Something Big Is About to Break

A little over a week ago, National Review published an essay with a headline that sounded almost too plain for the subject it was dealing with: “Something Is Going to Happen.”

That sort of headline would hardly raise an eyebrow on a prepper site, an obscure internet forum or one of those social media accounts that predicts civil war every second Tuesday.

But National Review is different. Founded in 1955, it is one of the oldest and most established conservative publications in the United States. It has always presented itself as serious, intellectual, and measured.

So when one of its writers says something is coming, it is worth paying attention. Daniel Foster’s essay began with a phrase that has become popular online among people who have grown tired of being told every week that the world is ending: “Nothing ever happens.”

Every election is the most important election in history. Every scandal is the one that will finally bring the whole system down. Every international dispute is the beginning of the next world war.

Then the week ends. The shops open the next morning. The bills still arrive. The kids still need picking up from school. Life carries on. People become cynical. They stop listening.

Foster’s warning was that this cynicism may have gone too far. Beneath the daily churn of outrage and political theatre, some of the forces that have preceded serious upheaval in the past are gathering again.

The international order is weakening. Economic nationalism is back. Institutions still go through the motions of authority, but fewer people trust them. Governments are losing control of their borders, their finances and, in some cases, their own populations.

Foster spent much of his essay on global affairs, but the larger point was hard to miss. The modern West is becoming less stable. He is not the only one saying it.

Almost 30 years ago, two American writers, William Strauss and Neil Howe, published a book called The Fourth Turning. They argued that Anglo-American history moves in long cycles lasting about 80 to 100 years.

Each cycle passes through four broad stages before ending in a period of crisis. During that final stage, institutions lose authority, politics hardens and the old order is eventually replaced, often through war, depression, revolution or some other national upheaval.

Strauss and Howe pointed to earlier crisis periods such as the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Great Depression followed by the Second World War.

Neil Howe later returned to the theory in The Fourth Turning Is Here. He believes the present crisis began around the 2008 financial crash and will probably reach its climax in the late 2020s or early 2030s.

The theory has its critics, and some of their objections are fair. History is messy. It does not run like a train timetable. A theory broad enough to include war, economic collapse, political breakdown and institutional reform can be made to fit a lot of things. Even so, there is something persuasive about the basic pattern.

The people who remember the last great catastrophe gradually pass away. The institutions built after it grow complacent. They become more bureaucratic, more self-protective and less responsive to the public.

Trust falls. Debt rises. Politics becomes more bitter. Compromise is treated as surrender. At some point, the old arrangements stop working, but there is no agreement about what should replace them. That is when events can move very fast.

Peter Turchin reaches a similar conclusion by a very different path. Turchin began his career as a theoretical biologist. He later helped develop a field called cliodynamics, which uses historical data and mathematical models to study why societies rise, weaken and sometimes fall apart.

In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, he points to a dangerous mix of pressures. Ordinary people find that life is getting harder. Wages stagnate. Housing becomes unaffordable. Starting a family is delayed or abandoned. Secure work becomes harder to find and young people begin to suspect they will never live as well as their parents did.

At the same time, the system produces more university graduates, political operators and ambitious professionals than there are powerful or prestigious positions available for them. Turchin calls this elite overproduction.

Many of these people become bitter. Some turn against the established elite and begin organising public anger for their own purposes. Meanwhile, governments become more indebted, less competent and less trusted.

Turchin also writes about what he calls a “wealth pump”, where money and opportunity move upwards while the position of ordinary workers declines. When these pressures come together, societies can enter a period of political disintegration.

Turchin and Howe are not making exactly the same argument. Howe looks at generations. Turchin looks at class, wealth, state capacity and elite competition. Still, they arrive in roughly the same place. The West may be dealing with more than another bad political cycle.

The most confronting warning comes from Professor David Betz of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Betz argues that Western governments are preparing for the wrong kind of threat. They remain focused on foreign enemies while paying too little attention to the risk of serious conflict inside their own countries.

In a 2025 essay called “Civil War Comes to the West, Part II: Strategic Realities”, Betz argued that the danger is being driven by cultural division, economic stagnation, elite overreach, and a growing belief that normal politics no longer works. He is not talking about two armies in matching uniforms meeting on a battlefield.

A modern civil conflict in a Western country would probably look much dirtier and more confusing. There could be riots, sabotage, political killings, communal violence, attacks on transport and power systems, organised street groups, and neighbourhoods where the state slowly loses control.

Modern cities are far more fragile than they look. Millions of people rely on power, water, fuel, mobile networks, electronic payments, supermarkets, and transport systems working every day. Most city dwellers do not keep much food at home. Many would struggle to cope with even a few days of serious disruption.

Those systems do not have to be destroyed. A handful of carefully chosen attacks could cause failures that spread quickly.

