I would always make the case that the US internally resembles Iran right after the 1979 revolution. There's actually a book called "Iranian military in revolution and war", which talks about what happened to the army when Khomeini took over. Lots of potential parallels.
One big difference between Iran and Iraq is that the Iranian regime was "revolutionary"; it rejects the "unfolkish" elements of communism while appealing to the struggles of the masses. It seek to replace the ineffective and corrupt "secular" laws with a legal system that is more "folkish" and is based on more politically acceptable grounds for a jumping board for world revolution.
Khomeini was thinking about spreading the revolution across the Islamic world, as seen by his refusal to make peace in 1982 and his conduct of the hostage crisis in Tehran.
As soon as the regime established itself, it was challenged by a plethora of enemies, and hence, a Revolutionary Guards Corps was established. One thing to remember is that the nascent Khomeinist regime was challenged by all kinds of separatist and revolutionary movements and it took a lot of force to suppress those.
The training and capability of the Revolutionary Guard are very varied. Leadership generally contains some veteran Palestine Fedayeen and such factions, while the lower ranks are populated by barely literate urban lower classes. A chunk of early revolutionary guards were in fact bodyguards for prominent clerics.
Alternatively, you could also say that what's happening in the West with the rise of populism resembles more of Algeria in 1992 at the onset of civil war. Or the line of the Arab Spring, which Algeria serves as a forerunner of what is to come.
But lessons from those conflicts are chilling, to say at least...
As we said, liberal hawks like the host of this Substack in general act as if all of the breakdown in civ-mil relations is owed to BadOrangeMan and his MAGA base. The reality that the GWOT was like acid slowly dissolving trust in the military as the last popular bipartisan institution standing is less often admitted by the rare honest liberal or liberal-tarian. Pete Hegseth as unqualified as you may view him did not come out of nowhere. The fetishization of JSOC that many liberal hawks are rightfully criticizing now that the Dems aren't running the War Department did not come out of nowhere.
You even now see hints here and there among a few liberal hawks' Substacks that aren't Boomer Slop and older Xer Anglosphere copium that maybe drone wunderwaffen and fanatical Banderite Bushido Ukrainian willpower alone cannot hold back the Russian hordes infiltrating 500m/1km gaps in the UAF lines in their twos and threes on dirt bikes and scooters.
The libhawks or as I derogatorily call them WorldWarWoke ists like our host here are slowly perhaps starting to have an inkling of the Russian theory of victory, which is not to seize territory (anymore than the Union Army's strategic goal was to seize Atlanta or Richmond) but slowly bleed the Ukrainian Army to death. Until NATO has to choose: either openly fight and die for the Ukraine in no longer disavowable numbers of Union Jack and Triclour draped caskets (as well as most politically explosive, German combatant deaths in a country that still genuinely dreads to its bones its crushing defeat at Russian hands in 1945) coming back from the 2027-29 Battles (Russians will finish off the Donbass redoubts by Autumn 2026) for Dnipro, Kharkov, Sumy, Zaporozhye and Odessa. Or accept the painful alternative of Ukrainian Finlandization. Aka DeNazification/DeBandera-ization. An end to the Greater Galician Reich Cult of WW2 Nazi collaborators that Ukraine's liberal supporters always sweep under the rug or willfully turn a blind eye toward.
In other words, to quote the LDS critic of American Empire from Utah Mr. Will Schyrver (who is also here on Substack) there are no more easy wars left to fight for the American Empire. And if you hate the Russians so much that Anglo-Trotskyism is at the heart of your worldview but you expect someone else to always do the bleeding and dying for your hate, then you'll pay at least a portion of the Grand Armee and Wehrmacht butcher's bill in the final attempt to destroy and dismantle Tsar Amalek.
We are pessimistic, but even we don't think the US as a whole can turn into a Syrian Civil War-style war. Our Second Civil War will look more like a combination of the Troubles in British-divided Ireland and Mexico's decades-long Narcowars. Complete with Santa Muerte and beheadings on this side of the border. There is a reason as much as one can criticize this Administration for its bombast and fetishization of warrior culture that people in the know like Erik Prince are bent on making the Western Hemisphere a redoubt against Eurasian axis interference, up to and including preemptively invading Venezuela (which would likely prove a cakewalk to regime change, only to bog down into leftist/narco guerrilla warfare against not even Chinese/Russian but Iranian and Hezbollah-armed FARC-types). Because Prince and Co know the shit is going to hit the fan and the US will only be able to maintain Hemispheric dominance once the dollar has to be massively devalued and/or bifurcated into a domestic vs international dollar (not unlike domestic vs international COMECON rubles in the old Soviet Bloc, capital controls for thee but not for the American nomenklatura).
