'We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,' said Dr. Barbara Walter, who serves on the Political Instability Task Force, which guides intelligence analysts on countries overseas that might be on the brink of conflict.
The University of California San Diego academic, who has studied hotspots like Syria and helps run a blog on political violence, said the U.S. meets several of the telltale signs that are part of a road to insurgency.
'No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,' she writes in her forthcoming book, How Civil Wars Start.
'If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory,' she writes, according to the Washington Post.
She concludes that the U.S. has gone through the 'pre-insurgency' and 'incipient conflict' phases – without deciding whether the Jan. 6th Capitol riot constitutes part of the 'open insurgency' phase. She also labels the U.S. as an 'anocracy' – a category between a democracy and an autocracy.
