U.S. in Highest-Risk Category for Civil War, Coup, or Collapse in CIA Model | Hacker News Reader

U.S. in Highest-Risk Category for Civil War, Coup, or Collapse in CIA Model

cmarmitage.substack.com

If the CIA could figure out how to stabilize a country that would be nice, but seems they know only how to destabilize countries when looking at their track record [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Yes, that's the impression from abroad, from Europe.

The worrying thing for me as a citizen of a European country (though one not now in the EU) is that we appear to be on a similar path though perhaps a little further back on it.

It is not normal for a hard right/far right party to get 72 million quid funding from crypto-billionaires within 3 days while that same party is under police investigation for breaking laws on electoral funding/donations.

That and the more... interesting folks over the pond seem determined to interfere with our politics as well.

The instability/uncertainty in the US is because of their historical (and current) weight on events spreading everywhere.

It's easy to poke fun at the US while downplaying our issues but in the long run, *unwise*.

I wonder if you mean UK or Germany (Reform or AfD, both are sponsored by extremely suspicious actors ... and Russia). But in either case you funded an adversary that wanted to attack you with oil money, Russia, to the tune of 20 billion euros per year (Germany) and 5 billion euros per year.

That's money that was used to attack Ukraine, and millions used to destabilize US and Western Europe.

> It's easy to poke fun at the US while downplaying our issues but in the long run, unwise.

But it's slightly cheaper too.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but the "72 million" is certainly a reference to two major donations to the Reform party in the UK.

Nobody donates those kind of sums without wanting a quid pro quo. And the donors, as you say, are extremely dodgy. As a brit it frankly frightenes me.

Same - 72 million if it gets you a government favourable to your interests is a cheap price for the kind of resources those famously altruistic billionaires can throw around.

In the same week as the undercover documentary where one of the senior Reform figures said on hidden camera "but if gets you a friend in No 10, worth it" while discussing how to circumvent the law on foreign donations.

If we don't crack down hard on this shit now we'll pay for it later.

> If we don't crack down hard on this shit now we'll pay for it later.

The USA provided an excellent example for us to learn from. But I do wonder if this cancer of corruption has already spread worldwide and is too powerful to stop the well financed populism through which it spreads.

"High-risk category" sounds like something will happen in the future, but there's already been a coup attempt:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...

Barbara Walter's model (which is what Armitage is leveraging) is deeply flawed and not the norm in most studies into autocracies and state instability.

And to add on to that, Armitage himself has been a provocateur for "soft secession" (which is basically an attempt at trying to instigate a nullification crisis 2.0).

Any better resources you'd recommend on the topic?

Primarily researchers directly and actively associated with the Ash Center who are researching institutional reform and stability [0] or those associated with the Carnegie Democracy, Conflict, and Governance program [1].

[0] - https://ash.harvard.edu/issues/instutitional-reforms/

[1] - https://carnegieendowment.org/programs/democracy-conflict-an...

Breaking news: after being the biggest threat to world stability, the US realizes that their behavior is also a threat to their own stability.

Always worth studying 1980s USSR.

Its really interesting to me to read books from the 80s set in the 2000s.

The Soviet Union was there chugging along, a monolithic and unstoppable foil to Murica! Everyone things nothing ever changes until it does. I expect that to be largely the same here if it's going to happen?

That said, I doubt we get a civil war, a more effective coup maybe? Or Collapse? But a civil war seems unlikely to me. We kind of already have lived through a revolution in the last couple years but people don't really see it.

How does he know what the CIA's model says? How did he get this inside information? And shouldn't he now have a warrant out for his arrest for obtaining such a thing?

I suggest reading the article you are commenting on, and you might find a ton of links to research in it. Reading is a great idea in general; I can recommend it.

I see a ton of links to other unauthorized sources--most people I've never heard of--who claim to have inside CIA documentation.

The model, methodology, and even the data set used are published research, even if the CIA didn’t publish their internal forecasts based on it. You can still just come to the same conclusion they can, there are no state secrets involved here, no matter how you try to frame it.

If the CIA didn't publish this, then how can one say there are no state secrets? How can one say they obtained the same conclusion without knowing the CIA's conclusion?

Researchers developed a model on behalf of the CIA and published it. The CIA is using this model. Calculating an MD5 hash according to the original paper describing the algorithm is going to yield the same hash for you and me for the same input. The same applies to any other evaluation model.

Where did you pick up the notion that anything about this is somehow secret? Why don’t you just read up on this for yourself? It’s all readily available on the internet.

They know, they’re just playing the FUD game.

Because the only sources in the article are non-CIA but claim they are CIA. The article is of little value if I have to search around the internet looking up information. And the sources in the articles are sources I have never heard of before which makes me suspicious. The whole thing has an odor to it.

I wonder if he bet on this on of those modern day betting sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Fragile_S...

This is why Trump's fight with canada is doomed: Trying to destabilize a top-10 country when your own country doesnt break the top 30.

Canada is very vulnerable to this kind of destabilization campaign because it is an even more decentralized polity than the United States. We are a confederation, our provinces have strong powers, and have long lasting regional political/economic (and language/cultural) tensions since our founding. What is good economically for Alberta is not necessarily good for Ontario and vice versa. A hostile party can definitely wedge in there (and are).

We're all fired up with (English) Canadian nationalism right now and Carney is riding high in the polls because of it but that isn't playing well in Quebec and doesn't play as strongly in Alberta. And when the inevitable economic crisis finally plays itself out in a severe recession, nationalism won't help. The knives will turn inward and the same people boosting Alberta "separatism" (lolz) right now will be turning the volume up to 10x to take advantage of it. They have deep pockets.

It's a continent wide problem and requires sane forces in civil society across the whole continent to work together.

Never having heard of this metric, I went to look at the sponsors and inventors: Fund for Peace.

OSF, CIA, USAID, and US defence agencies of various flavours. Very reassuring to see these stalwarts of democracy funding such a noble metric.

How is it surprising organisations involved in humanitarian aid in crisis regions are also sponsoring research on fragility of governments?

CIA? Various US military agencies? OSF? Humanitarian?

There are no blue states. There are only blue cities. If they wish to "secede", what that indicates is that they have not thought through how easy it is to block a road.

By that logic, there are no red states, only red hinterlands.

There are no red or blue states. Only shades of purple.

This is also what I point out to my fellow Canadians who insist that Canada has political-economic "friends" in "blue states"; if you look at a map from the 2024 election even the "bluest" of states had walls of red and sometimes especially right next to the Canadian border. Western New York and Vermont both have counties right across the border that swung for Trump sometimes by margins as much at 15%.

There's no easy way out of this quagmire. A deep horrible somewhat tribal division has spread in North American society around a pile of issues and it's become pivoted around a supposed "left"-right axis but it's really about a whole pile of other issues and unresolveable grievances. Prosperity is declining in western countries, and distribution of wealth is becoming drastically unequal. And neither liberal or conservative ideological centres (the only two allowed in American politics) have any kind of solution.

The same infection is here in Canada as well, but less intense. As usual we're just 10 years behind whatever trend happens there.

That was tried, in the 1860s. What you’re suggesting didn’t go well.

Various red states are red only due to gerrymandering.

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