Thus far, the British who still (mis)rule Canada and have massively accelerated its native population replacement are maintaining their grip on MapleSyrup-stan, complete with convincing liberal ex-Canuck officers up there that the US just might invade in an American SMO built on unity of the Canadian and American peoples (ain't happening, at least not for another decade or two of Canada sliding into full bore Anglo-globalist technocratic tyranny), and the EUrocrats likewise have kept Greenland off the table for us. But we'll see how long their pre-emption of American cannibalization of our allies can hold, particularly after the humiliating British/EUroNATO defeat in Ukraine is no longer deniable in a few years.
For one thing, who would be the equivalent of the NATO member Turkish Army occupying a chunk of the USA to create a quasi-haven (at least from ground assault) for an American insurgency against a future federal regime?
This is why I although I am a reactionary, unlike many of my fellow reactionaries, I do not lionize the Confederacy. Not only due to slavery being a doomed institution that degraded whites as well as blacks, but also the fact that the South was not-so-secretly bankrolled by British bankers with some French assistance (see the concurrent attempt to establish a French puppet regime in Mexico during the CW).
Interestingly enough, the British role in instigating CW including via what would be termed today agent provocateuring both sides (radical abolitionists like John Brown if not JB himself had their circles infiltrated by British intel cells out of Canada, which also was where John Wilkes Boothe was fleeing when he was caught after assassinating Lincoln).
The consensus on civ-mil relations has been breaking down for decades, dating back to the post Cold War search for mission turning inward with military hardware used at Waco during the Clinton years. But a liberal officers corps' tweeted and now BlueSky'd blind deference to British, Ukrainian and prior to that Qatari-funded and Turkish operated moderate Jihadi Lobby propaganda in Syria; the Summer of Floyd and the Great Awokening plus trans and furry officers in uniform all had plenty to do with it.
Look, Jolani's Syria is what "conservative revolution" turns into in the end. It almost never won. Salazar's Portugal ended up liberalizing after the whole of Portugal turned into a third-world shithold. Franco ended up the same. Finland invented social democracy after the Continuation War and had to live with the Soviet Union throughout their career. Taliban's Afghanistan is kinda working, but are you really suggesting they are a role model?
I do think the libs and left crying about police militarization without mentioning Waco and Ruby Ridge is hypocritical. But crying about Waco and Ruby Ridge without mentioning MOVE bombing or the Battle of Blair Mountain is equally, if not more, hypocritical. At this point, maybe Hobbes was right...
One of the potential future scenarios is transforming into an Iran-style state where you have a revolutionary guard (JSOC, XVIII Airborne Corps, CIA, and State Department rolled into one) enforcing their rule over everyone else to keep the American Empire running, as this is technically the only way to preserve the "traditions". Just look at how they are doing now and tell me it's a good idea.
Alternatively, just go full Middle East/North Africa shithole route where you do some Arab Spring style revolution and get whacked by global capitalism backed regime operating on domestic counterinsurgency, survivors radicalize into indecipherable schizos and get whacked in the following decades (see Algeria after 1992, Syria, and a couples others), special variation is Somalia 1992 where whole country disintegrates and you have an ineffective central government subservient to the global capitalist/imperialist system, a bunch of religious populist revolutionaries (Al-Shabaab/IS-Somalia), slightly more well off local government with autonomy (Puntland), and such.
Finally, there's the hidden history of American COIN since the 2000s that Petraeus really doesn't want you to know: When the French government wanted to do their Afghan withdrawal, the professional parts of the armed force literally started a whole terrorist movement. As much as I despise Foucault and much of the left, they got one thing right: Imperialism is a Boomerang; what you give, you get.
But what's the alternative? If COIN as expeditionary warfare is a bad idea, then what's the alternative? Bury one's head in the sand when the next 9/11 happens? March into Afghanistan and seize the whole country as a "democratized war" would call for?
Who would be the counterpart to NATO member Turkey occupying Idlib in a Civil War 2 broken USA? As I said, the people that think a Second American Civil War would anything like the first but being fought with Bradleys and F16s instead of Blue vs. Gray with muskets and cannons don't understand a damn thing bout logistics. Or counterinsurgency and 5th Generation Warfare. Which in case of CW2, very well might involve some forms of competition for the hearts and minds of US born 1st and Second generation Latinos.
Tejanos will see your California Azatlan units and raise you Juan Seguín, Jose Antonio Navarro and Lorenzo de Zavala Brigades. In other words, if you form John Brown Antifa Brigades pushing La Raza and Reconquista ideology you'll get Erik Prince's successors forming right wing Christero units in response to hand out free one way helicopter rides for the commies out over the Gulf of Mexico. I don't understand why any of this isn't obvious to more intelligent liberal vets, in the same sense that I couldn't understand how Ukrainian ultranationalists acting as muscle for globalist financiers and NATO could expect the pro-Russian populations of Crimea and the Donbass to just take the violent false flag sniper killings-abetted overthrow of Yanukovych and the Odessa Trades Union massacres lying down. Maybe they believed in their own Banderite Bushido war magick and thought the dumb Sovoks wouldn't be able to fight them, despite Russia's Donbass locals JV team basically pantsing the sad sack Ukrainian Army from the Donetsk Airport to Debaltsevo battles.
