An American civil war is far-fetched, and yet …
Domestic turbulence in the US as depicted in a new film is the biggest threat to the West
James Baker, the oldest living US secretary of state, tried to hold Yugoslavia together in the turbulent 1990s by lecturing Balkan nationalists about the American Civil War, the deadliest military conflict ever experienced in his country. The outburst by the Texan was reasonable in two respects: it’s a big, bloody step to violently break up even an unhappily united country. And the consequences of a civil war live on for generations, long after its moral purpose has been forgotten.
Some of the force of the latest Alex Garland film, Civil War, currently screening in Britain and the United States, is in its echo of the 1860s when 750,000 American soldiers died for the union or the confederacy. But it also taps into current fears about the future of a modern, polarised, easily-angered society when the centre wobbles and leadership fails, when guns are freely circulated, when militias are limbering up and Donald Trump’s supporters are ready to call “Foul!” if their hero stumbles.
In the lead-up to the January 2021 assault on the Capitol, armed far-right groups like the Oath Keepers saw their mission as not only to keep the defeated Trump in power but to defend America from what they saw as apocalyptic totalitarianism. They used the language of insurrection. But there has been no subsequent stampede towards anything resembling civil war.
In real life, the only politician to invoke that kind of open conflict is a Russian, the former prime minister and Putin stooge Dmitry Medvedev. When the US finally approved a large military aid package for Ukraine, Medvedev “sincerely wished” a new civil war on America, “which I hope will be radically different from the war between north and south in the 19th century and will be waged using aircraft, tanks, artillery, all types of missiles and other weapons”. Medvedev’s wildest assumption is that the West is itself trying to foment a civil war in the single nation that is Russia and Ukraine.
Civil war in a developed democracy remains a fantasy. The premise of the Garland film is that a secessionist axis has been forged by Texas and California with the aim of toppling a despotic president who has appointed himself to a third term. The president launches airstrikes and calls in troops. Shopping malls are turned into barricades.
That’s not going to happen: the rifts in American society express themselves chiefly in the form of war-substitutes, in online feuds, rage tweets, in hate speech and mutually assured cancellation. The summer protest wave of 2020 was real enough but was moulded by the societal restraints imposed by Covid, the frustration of lockdown. “We are more melancholic than choleric,” says the US sage Ross Douthat, “more disillusioned than fanatical.”
Even so, the background music to a presidential election between two old men isn’t spreading calmness and light among America’s allies. The domestic political squabbling over Ukrainian assistance showed how much Washington’s friends and allies abroad depend on US goodwill - and how that can have an expiry date.
There is a sense among allies - watch out for the cracks at the upcoming Nato 75th anniversary summit - that at a time of high danger, urgently needed American military support will be folded into some Washington kitchen sink conflict, arms cynically weaponised by Congress. If even Israel is nervous, then most of western Europe should be too. America’s perceived turbulence is becoming the greatest strategic risk for the West.
In the interest of dramatic credibility, Garland’s fictional president is not given a Trumpian hairstyle or recognisable mannerisms but Trump, or Trump-like erratic decision-making, is at the core of his film. That is presumably why it is being released ahead of the presidential election: it’s about the individual price that might have to be paid when a leader (any leader) smashes through the institutional guard rails of a democracy. Civil war is the grimmest consequence of political dysfunction and it rarely ends well.
This week is the anniversary of the German bombing of Guernica in 1937: civil wars suck in malign foreign actors, not only in 1930s Spain but across today (Wednesday)’s Sahel from Guinea to Sudan, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, in Haiti. The divisions run through families. Many of the migrants that we complain about have had their future (and the future of their children) smashed by internal wars whose causes no one can remember.
That’s why democratic societies have to reinforce their institutions (Garland’s buffoonish president abolishes the FBI), maintain and test checks and balances, restrain leaders who govern only with the help of terrified loyalists. Even Trump in his early White House period made a semblance of surrounding himself with some knowledgeable and non-conspiratorial advisers, the so-called adults in the room. They didn’t last but some appropriate lessons should be drawn about who and how people are drawn into the inner governing circles. There are rules but it is still too easy for the soi-disant leader of the free world to become a paranoid Caesar.
Post-election trauma is built into the American system, whoever wins. Crucially, the winner this year will have to take seven swing states where majorities are razor-thin. And the loser will have to accept the luck of the draw. Both contenders will then have to persuade their supporters that the election was fair and that the nation has to work together to shape policy. One (but only one, the most gruesome) alternative can be currently viewed in the cinemas. Garland’s Civil War is both instructive and stomach-curdling.
The Times
