Quickie: Scary piece: America’s Next Civil War
American chaos is already oozing over the border: the trickle of refugees crossing after Trump’s election has swollen to a flood; a trade war is underway, with a US trade representative describing Canada as “a national security threatâ€; and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military the world has ever known openly praises authoritarians as he attempts to dismantle the international postwar order. The US has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council, pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, abandoned the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and scorned the bedrock NATO doctrine of mutual defence. Meanwhile, the imperium itself continues to unravel: the administration is launching a “denaturalization task force†to potentially strip scores of immigrants of their US citizenship, and voter purges—the often-faulty processes of deleting ineligible names from registration lists—are on the rise, especially in states with a history of racial discrimination. News of one disaster after another keeps up its relentless pace but nonetheless shocks everybody. If you had told anyone even a year ago that border guards would be holding children in detention centres, no one would have believed you.
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