'White Nationalism' has very little future so long as it stupidly lapses into Uncle Adolph stupidity romanticizing or apologizing for a regime that killed more Slavic Whites than anybody (here I can only take McMeekin in doses while at the risk of being called a Right-Wing Tankie I will say Stalin's post 1936 body count has been highly inflated). Or Azov Waffen SS LARPing so the post-war Zelensky team can import 10 million South Asian and African migrants to replace the more than decimated Ukrainian male population. But Castizo Bukele-style Elected Strongman Nationalism will be alive and well through the 21st century.
The only reason Ukraine is still in this war four years later besides a large portion of its population being docile, doped (meth is the secret sauce of the UAF just like it was for the blitzkrieg and the late WW2 Hitlerjugend) and the most brainwashed Europe has seen since 1945. I get Ukrainians never wanting to be ruled from the Kremlin again but I don't get their willingness to die so cheaply for the cowards pushing them forward, even as NATO is providing a massive untouched logistics rear. If I were a Ukrainian male in Zelensky governed territory I would've run like hell for the Polish or Romanian border in 2022, I would not have stuck around to get press ganged. On paper Ukraine looks like an inexhaustible meatshield and NATO seems to have a formula for keeping this war going forever, except A) you cannot it turns out print equipment the way you can print money B) you will all run out of Ukrainian males before you run out of drones.
Speaking of which, the Chinese are finally complying with Russian pleas to restrict reexports of lithium ion batteries and other drone components. And with the number of 'smoking accidents' at TNT plants in Tennessee of late the more paranoid members of our deep state, including those who gloated about random munition plants blowing up in Russia, might want to check on the huge glass house they and the Collective West lives in.
As for the all the 'ha ha how will you peasants fight drones with your AR15s!' midwit power worshipper types, they don't understand that drone makers and importers even those living behind compound gates have addresses like everyone else.
Look, Saddam's Iraqi army was considerably less capable at causing headaches to US army compared to the Iraqi insurgency, but does it mean the insurgency and civil war actually unlocks some sort of mysterious "5th gen warfare" potential in the Iraqi people?
Similar thing for Iran and Hezbollah, especially the latter as poster child for "5th gen warfare", over the years they steadily built a portfolio of irregular warfare capabilities that don't rely on massive economy that is required for raising a conventional force with jets and high end air defenses. And what it got for them? Getting whacked by F-35s?
The earliest case study for "civil war creates gigachad warrior people" is perhaps Chechnya and the result is indeed "mixed". On one hand the Chechen dissolution of state authority since its independence did create so many weird groups ranging from gangs to regular people cosplaying Red Dawn to nationalist former military officers to crazy jihadis from Afghanistan and this indeed introduces more flexibility than Russian armed forces can handle. After their win in 1996 they kind of doubled down on that with further breakdown of state authority to the point it resembles the "civil war 2.0" scenario you mentioned. Various militant groups, lots of them wackos like the Basayev types, indeed got some pretty crazy capabilities in terms of unconventional warfighting. But the thing is that this all come at the cost of basic industry and other state resources. Without a proper state they can't maintain a coherent national defense strategy or to adapt to the changing world, and in 1998 after their failed "5th generation warfare" to SMO Dagestan they got whacked. I'd still make the edge case that because of Basayev and friends Russian government indeed paid more money to Chechnya and Kadyrov is indeed what the average armed group in Chechyna between 1996-1999 wanted, and with Russian money. But again, they lost against Russian armed forces in 1999.
My "case study" for "civil war 2.0" was actually Somalia after Siad Barre. Even assume "best case scenario", see Finnish Civil War, it's the Socdems that rule after WW2.
"Weird case" of revolution would be Revolutionary France, where a proto-world war broke out because of it.
Regarding the modern Russian state, it's kind of two things rolled into one; you see a lot of posturing towards traditionally right-wing, but you also see a gigaton of Mohammeds everywhere, including the fucking head of the 76th guard airborne division. And just look at the absolute shitshow in Crocus. And there's the Chinese down south. Thinking they are some sort of West savior is the same as Algerian Islamists in the 90s thinking Saudi Arabians are some sort of Islamic paradise and a model to study. (yeah, that's what they believe)
The Chechen example of COIN is an interesting one and in my opinion, more authentic than the Anbar Awakening. Which probably was the closest thing the US Army has done as a sincere compliment to Russia's pacification of its own Caucasus in the sense that Petraeus and co realized the cheapest solution by far was to pay off the Sunni tribes to switch sides and expel the Wahhabists. Some of whom saw the writing on the wall and became the now oh so respectable Ahmed al Sharaa who interestingly enough, is in Moscow today (Incidentally, now how does that make you feel 'Assad must go' #WorldWarWoke ists, Brit firsters and Qatari Moderate Jihadi Lobby enthusiasts, to see Assad living in luxury exile off Rublovka and his successor still in Russia negotiating arms contracts and preserving the Russian toehold in the Eastern Med?).