Betz warns that some cities could become what he calls “feral”. They would still have councils, police stations, and government offices, but the authorities would no longer be in firm control.

Later in 2025, Betz and another British strategic scholar, M. L. R. Smith, expanded on this argument in an essay titled “Reflections on Homeland Insecurity: The Strategic Anatomy of Civil Wars to Come.” They described Western countries as entering the “long twilight of civil war”. That phrase is hard to forget.

Their concern is that several pressures are building at once. Governments promise more but deliver less. Immigration continues while assimilation weakens. Trust falls between different groups. Younger people cannot afford homes or start families. Digital networks make it easier for groups to organise outside the control of governments.

Then there is artificial intelligence, which threatens white-collar work after globalisation already wiped out much of the secure blue-collar employment that held many communities together. Betz and Smith see these as signs of a system coming apart at the edges.

You do not have to agree with every word they write to take the warning seriously. These are scholars who have spent their careers studying war, strategy, and the breakdown of order.

Elon Musk has now made the same warning in much blunter terms. Musk, the businessman behind Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has predicted that Britain could face civil war within 20 years. He believes deep cultural division, mass immigration and incompatible values could eventually lead to a violent reckoning.

Musk is not a historian, and being one of the richest men in the world does not make his predictions correct. He also has a taste for provocation. Even so, his warning is not coming out of nowhere. It overlaps with the far more detailed work of Betz. Musk gives the blunt version. Betz explains how such a conflict might actually unfold.

The strongest thread running through all of this is the loss of legitimacy. For generations, Western governments could rely on a broad level of public consent. People might hate the government of the day, but most still believed the basic system was fair enough.

Elections mattered. Courts were independent. Police enforced the law. Public servants served the public. Journalists reported facts. Universities pursued knowledge. Children would probably live better lives than their parents. A lot of people no longer believe those things. They think elections replace the faces but not the direction of government.

They see police moving quickly over offensive words while burglaries, assaults, and organised crime go unsolved. They watch governments ignore clear public opposition to mass immigration, censorship, and costly ideological schemes. They see billions borrowed and spent while roads, hospitals, and schools get worse.

Young people are locked out of housing. Couples delay having children because they cannot afford them. People who work hard and obey the law feel as if they are being taken for fools. Institutions still demand obedience, but they no longer command the respect they once did.

A government can survive being unpopular. It has a much bigger problem when a large part of the population comes to see it as alien, hostile, or illegitimate. People do not go straight from voting to violence. Usually, they withdraw first. They stop listening. They stop trusting. They retreat into their own groups. They turn to protest movements, new parties, or forms of resistance outside the usual political system. If those efforts fail as well, darker possibilities open up.

The frightening part is that a society can look normal right up until it stops being normal. The shopping centres are open. The share market is rising. People are watching Netflix and ordering dinner through an app. The airport is busy. Then something happens.

That was part of Foster’s point about the years before the First World War. Europe before 1914 was wealthy, confident, technologically advanced, and closely connected by trade. Many people thought modern commerce had made a major war too destructive and too irrational to happen. They were right about it being irrational. It happened anyway.

A functioning society rests on habits that are easy to take for granted. People expect strangers to obey basic rules. Political losers accept election results. Officials exercise power within limits. Citizens still see one another as belonging to the same country. Those habits can weaken for years without causing an immediate collapse.

Then a disputed election, a terrorist attack, an assassination, a banking failure, a blackout, a riot, or some other shock exposes how much tension had already built up. The event that sets things off is rarely the whole cause. It is the spark, not the fuel.

None of this proves that Britain, Australia, America, or any other Western country is certain to face war. Historical theories are not prophecy. Mathematical models can be wrong. Academics sometimes become too attached to their own ideas. Elon Musk makes plenty of predictions that do not come true.

But it would also be foolish to dismiss every warning because nobody can name the date. The world we grew up in is becoming less secure. Governments are less trusted. The cost of living is eating away at families. Mass immigration has changed countries without clear public consent. Young people increasingly believe the system has denied them a future.

Different writers, using different methods, are seeing the same pressure build. Neil Howe calls it the Fourth Turning. Peter Turchin calls it political disintegration. David Betz warns of a long twilight of civil war. Elon Musk talks about a coming reckoning. Daniel Foster chose simpler words: Something is going to happen.

No one knows exactly what shape it will take. It may be economic, political or social. It could be one sudden crisis or a string of smaller ones that governments cannot contain. There is still time to change direction, but not while leaders keep pretending everything is basically fine.

A society cannot go on weakening its borders, burying its young in debt, punishing dissent, degrading its institutions, and treating its own history with contempt without eventually paying a price.

For years, anyone who said so was called a crank. That excuse is wearing thin.

“The great civilizations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.”
– Arnold J. Toynbee