I feel like we're seeing this now with Gideon losing power in North America.
Not necessarily. Gideon's territory has been cut into pieces, and one of the most likely outcomes is that second and third-tier warlords in some of the pieces simply stop acknowledging his authority, while Gideon himself is too busy getting pounded on by GDI to really contest that by even
fighting a civil war.
[Of course, this is assuming that Gideon can't escape and re-establish himself in a new territorial base to prolong the conflict, in which case he probably
won't lose the backing of his followers and
won't have to fight a civil war anyway]
Remember, Nod's North American territories were only vaguely continguous
before Steel Vanguard. Because they run in a big stripe from the Gulf Coast of the former United States, up along roughly the line of the Mississippi, clear up through Canada (passing through VERY deep Yellow/Red zone around the western tip of Lake Superior). Then up into a big blob of northern Canada, heavily interrupted by Red Zone incursions in the Canadian prairie regions that probably cut a lot of the existing transport corridors Nod was relying on. Then back down south
along the Rockies, running down the mountain range
lengthwise.
It's just a massively unwieldy region to control, even if you can fly/tunnel (but not drive/locomotive) your way across the Red Zone safely, which you kind of can't because of ion storms.
And this is made
so much worse by the part where we've just cut that big unwieldy several thousand kilometer ribbon of territory into three pieces by pushing the Green Zone boundary all the way up to the Red Zones around Chicago and the Great Salt Lake.
If Gideon loses his ability to coordinate warlords across those big stripes of territory (which is frankly an impressive achievement on his part!)... Well, there's no real civil war, there's just a general 'fuck off and fall apart' dynamic. Especially with GDI negotiating surrenders these days.
On the larger scale, this is true.
On the smaller scale, if one commander loses her territory to the advancing Red Zone but maintains most of her armed forces, she may not listen when the neighboring commander tells her that the price for settling in his territory is vassalage. She may decide to adjust the chain of command so that she maintains her independence and power.
One of the duties of a major warlord is to ensure this kind of thing doesn't happen. To distribute territory in a way that satisfies most of their subordinates, and to remind the dissatisfied that they have a great big stick that they will use on anyone who doesn't like their decisions.
If we eliminate a major warlord under circumstances that don't leave a clear successor, their branch of Nod could easily fall into civil war.
Perhaps. On the other hand, there are complications.
First, Nod is aware that Kane is on some level watching, and is unlikely to actively want this kind of internecine warfare. Note that the only
current major Nod-on-Nod conflicts we've been aware of in the past several years were (1) rebellions against Krukov's authority, and (2) the Caravansarai-Mehretu conflict. The former is a clear example of something analogous to the state retaining central authority, and the latter is a confllict Mehretu personally started for reasons unlikely to recur elsewhere. Only the latter fits the bill of "Nod civil war," and quite frankly I suspect there isn't and hasn't been much "Nod civil war" in this past decade. Not compared to previous interwar periods when more of the Earth's surface was habitable and when Kane was
not so obviously still active and aware of world affairs. This time, pressure to resolve disputes short of war is stronger, especially since GDI is watching, has just proven its nearly unprecedented ability to
strike first, and will obviously take advantage of any civil wars that materialize.
Second, any major retreats by Nod are likely to be
into the territory of an existing major warlord. By your own argument, major warlords are the ones with "big sticks." The warlords (major or minor) falling back into that warlord's territory will
NOT have big sticks; their sticks will tend to be broken by GDI. That is to say, even if they have the loyalty of their troops, that loyalty will be strained by defeat, and the troops' equipment will be cut off from its support base and access to uncontested tiberium mining grounds.
Third, I'm pretty sure your model here is how nomadic peoples behave, where when a big new rough tough Tribe A comes in and displaces Tribe B, Tribe B tends to try to resettle into the lands of Tribe C, which results in a B-C war that may in turn result in Tribe C being displaced into the lands of Tribe D, repeating the process. The big difference is that in this dynamic, it's 'every tribe for itself." Even given that Nod is ideologically willing to fight internal conflicts, there
IS some concept of a "greater good of Nod," and the warlords are presumably able to negotiate and under some pressure to do so.
...
One might analogize to the difference between the classical and medieval Mediterranean.
In classical times, conflict between states was extremely brutal, diplomacy was rudimentary, and wars were often fought to the knife because once one side started winning it had no real incentive to
stop until forced to stop, or until it had successfully pillaged the losers of everything they had and sold the survivors into slavery.
In medieval times, the Mediterranean basin was dominated by a few conflicting world religions, and conflicts between the religions could be brutal, but
within each religious grouping's sway, there were some enforced norms that were usually in play.
For instance, Christians were not, on the whole, supposed to sell other Christians into slavery, for instance. And if you won a battle against rival Christians but did really brutal things to their women and children, or utterly ravaged their lands and left them with nothing, you could get in a lot of trouble with the Pope. Because religious authorities in Western Europe remained personally neutral in most Christian-Christian disputes and would tend to excommunicate anyone who acted like a complete ogre. Conflict continued to occur among Western Catholic Christians, but was kept within certain boundaries, and was usually resolved well short of the total annihilation of the losing side.
Now, these same Roman Catholics could be
horrifyingly brutal to heretics or 'infidels' who did not accept the legitimacy and supremacy of the Roman Catholic cultural framework, and they certainly fought each other quite vigorously at times... but there was at least a
norm of conflict resolution short of total war to the knife, and within which framework vassalage and subordination were accepted means of resolving such issues.
So we may see internal Nod conflicts as we put Nod under military pressure... or we may see these disputes being resolved with limited or no wars.
And yes, I just compared Kane to a medieval pope. No offense is intended to any Catholics in the audience, but the
social role is similar, what with how he spends most of his time more or less peaced out in Italy and occasionally pops in to excommunicate a disloyal warlord or call for a crusade.
___________________________
*(including the second and third-tier warlords subordinate to a given major warlord)