I don't know enough about Somalia outside the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 to have an opinion about Siad Barre. Nor the Finnish Civil War.
But having previously lived and worked in Moscow several years before the Russian Spring and SMO, I can speak to Russia's ideological alignment as the born-again global champion of traditional values: beware of those citing outdated abortion and divorce statistics from the country's post-Soviet civilizational nadir in the 1990s-early 2000s, and also those who inflate the Muslim share of the Russian Federation population, which is probably not much higher than 13%. And this is a very different percentage from what it is in France, because these are Caucasians or Central Asian origin peoples who have traditionally been a part of the Russian Empire for centuries, they are not an imported North African Maghrebi population with an ethnonationalist chip on their shoulder from the Algerian War and its aftermath.
Furthermore, the number of Central Asian migrant workers is if anything going down as China becomes more attractive for Tadjik or Uzbek laborers, and the OFMS has started more than symbolic deportations amid public demand for tighter immigration enforcement. Most of those the SBU/GUR pay to plant bombs under Russian generals and colonels cars and whatnot are Russian or Ukrainians who settled in the country, they are not disaffected Muslim migrants. The Crocus City attack was the spectacular exception and you and all the WorldWarWoke blue yellow flag wavers should be aware that those terrorists got caught fleeing to the Ukrainian border. Which should tell everyone just how the GUR's Budanov really feels about sponsoring jihadist terrorists to murder Russian civilians.
Algeria is about as French as you could get, honestly. Algeria Francais is not "just some words". They are about as French as Kaliningrad. The thing about "French Imperialism" is that it never left technically. The French were what kept the FLN up and running throughout the Cold War and to the 21st century. The whole "France bad" is just what happens when the population of a certain third-world country believes in what the elite says... (usually it won't end well for all involved)
I remember a certain incident that involved a certain someone burning a Quran in Russia, the son of Kadyrov, and some physical altercations. It wasn't pretty... And there was a video of someone kissing the holy Islamic book...
Also are you really that sure about the last of your claims?
But again, the "magical Russian" is a powerful cultural artefact with American thinking.
The Crocus attack does not fit in the Ukrainian modus operandi that relies mostly on paying the local criminal/marginalized population against usually members of the military.
ISKP usually relies more on ranting on TikTok. Also, there was a lesser attack in Dagestan that involved the sons of some local big shot and a synagogue. Also, a jail riot that comes with a pretty nasty throat-slicing. Do they all plan to bug out to Ukraine? And CENTCOM is obsessed with whacking ISKP to the point they are totally willing to work with anyone.
I'm not one of those people on the Right who makes constant jokes about the French surrendering in 1940 or at Dien Bien Phu. The French fought like hell from 1914-17, even as the British took the lead on the Western Front and were grinding forward with American help when the Germans surrendered in November 1918.
I do think the French post colonial empire across the Sahel and much of Africa is being dismantled with some help from the Russians and good riddance to the African Franc and other exploitive vehicles. France having to pay market rates for uranium rather than getting it nearly free from Niger, for example, is going to have ripples through their electric utility rates amid a general Western European cost of living crisis. 'EuroPoors' is not just a meme and the Yellow Vests have not vanished into the mists. They will be back.
I have zero doubt that the Crocus City terrorists were in fact, caught near the Ukrainian border and were allowed to flee there as the FSB tracked their shitty getaway car so as to expose the GUR/SBU hand (read: MI6 proxies) in sponsoring them.
But regarding 'magical Russians' or pedestalizing of Russians on the American Right, that's hardly a thing. Seriously. Roughly 2,000 families thus far world wide, a higher percentage of them German or British rather than American, have taken advantage of the Shared Values Visa to emigrate to the Russian Federation since Putin issued it by decree in August 2024.
The vast majority of Americans simply don't think about Russia at all or didn't from the fall of the USSR in December 1991 until June 2016, when elements of our deep state (Brennan, Clapper and their British Empire forever handlers like Sir Richard Dearlove) got majorly pissed that the Russian JV team in the Donbass had humiliated the Ukrainian Army at Debaltsevo and the Russian Air Force was c-ck blocking their long-planned regime change operation in Syria. Then suddenly overnight Democrats switched from Obama's dismissive of Romney's Russia stuff in 2012, 'The 80s called, they want their foreign policy back' to the party of foaming at the mouth rabid Russophobes. With some help from a few thousand neocon Never Trumper Republicans.
Damn, and I thought your long articles were downers.
