I wrote today for Politico about the talk of a coming civil war. I had to look at Barbara Walter’s widely praised book on civil wars for the column, and it’s pretty terrible:
In her book, Walter makes a sustained case for the coming of a low-intensity civil war. Much of her material about internal conflicts in foreign countries, though, serves to demonstrate how different we are from the places that descend into civil war.
Our political tribalism is nothing like the dispute between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, wherein the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy in the 1960s, leading to the exile of Tutsis who formed a rebel army and invaded the country in 1990. It bears zero resemblance to Lebanon’s multi-sided conflict from 1975-1990, which included a dizzying array of religious and ethnic factions and foreign powers taking a large hand in the fighting.
Countries torn by civil wars are prone to endemic instability and divisions that go much deeper than disputes over the causes of inflation, how much federal money we should spend fighting climate change, or whether abortion should be legal.
The United States has a long-standing, widely-respected Constitution, a durable two-party system, national elections that still hinge on persuadable voters in the middle, and a federal system that coheres while giving latitude to state and local differences. The same can’t be said of Syria, Somalia, Congo, Tajikistan or any number of other places that are or have been beset by civil war.