Is America headed for collapse?

‘Predictions are hard, especially about the future’ (Danish proverb) 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.

If an event has zero probability, then we need not waste any time on it.

If some development seems at all possible, we can investigate the probability by creating scenarios and considering their plausibility.

For example, is there going to be a civil war in the United States?

“Budyet grazhdanskaya voyna?” was the question every foreign journalist got asked daily by ordinary Russians in the last years of the old Soviet Union. (“Will there be a civil war?”) 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 1861-65, 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.

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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 President Donald Trump and his friends call them a “radical left terror group”.

The US 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. 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 answerable to Trump.

The fourth blue city to be picked off is Portland, Oregon, which Trump described as “war-ravaged”. 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 “Make America Great Again” control.

If they are arrested, it’s all over, and there are ICE offices in every state. The governors almost certainly have contingency plans 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.

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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 big changes of that kind usually happen overnight.

I’m not predicting that this will happen, but it is a non-zero possibility. Maybe a 10% 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 United States, unfortunately, I can.

Turning the US into an authoritarian state on the model of Hungary, with “free” but predictable elections, would be a betrayal of a quarter-millennium of American history. (Probability 30%)

Invading neighbours (Canada and Greenland) rarely works out well in the 21st century (10-15%).

Tariff wars end in tears all round (70%). But the most depressing scenario suggests that the US 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.

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