I’ll try to write about Hegel and Girl Pop again for the next one
I'm doing my writing 121 narrative essay on you and the rock and the discourse community around left of center mil shit
I would always make the case that the US internally resembles Iran right after the 1979 revolution. There's actually a book called "Iranian military in revolution and war", which talks about what happened to the army when Khomeini took over. Lots of potential parallels.
I actually thought about mentioning Iran, but I figured I made the point I was going for. (also still quite exaggerated by comparison, though)
One big difference between Iran and Iraq is that the Iranian regime was "revolutionary"; it rejects the "unfolkish" elements of communism while appealing to the struggles of the masses. It seek to replace the ineffective and corrupt "secular" laws with a legal system that is more "folkish" and is based on more politically acceptable grounds for a jumping board for world revolution.
Khomeini was thinking about spreading the revolution across the Islamic world, as seen by his refusal to make peace in 1982 and his conduct of the hostage crisis in Tehran.
As soon as the regime established itself, it was challenged by a plethora of enemies, and hence, a Revolutionary Guards Corps was established. One thing to remember is that the nascent Khomeinist regime was challenged by all kinds of separatist and revolutionary movements and it took a lot of force to suppress those.
The training and capability of the Revolutionary Guard are very varied. Leadership generally contains some veteran Palestine Fedayeen and such factions, while the lower ranks are populated by barely literate urban lower classes. A chunk of early revolutionary guards were in fact bodyguards for prominent clerics.
Alternatively, you could also say that what's happening in the West with the rise of populism resembles more of Algeria in 1992 at the onset of civil war. Or the line of the Arab Spring, which Algeria serves as a forerunner of what is to come.
But lessons from those conflicts are chilling, to say at least...
Yeah that was a good album
As we said, liberal hawks like the host of this Substack in general act as if all of the breakdown in civ-mil relations is owed to BadOrangeMan and his MAGA base. The reality that the GWOT was like acid slowly dissolving trust in the military as the last popular bipartisan institution standing is less often admitted by the rare honest liberal or liberal-tarian. Pete Hegseth as unqualified as you may view him did not come out of nowhere. The fetishization of JSOC that many liberal hawks are rightfully criticizing now that the Dems aren't running the War Department did not come out of nowhere.
You even now see hints here and there among a few liberal hawks' Substacks that aren't Boomer Slop and older Xer Anglosphere copium that maybe drone wunderwaffen and fanatical Banderite Bushido Ukrainian willpower alone cannot hold back the Russian hordes infiltrating 500m/1km gaps in the UAF lines in their twos and threes on dirt bikes and scooters.
The libhawks or as I derogatorily call them WorldWarWoke ists like our host here are slowly perhaps starting to have an inkling of the Russian theory of victory, which is not to seize territory (anymore than the Union Army's strategic goal was to seize Atlanta or Richmond) but slowly bleed the Ukrainian Army to death. Until NATO has to choose: either openly fight and die for the Ukraine in no longer disavowable numbers of Union Jack and Triclour draped caskets (as well as most politically explosive, German combatant deaths in a country that still genuinely dreads to its bones its crushing defeat at Russian hands in 1945) coming back from the 2027-29 Battles (Russians will finish off the Donbass redoubts by Autumn 2026) for Dnipro, Kharkov, Sumy, Zaporozhye and Odessa. Or accept the painful alternative of Ukrainian Finlandization. Aka DeNazification/DeBandera-ization. An end to the Greater Galician Reich Cult of WW2 Nazi collaborators that Ukraine's liberal supporters always sweep under the rug or willfully turn a blind eye toward.
In other words, to quote the LDS critic of American Empire from Utah Mr. Will Schyrver (who is also here on Substack) there are no more easy wars left to fight for the American Empire. And if you hate the Russians so much that Anglo-Trotskyism is at the heart of your worldview but you expect someone else to always do the bleeding and dying for your hate, then you'll pay at least a portion of the Grand Armee and Wehrmacht butcher's bill in the final attempt to destroy and dismantle Tsar Amalek.
We are pessimistic, but even we don't think the US as a whole can turn into a Syrian Civil War-style war. Our Second Civil War will look more like a combination of the Troubles in British-divided Ireland and Mexico's decades-long Narcowars. Complete with Santa Muerte and beheadings on this side of the border. There is a reason as much as one can criticize this Administration for its bombast and fetishization of warrior culture that people in the know like Erik Prince are bent on making the Western Hemisphere a redoubt against Eurasian axis interference, up to and including preemptively invading Venezuela (which would likely prove a cakewalk to regime change, only to bog down into leftist/narco guerrilla warfare against not even Chinese/Russian but Iranian and Hezbollah-armed FARC-types). Because Prince and Co know the shit is going to hit the fan and the US will only be able to maintain Hemispheric dominance once the dollar has to be massively devalued and/or bifurcated into a domestic vs international dollar (not unlike domestic vs international COMECON rubles in the old Soviet Bloc, capital controls for thee but not for the American nomenklatura).
