Programming note: Tomorrow, Saturday, Mark will be back for his weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. It airs at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. On Sunday, he will have a different kind of audio diversion, with Part Four of the new serialisation of his highly prescient bestseller, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
~Because they made the mistake of sabotaging his escalator and then his prompter, the President of the United States opened up a supersized can of geopolitical whup-ass on the UN General Assembly this week, pithily summarised by many headline-writers thus:
Trump's middle finger to the UN: 'Your countries are going to hell'
In fairness, this insight was mainly directed at America's "allies" in Europe. The particular hell they are going to will not be news to those who've swung by this shingle over the last twenty-three years, but I thought it might be worth doing a brisk tour d'horizon of where we're at:
*WESTERN EUROPE
The other half of the Nato "alliance" is not "going" to hell; they're at the express check-in seeing if they can get upgraded to a better circle. As I have been saying for a while, the latter half of the 2020s will be Western Europe's last meaningful electoral cycle. If "populist" parties are treated by the "mainstream" cabal as they were in the recent Dutch and German elections, there will be no point pinning your hopes on the 2035 vote, because by then we will be past the demographic point of no return and the only means of salvaging France or England, Sweden or Austria will be non-democratic and violent.
Newspapers and think-tanks, guardedly decoding the somewhat obscured official statistics, nevertheless openly speculate on whether the native populations of some of the oldest nation states on earth will become minorities in their own lands by the 2050s or 2060s. The correct answer is, absent mass deportations, somewhat before. In response, so-called "free" societies are ever more brazenly policing their citizens' speech, introducing de facto blasphemy regimes protecting Islam, and planning to mandate "digital ID".
This is a tragedy, and will end very bloodily.
*CENTRAL EUROPE
It is a tribute to the perversity of America's "victory" in the Cold War that such remnants of "the west" as are to be found are now almost exclusively located east of the Iron Curtain. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, to wax Churchillian, the most peaceful places to be on the Continent - by which I mean more or less stab-free rape-free paedo-free - will be the likes of Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, maybe even Moldova.
Why?
Because they're not full of Muslims.
It isn't difficult. The question is whether they can maintain that advantage in the face of Cruella von der Leyen's determination to turn them into the same busted-arse dumps as the cities of her own country.
*RUSSIA-UKRAINE
In a couple of months' time, the Kremlin will have been slogging it out in Ukraine for longer than it battled the Axis powers on the Eastern front. Joe Biden's autopen promised that sanctions would bring Putin to his knees, so it would be much easier for Joe to sniff his hair. It hasn't happened and it isn't going to happen - mainly because the non-Nato parts of the world have concluded, for good or ill, that it is not in their interests for Russia to lose.
Is Trump's apparent reversal on Ukraine's territorial integrity serious? Or just another 4-D chess move amusingly calling Macron, Starmer and the other butch boys' bluff?
Doesn't really matter either way. If there were any serious prospect of Zelenskyyyyyy re-taking the Donbas, never mind the Crimea, Putin would go nuclear.
Oh, not Armageddon, not immediately; just a stray nuke in, say, a remote, lightly populated part of Norway or Canada that could be attributed to computer error, or - perhaps more plausibly - Washington's rogue Deep State hacking the system. And then what are you gonna do?
For Russians, this is not the Afghan war, far away on the fringe of the map: they do not regard Odessa as they do Jalalabad. Putin is not willing to lose, and everything he has done since Trump's election has emphasised that. So the question is: can you defeat Russia militarily without spreading the war beyond Ukraine's borders? Tricky...
So let's simplify it: can you defeat Russia militarily?
I think we all know the answer to that.
As for Ukraine, it will run out of cannon fodder long before it runs out of Nato-manufactured cannons:
At the time of its independence in 1991, it had fifty-two million people.
In 2021, the year before the war, it had a population of forty-three million.
Currently, it stands at thirty-nine million.
Because of war dead and massive flight, particularly of fertile women, Ukraine's population is predicted to decline further, to thirty-five million by 2040.
This will be the last war Ukraine ever fights, and it will never recover from it. But it made Lindsey Graham and Boris Johnson feel mega-butch, so there's that.
*AFRICA
In 1900 the population of Africa was 140 million. That's why it was possible for one continent to be entirely owned by another - Europe - and why a mere five dozen British civil servants could until 1956 govern the whole of the Sudan, reasonably well and better than any time since.
Today the population of African is one-and-a-half billion. In fact, the continent now adds the equivalent of its total 1900 population - 140 million - every four years. In 2020 Africa had 1.38 billion people; in 2025 1.55 billion people. By 2050 the UN projects another billion Africans. By 2070 - or Thatcher/Reagan to now - the world will have five billion (and falling) Asians, over three billion (and rising) Africans, and Europe and the Americas will be a bit of loose pocket change rattling around between those very round numbers.
It is possible, of course, that those numbers will not come to pass. A significant percentage of those three billion might decide to head to almost any Libyan port delivered by Obama, Cameron and Hollande into the hands of the jihad boys and procure passage on a northbound ship to be ushered by a German or Scandinavian "refugee" "charity" into an Italian port.
