SAN DIEGO — Barbara Walter, a political scientist at UC San Diego, has been studying civil wars for 30 years. She understands the script they follow: how they ignite, how they escalate, how they end.
The storm clouds she sees gathering now are over the United States.
"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," Walter writes in a new book. "And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory."