Thus far, the British who still (mis)rule Canada and have massively accelerated its native population replacement are maintaining their grip on MapleSyrup-stan, complete with convincing liberal ex-Canuck officers up there that the US just might invade in an American SMO built on unity of the Canadian and American peoples (ain't happening, at least not for another decade or two of Canada sliding into full bore Anglo-globalist technocratic tyranny), and the EUrocrats likewise have kept Greenland off the table for us. But we'll see how long their pre-emption of American cannibalization of our allies can hold, particularly after the humiliating British/EUroNATO defeat in Ukraine is no longer deniable in a few years.
For one thing, who would be the equivalent of the NATO member Turkish Army occupying a chunk of the USA to create a quasi-haven (at least from ground assault) for an American insurgency against a future federal regime?
This is why I although I am a reactionary, unlike many of my fellow reactionaries, I do not lionize the Confederacy. Not only due to slavery being a doomed institution that degraded whites as well as blacks, but also the fact that the South was not-so-secretly bankrolled by British bankers with some French assistance (see the concurrent attempt to establish a French puppet regime in Mexico during the CW).
Interestingly enough, the British role in instigating CW including via what would be termed today agent provocateuring both sides (radical abolitionists like John Brown if not JB himself had their circles infiltrated by British intel cells out of Canada, which also was where John Wilkes Boothe was fleeing when he was caught after assassinating Lincoln).
The consensus on civ-mil relations has been breaking down for decades, dating back to the post Cold War search for mission turning inward with military hardware used at Waco during the Clinton years. But a liberal officers corps' tweeted and now BlueSky'd blind deference to British, Ukrainian and prior to that Qatari-funded and Turkish operated moderate Jihadi Lobby propaganda in Syria; the Summer of Floyd and the Great Awokening plus trans and furry officers in uniform all had plenty to do with it.
Look, Jolani's Syria is what "conservative revolution" turns into in the end. It almost never won. Salazar's Portugal ended up liberalizing after the whole of Portugal turned into a third-world shithold. Franco ended up the same. Finland invented social democracy after the Continuation War and had to live with the Soviet Union throughout their career. Taliban's Afghanistan is kinda working, but are you really suggesting they are a role model?
I do think the libs and left crying about police militarization without mentioning Waco and Ruby Ridge is hypocritical. But crying about Waco and Ruby Ridge without mentioning MOVE bombing or the Battle of Blair Mountain is equally, if not more, hypocritical. At this point, maybe Hobbes was right...
One of the potential future scenarios is transforming into an Iran-style state where you have a revolutionary guard (JSOC, XVIII Airborne Corps, CIA, and State Department rolled into one) enforcing their rule over everyone else to keep the American Empire running, as this is technically the only way to preserve the "traditions". Just look at how they are doing now and tell me it's a good idea.
Alternatively, just go full Middle East/North Africa shithole route where you do some Arab Spring style revolution and get whacked by global capitalism backed regime operating on domestic counterinsurgency, survivors radicalize into indecipherable schizos and get whacked in the following decades (see Algeria after 1992, Syria, and a couples others), special variation is Somalia 1992 where whole country disintegrates and you have an ineffective central government subservient to the global capitalist/imperialist system, a bunch of religious populist revolutionaries (Al-Shabaab/IS-Somalia), slightly more well off local government with autonomy (Puntland), and such.
Finally, there's the hidden history of American COIN since the 2000s that Petraeus really doesn't want you to know: When the French government wanted to do their Afghan withdrawal, the professional parts of the armed force literally started a whole terrorist movement. As much as I despise Foucault and much of the left, they got one thing right: Imperialism is a Boomerang; what you give, you get.
But what's the alternative? If COIN as expeditionary warfare is a bad idea, then what's the alternative? Bury one's head in the sand when the next 9/11 happens? March into Afghanistan and seize the whole country as a "democratized war" would call for?
Who would be the counterpart to NATO member Turkey occupying Idlib in a Civil War 2 broken USA? As I said, the people that think a Second American Civil War would anything like the first but being fought with Bradleys and F16s instead of Blue vs. Gray with muskets and cannons don't understand a damn thing bout logistics. Or counterinsurgency and 5th Generation Warfare. Which in case of CW2, very well might involve some forms of competition for the hearts and minds of US born 1st and Second generation Latinos.
Tejanos will see your California Azatlan units and raise you Juan Seguín, Jose Antonio Navarro and Lorenzo de Zavala Brigades. In other words, if you form John Brown Antifa Brigades pushing La Raza and Reconquista ideology you'll get Erik Prince's successors forming right wing Christero units in response to hand out free one way helicopter rides for the commies out over the Gulf of Mexico. I don't understand why any of this isn't obvious to more intelligent liberal vets, in the same sense that I couldn't understand how Ukrainian ultranationalists acting as muscle for globalist financiers and NATO could expect the pro-Russian populations of Crimea and the Donbass to just take the violent false flag sniper killings-abetted overthrow of Yanukovych and the Odessa Trades Union massacres lying down. Maybe they believed in their own Banderite Bushido war magick and thought the dumb Sovoks wouldn't be able to fight them, despite Russia's Donbass locals JV team basically pantsing the sad sack Ukrainian Army from the Donetsk Airport to Debaltsevo battles.
