenario suggests that the U.S. has begun a high-speed recapitulation of the past century of Argentinian history. That would deliver it to the state Argentina is in now in only 20 or 30 years.

I’m not suggesting a probability for that, because I cannot believe how high it seems.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. The previous book, The Shortest History of War, is also still available.

The Hill Times

 

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