That's the scary scenario. In Belfast and Armagh and Derry, it just went on and on: bombings, assassinations, hit and run shootings, heavy-handed military reprisals, vigilante justice, vengeance and revenge killings.....and in the end, nobody won. Not the Provisional Irish Republican Army, not the Royal Ulster Constabulary, not the Irish National Liberation Army, not the Ulster Defence Association, not the Red Hand Commandos, Ulster Volunteer Force, or the British Army. All that happened was, the reprisals simply went on and on, until the various parties basically got sick of fighting, and decided to just.....quit.
That's what I see happening here. The sides will break down street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, the barricades will go up, the windows will be filled with snipers, the Molotov cocktails will fly, the kids will grow up thinking that hurling rocks at the people on the other side of the fence is normal behavior, and when the Army or the National Guard moves in to restore order, whoever opposes them will be doing more than hurling brickbats and firebombs---they'll be setting off booby traps and bombs to drive them back out. And it will just go on and on and on. Ireland's Troubles went on for approximately 30 years, more or less, which is pretty much an eternity for people who are caught in the crosshairs of the various hostile factions.
The only way I see a different scenario in this between Ulster and the United States is that in our case, we have China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and the militant jihadist groups of your choice, all waiting to pounce once we're weak enough that we can't fight them off. A foreign military intervention into an American "Troubles" is a very likely possibility; while Antifa and the Students for Justice in Palestine are swapping potshots with the Illinois Sons of Liberty and the Patriot Front in the streets of Chicago, China could land several hundred ships bearing thousands of troops in California and Oregon, and from there start moving inland, with the excuse being that America's nuclear arsenal presents a threat to world peace and stability, so they're moving in to "restore stability and order".
It could happen. Even worse would be if, say, China and Russia decided to squabble with each other over who gets what, and start battling each other on American soil. Or one of their proxies, say, Iran, with Russia's backing, or North Korea with China's backing, decides that things aren't moving fast enough, and go to an extreme, setting off a nuclear or biological weapon somewhere. Any way you slice this, it ain't gonna be pretty, and if you aren't scared, you ought to be.