'White Nationalism' has very little future so long as it stupidly lapses into Uncle Adolph stupidity romanticizing or apologizing for a regime that killed more Slavic Whites than anybody (here I can only take McMeekin in doses while at the risk of being called a Right-Wing Tankie I will say Stalin's post 1936 body count has been highly inflated). Or Azov Waffen SS LARPing so the post-war Zelensky team can import 10 million South Asian and African migrants to replace the more than decimated Ukrainian male population. But Castizo Bukele-style Elected Strongman Nationalism will be alive and well through the 21st century.
The only reason Ukraine is still in this war four years later besides a large portion of its population being docile, doped (meth is the secret sauce of the UAF just like it was for the blitzkrieg and the late WW2 Hitlerjugend) and the most brainwashed Europe has seen since 1945. I get Ukrainians never wanting to be ruled from the Kremlin again but I don't get their willingness to die so cheaply for the cowards pushing them forward, even as NATO is providing a massive untouched logistics rear. If I were a Ukrainian male in Zelensky governed territory I would've run like hell for the Polish or Romanian border in 2022, I would not have stuck around to get press ganged. On paper Ukraine looks like an inexhaustible meatshield and NATO seems to have a formula for keeping this war going forever, except A) you cannot it turns out print equipment the way you can print money B) you will all run out of Ukrainian males before you run out of drones.
Speaking of which, the Chinese are finally complying with Russian pleas to restrict reexports of lithium ion batteries and other drone components. And with the number of 'smoking accidents' at TNT plants in Tennessee of late the more paranoid members of our deep state, including those who gloated about random munition plants blowing up in Russia, might want to check on the huge glass house they and the Collective West lives in.
As for the all the 'ha ha how will you peasants fight drones with your AR15s!' midwit power worshipper types, they don't understand that drone makers and importers even those living behind compound gates have addresses like everyone else.
Look, Saddam's Iraqi army was considerably less capable at causing headaches to US army compared to the Iraqi insurgency, but does it mean the insurgency and civil war actually unlocks some sort of mysterious "5th gen warfare" potential in the Iraqi people?
Similar thing for Iran and Hezbollah, especially the latter as poster child for "5th gen warfare", over the years they steadily built a portfolio of irregular warfare capabilities that don't rely on massive economy that is required for raising a conventional force with jets and high end air defenses. And what it got for them? Getting whacked by F-35s?
The earliest case study for "civil war creates gigachad warrior people" is perhaps Chechnya and the result is indeed "mixed". On one hand the Chechen dissolution of state authority since its independence did create so many weird groups ranging from gangs to regular people cosplaying Red Dawn to nationalist former military officers to crazy jihadis from Afghanistan and this indeed introduces more flexibility than Russian armed forces can handle. After their win in 1996 they kind of doubled down on that with further breakdown of state authority to the point it resembles the "civil war 2.0" scenario you mentioned. Various militant groups, lots of them wackos like the Basayev types, indeed got some pretty crazy capabilities in terms of unconventional warfighting. But the thing is that this all come at the cost of basic industry and other state resources. Without a proper state they can't maintain a coherent national defense strategy or to adapt to the changing world, and in 1998 after their failed "5th generation warfare" to SMO Dagestan they got whacked. I'd still make the edge case that because of Basayev and friends Russian government indeed paid more money to Chechnya and Kadyrov is indeed what the average armed group in Chechyna between 1996-1999 wanted, and with Russian money. But again, they lost against Russian armed forces in 1999.
My "case study" for "civil war 2.0" was actually Somalia after Siad Barre. Even assume "best case scenario", see Finnish Civil War, it's the Socdems that rule after WW2.
"Weird case" of revolution would be Revolutionary France, where a proto-world war broke out because of it.
Regarding the modern Russian state, it's kind of two things rolled into one; you see a lot of posturing towards traditionally right-wing, but you also see a gigaton of Mohammeds everywhere, including the fucking head of the 76th guard airborne division. And just look at the absolute shitshow in Crocus. And there's the Chinese down south. Thinking they are some sort of West savior is the same as Algerian Islamists in the 90s thinking Saudi Arabians are some sort of Islamic paradise and a model to study. (yeah, that's what they believe)
The Chechen example of COIN is an interesting one and in my opinion, more authentic than the Anbar Awakening. Which probably was the closest thing the US Army has done as a sincere compliment to Russia's pacification of its own Caucasus in the sense that Petraeus and co realized the cheapest solution by far was to pay off the Sunni tribes to switch sides and expel the Wahhabists. Some of whom saw the writing on the wall and became the now oh so respectable Ahmed al Sharaa who interestingly enough, is in Moscow today (Incidentally, now how does that make you feel 'Assad must go' #WorldWarWoke ists, Brit firsters and Qatari Moderate Jihadi Lobby enthusiasts, to see Assad living in luxury exile off Rublovka and his successor still in Russia negotiating arms contracts and preserving the Russian toehold in the Eastern Med?).
