In a chilling interview with Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum, Professor David Betz, a leading expert on irregular warfare from King’s College London, has warned that civil war is not just a distant possibility but a “very likely” threat to Britain and, by extension, the West—including the United States. Betz, author of The Guarded Age: Fortification in the 21st Century and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, argued that societal fractures, elite overreach, and a volatile mix of identity politics have pushed the UK to the brink.
Betz, who has studied insurgency and counterinsurgency for over 25 years, traced his alarm back a decade to the Brexit referendum when he first noticed Britain’s elites undermining the public’s will—an overreach he says has only worsened. According to Betz, multiculturalism has eroded social cohesion, nativist sentiments are surging, and trust in institutions has collapsed. “The primary threat to the security and prosperity of Britain today is not external, but internal,” he said.
The professor predicted a “Latin American-style dirty war” marked by chronic low-level violence, escalating into a rural-versus-urban showdown. Anti-status quo factions, he warned, are already plotting to collapse major cities like London through infrastructural attacks—think power grids and gas lines—triggering chaos they plan to outlast in rural strongholds. “It’s destructively simple, well-reasoned, and straightforward to implement,” Betz said, noting the strategy exploits urban vulnerabilities long highlighted by experts.
Drawing on Mao’s insurgency model, Betz placed Britain at a tipping point. Islamist factions, he argued, are in “phase two”—with no-go zones and semi-regular attacks—while white identity groups are midway through “phase one,” organizing and radicalizing. Elite actions, from unequal sentencing guidelines to cultural assaults on British icons like Agatha Christie, are fanning the flames, he said, likening them to historical peasant revolts against rule-changing elites.
For Betz, a Canadian who moved to Britain in 1998, this descent feels “out of character” for a nation priding itself on stability. Yet, he sees the same dynamics at play across the West, including the U.S., where polarization, economic despair, and identity clashes mirror the UK’s trajectory. His message is clear: unless elites reverse course, the West faces a reckoning. “We’re right on the edge,” he warned.
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