Pattern Recognition = Evident Civil War Threat

By Michael Holburn - Contributing Writer to The Union

Image Source: Photo by MagicPattern on Unsplash


Billionaire investor Ray Dalio posted a Jan 26 essay titled “Money, Civil & International War, Minneapolis, and Beyond—in Perspective.”

The timing was not accidental. Two days earlier on Jan 24, a Border Patrol agent had shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and VA hospital worker, in broad daylight on a Minneapolis street. It was the third shooting involving federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in less than a month. The first, on January 7, had killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

Dalio’s conclusion was blunt: the United States is now a tinderbox, deep in what his framework calls Stage 5—the “pre-breakdown phase”—and showing signs of tipping into Stage 6, the final stage, defined by civil war or revolution.

If you are not familiar with Dalio’s Big Cycle, here is the short version.

In his 2021 (PDF) book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, the Bridgewater Associates founder analyzed 500 years of history to identify a six-stage, roughly 80-year cycle that tracks how societies rise, prosper, overextend, fracture, and collapse. Stage 5 is where financial deterioration meets intense internal conflict: large wealth gaps, rising populism, declining trust in institutions, and the demonization of political opponents. Stage 6 is where the system breaks—when people stop accepting the rules and start fighting for control outside of them.

Dalio has been warning about the persistent distrust for years. What changed in January is that he identified specific events pushing us toward total breakdown.

In his essay, he cited two accelerants. The first is federal agents killing civilians on American streets—what he described, drawing from his book, as a sign that “almost certainly signifies the progression to the next and more violent civil war stage.” The second is the intensifying conflict between the federal government and state governments, which he called a “classic historical marker” for civil conflict.

Governor Tim Walz declared a Day of Unity and demanded federal agents leave Minnesota. Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get out.” More than 3,000 federal officers remained deployed in Operation Metro Surge. Nationwide protests followed, culminating in a January 30 National Shutdown. (Editor note: Recent analysis has found that Operation Metro Surge will cost millions for local governments and philanthropic organizations who have been assisting people impacted by ICE brutality.)

Dalio is not alone in this assessment. Political scientist Barbara Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, has spent years studying the conditions that produce internal conflict. Her research, originally developed for a CIA-backed Political Instability Task Force, identified two key predictors: whether a country has slipped into “anocracy”—a partial democracy with authoritarian characteristics—and whether its political parties have organized along identity lines rather than ideology.

By December 2025, Walter told UC San Diego’s GPS News that indicators suggested America’s democracy score would fall between 1 and 3 on the Polity scale—squarely in the anocracy danger zone. She was unambiguous: countries that backslide into anocracy are very likely to degrade further.

Meanwhile, Genocide Watch—the organization founded by Dr. Gregory Stanton, who developed the Ten Stages of Genocide framework—has for some time listed the United States as exhibiting signs of classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, polarization, and denial. That is six of ten stages.

The overlap between Stanton’s genocide indicators, Walter’s civil war predictors, and Dalio’s Big Cycle stages is difficult to dismiss as coincidence. Three independent frameworks, developed by three different scholars studying three different phenomena, are converging on the same conclusion: the United States is in a structurally dangerous position.

None of this means civil war is inevitable. Dalio himself has said the choice belongs to political leaders—particularly the president. In a February 9 interview with Tucker Carlson, he described the dynamic plainly: in the persistent distrust phase, people pick a side and fight, keep their heads down and hope they don’t get shot, or flee. He noted that many people who would never have imagined being afraid are now afraid to speak up. That is not a sign of a healthy republic.

I served in the Army and have spent over fifteen years in cybersecurity. I understand what threat indicators look like. When three separate analytical frameworks independently flag the same warning signs—

• federal violence against civilians

• state-federal confrontation

• identity-based polarization

• institutional erosion

• $38 trillion debt bomb (note: estimate before the now ongoing War in Iran - Feb 28)

—that is not partisan commentary. That is pattern recognition.

The question is no longer whether the indicators are present. They are. The question is whether anyone with the power to de-escalate will choose to do so before persistent distrust in the system results in a total breakdown or civil war / revolution.

Editor Note: We did our best to incorporate author sources as embedded links. We also added our own, and in one case substituted a more recent summary of the same ideas.

About the Author

Michael Holburn is a cybersecurity professional and Army veteran based in North Texas, with over 15 years of enterprise security experience. A founder building AI-native security platforms for small and mid-sized businesses, he brings a national security practitioner’s lens to questions of institutional integrity and the weaponization of federal power.

The views and opinions expressed by volunteer contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of The Union, a single issue organization that welcomes all and is dedicated to protecting democracy. Please donate to support our work via Act Blue.