I don't know enough about Somalia outside the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 to have an opinion about Siad Barre. Nor the Finnish Civil War.
But having previously lived and worked in Moscow several years before the Russian Spring and SMO, I can speak to Russia's ideological alignment as the born-again global champion of traditional values: beware of those citing outdated abortion and divorce statistics from the country's post-Soviet civilizational nadir in the 1990s-early 2000s, and also those who inflate the Muslim share of the Russian Federation population, which is probably not much higher than 13%. And this is a very different percentage from what it is in France, because these are Caucasians or Central Asian origin peoples who have traditionally been a part of the Russian Empire for centuries, they are not an imported North African Maghrebi population with an ethnonationalist chip on their shoulder from the Algerian War and its aftermath.
Furthermore, the number of Central Asian migrant workers is if anything going down as China becomes more attractive for Tadjik or Uzbek laborers, and the OFMS has started more than symbolic deportations amid public demand for tighter immigration enforcement. Most of those the SBU/GUR pay to plant bombs under Russian generals and colonels cars and whatnot are Russian or Ukrainians who settled in the country, they are not disaffected Muslim migrants. The Crocus City attack was the spectacular exception and you and all the WorldWarWoke blue yellow flag wavers should be aware that those terrorists got caught fleeing to the Ukrainian border. Which should tell everyone just how the GUR's Budanov really feels about sponsoring jihadist terrorists to murder Russian civilians.
Algeria is about as French as you could get, honestly. Algeria Francais is not "just some words". They are about as French as Kaliningrad. The thing about "French Imperialism" is that it never left technically. The French were what kept the FLN up and running throughout the Cold War and to the 21st century. The whole "France bad" is just what happens when the population of a certain third-world country believes in what the elite says... (usually it won't end well for all involved)
I remember a certain incident that involved a certain someone burning a Quran in Russia, the son of Kadyrov, and some physical altercations. It wasn't pretty... And there was a video of someone kissing the holy Islamic book...
Also are you really that sure about the last of your claims?
But again, the "magical Russian" is a powerful cultural artefact with American thinking.
The Crocus attack does not fit in the Ukrainian modus operandi that relies mostly on paying the local criminal/marginalized population against usually members of the military.
ISKP usually relies more on ranting on TikTok. Also, there was a lesser attack in Dagestan that involved the sons of some local big shot and a synagogue. Also, a jail riot that comes with a pretty nasty throat-slicing. Do they all plan to bug out to Ukraine? And CENTCOM is obsessed with whacking ISKP to the point they are totally willing to work with anyone.
I'm not one of those people on the Right who makes constant jokes about the French surrendering in 1940 or at Dien Bien Phu. The French fought like hell from 1914-17, even as the British took the lead on the Western Front and were grinding forward with American help when the Germans surrendered in November 1918.
I do think the French post colonial empire across the Sahel and much of Africa is being dismantled with some help from the Russians and good riddance to the African Franc and other exploitive vehicles. France having to pay market rates for uranium rather than getting it nearly free from Niger, for example, is going to have ripples through their electric utility rates amid a general Western European cost of living crisis. 'EuroPoors' is not just a meme and the Yellow Vests have not vanished into the mists. They will be back.
I have zero doubt that the Crocus City terrorists were in fact, caught near the Ukrainian border and were allowed to flee there as the FSB tracked their shitty getaway car so as to expose the GUR/SBU hand (read: MI6 proxies) in sponsoring them.
But regarding 'magical Russians' or pedestalizing of Russians on the American Right, that's hardly a thing. Seriously. Roughly 2,000 families thus far world wide, a higher percentage of them German or British rather than American, have taken advantage of the Shared Values Visa to emigrate to the Russian Federation since Putin issued it by decree in August 2024.
The vast majority of Americans simply don't think about Russia at all or didn't from the fall of the USSR in December 1991 until June 2016, when elements of our deep state (Brennan, Clapper and their British Empire forever handlers like Sir Richard Dearlove) got majorly pissed that the Russian JV team in the Donbass had humiliated the Ukrainian Army at Debaltsevo and the Russian Air Force was c-ck blocking their long-planned regime change operation in Syria. Then suddenly overnight Democrats switched from Obama's dismissive of Romney's Russia stuff in 2012, 'The 80s called, they want their foreign policy back' to the party of foaming at the mouth rabid Russophobes. With some help from a few thousand neocon Never Trumper Republicans.