Justin Trudeau is not likely to ask about the possibility of a civil war bursting out in the United States in the coming years when he meets with Joe Biden at the G7 summit this week in Italy. That is already an issue being considered by a think group that is part of Trudeau’s cabinet. In a spring report titled “Disruptions on the Horizon,” a quiet office known as Policy Horizons Canada proposed an American civil war as a scenario that Ottawa should consider preparing for. The 37-page dossiers contained this hypothetical, which described the prospect in 15 succinct words: “U.S. ideological divisions, democratic erosion, and domestic unrest escalate, plunging the country into civil war.”
To discover that your next-door neighbor is growing uneasy about the prospect of graphic violence occurring in your house is an unpleasant experience. A lot of doomsday predictions regarding US politics under Trump have been made. Left-wing think tanks, political advisors, and scholars have been engaging in nonstop conjecture and role-playing since the election of 2016, supposedly in an attempt to uphold democracy. Much of this has actually come across as self-indulgence. In 2020, there was a crazy war-game simulation in which Biden and his allies encouraged the West Coast as a whole to break away from the union.
It seemed to me that the Policy Horizons study was different—it was not dark fan fiction from American partisans, but rather a serious branch of a friendly foreign government considering our country’s crackdown. In light of this, how serious should people on both sides of the 49th parallel take this? Hundreds of experts and government officials were polled for the Policy Horizons report regarding disruptive occurrences for which Canada would be well-prepared. The possibility that those events would transpire, their potential timing, and the potential amount of disruption they may cause were then used by the writers to categorize those possibilities. The American Civil War was considered an unlikely yet extremely significant event. Other scenarios in that general category included the proliferation of homemade biological weapons; the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, leading to mass death and food shortages; and the outbreak of World War 3.
The portrayal of an American civil war in a report, as noted by John McArthur, a Brookings Institution expert and member of the Policy Horizons steering group, suggests that Canadians are more concerned with U.S. politics than they are with a fight akin to the Civil War of 1861. McArthur made it clear that he was speaking for himself and not Policy Horizons, pointing out that the Trump administration’s isolationism and protectionism damaged Canada’s economic ties and had a detrimental effect because of Trump’s actions toward Trudeau and Canada. McArthur emphasized that Canadians are extremely concerned about any instability in the United States, which complicates Canada’s place in the world.
Professor Catherine Beaudry of Polytechnique Montréal was less optimistic about the report. Though she thought future reports should evaluate the government’s ability to act in different situations, she appreciated the report’s outline of hypothetical scenarios to help prepare for and comprehend their interconnection. Although a spokesman for Policy Horizons noted that the report’s content does not always reflect the opinions of the Canadian government or its departments, attempts to reach the organization for comment were unsuccessful.
Had they perhaps realized that speculating about an ally’s incipient civil war could come off as impolite? Without a more developed sense of Policy Horizons thinking, I asked myself: What would an American civil war look like? Not, I suspect, a huge section of the country breaking away and announcing its departure by shelling a military base. The Confederate approach seems obsolete against today’s vast, professionalized, high-tech federal military. Most contemporary civil wars — in Yemen or Sudan, for instance — are not helpful reference points for the United States. They involve weak governments in poor countries, often with destabilizing interference from neighboring regimes.
There is only one plausible scenario for an American civil war, and it is based on a recent, close-by example—Canada’s own—rather than one from a remote or far-off history. In the 1960s, sectional militants believed that undesirable changes had occurred to the federal system, therefore they launched a prolonged and violent attack on the state known as Quebec separatist. This was not a full-fledged civil war. After almost ten years of bombs, thefts, and kidnappings, Quebec separatists kidnapped and killed the province’s deputy premier, Pierre Laporte, during the October Crisis of 1970. In the aftermath of January 11, the United States remains a heavily armed nation with a contentious federal structure and strong, independent province identities. This was a time of horrific, violent civil unrest. Texas and California are two examples of our states that already function as quasi-national entities. The nation as a whole will undoubtedly detest the incoming president, and a sizable portion of the populace will probably view him as illegitimate.
It is easy to understand how that combination of circumstances could result in our own October catastrophe. Does Justin Trudeau have any thoughts on that? His leadership is a holdover from that era as well. One reason Pierre Trudeau, the founder of current Canadian politics, rose to prominence and became a dynasty-founding leader was because of his ruthless suppression of the Quebec militants. Perhaps Justin Trudeau doesn’t need a think group to inform him that the stability of North America is at jeopardy due to the roiling rage over the border. However, he is not his father, and Canada is not facing this dilemma. As neighbors and onlookers, they currently play a different role—that of observers.