As with all things, we did this to ourselves: Western medicine eliminated childhood mortality in the most dysfunctional and corrupt countries on earth, thereby incentivisng millions (billions?) to head for a four-star country-house hotel in England. But, as it is, almost all population growth across the planet right now is coming from sub-Saharan Africa and the wackier Islamic redoubts. Would you stay in Chad when your cellphone is full of EU politicians insisting that "Diversity is our strength"?
To put it at its mildest, when do the citizens of countries "going to hell" at least rouse themselves to boo the cobwebbed clichés?
*THE MIDDLE EAST
I don't write much about "Palestine" mainly because I haven't had a new thought on the subject in a quarter-century. But forget, for a moment, the Jews: I understand many people find Jews all a bit Jewy and agree with that Brit Wanker Copper that it's unacceptably provocative to have Jews strolling the streets looking "openly Jewish". So set aside your antipathy to the Chosen; it is not in your interest to have another Islamic krappistan to add to the dozens out there.
There are fifty-seven members of the Organisation of Islamic Co-Operation; and, unlike the Commonwealth, at the UN they all vote as a bloc. So far Europe's only member is Albania, but, given that over ten per cent of Albanian males are now resident in England it can only be a matter of time before the UK applies for "associate membership". As it is, J D Vance has already suggested that His Majesty's Dominions and the Continental powers are recognising "Palestine" only for domestic demographic reasons. Why would that surprise anyone? It's in America Alone, for cryin' out loud - although admittedly I wrote that when JD was in junior high.
Was "President" Mahmoud Abbas, now in the twenty-first year of his five-year presidential term, grateful for "recognition" by every Ukrainian rent-boy's favourite bottom? No. He immediately demanded Sir Keir pay him two trillion dollars in reparations for Britain's administration of its UN mandate for Palestine. The UK is broke but I suppose it could find the money if it, say, downgraded its Albanian sex-traffickers to three-star hotels.
But all "President" Abbas would do is sluice it to his sons, who, after a lifetime's devotion to "Palestinian" public service are now among the richest men on the planet, thanks to USAid and its Euro-equivalents.
Abbas and the sewer he presides over are the problem not the solution. If conjuring into being such a "state" - with embassies in London, Paris and beyond - is the best we can do at this stage in the Great Game, our civilisation deserves to die.
*CHINA et al
In America Alone I wrote that, thanks to its one-child policy, China "will get old before it's got rich" - a line Henry Kissinger picked up on and started using, although it sounds much more authoritative in his guttural vowels than in my showtune nancy-boy voice.
That's not good news - because it means the Politburo has every incentive to act sooner rather than later. Which is why it's been busy, under its Belt & Road initiative, gobbling up large parts of the Commonwealth from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean to Africa to the Caribbean.
However, China has one huge advantage over us: it is a conventional ethnostate - with 1.2 billion Han Chinese accounting for some ninety-two percent of the population. India, the world's most populous nation, is a little more complicated, but, more importantly, thinks and acts as a conventional ethnostate. They have not imported from America that "nation of immigrants" bollocks. Unlike, say, English "liberals", the Chinese and Indians - nor any other sane society - would not regard it as a sign of their virtue were the native population of their capital city were to sink to thirty per cent in nothing flat. The emerging powers of the world have a survival instinct and a strategic clarity that the suicidal west does not.
*THE UNITED STATES
America's 1950 moment is drawing to a close. If it ends with every US "ally" going off the cliff and the BRICS crowd collapsing the dollar, its three-quarter-century dominance is unlikely to be regarded by posterity as a grand success. Both scenarios are quite likely: for everyone accept the US and its client states, the inauguration of the post-dollar world is simply a matter of agreeing the timing. As for going off the cliff, whether one can remain a First World society of 400 or 500 million is an interesting question, but you're severely worsening the odds with all the diversity wankerama.
To be sure, Donald Trump has spent the last nine months demonstrating an energy in the executive unimaginable in France or Germany, Canada or Australia. However, he is stymied at every turn by the industrial-scale hollowing out of every institution from your local kindergarten to the Pentagon. A third-rate politicised judiciary - with an extraordinary number of foreign-born judges whose English comprehension does not apparently extend to the separation of powers - is confident it can stall the President's drive and determination until the next election.
Furthermore, the United States is the fons et origo of every madness afflicting the core west, starting with mass trannification. Millions of apparently sane people, including your children's teachers and your hospital management (and, in Minnesota, your governor), purport to believe that this is as much of a woman as the late Claudia Cardinale.
The American left gives the impression it won't be satisfied till every middle-school boy is a girl and vice-versa. Why would they do such a thing? Because, as I've said for years to the despair of many "conservative" radio listeners, if you can abolish biological sex, what can't you do? So we now have psychotrannies gunning down children at mass in Catholic schools and tranny boyfriends assassinating key conservative figures on stage before thousands of people. We are at the dawn of what is already being spoken of as the Age of Assassination.
Was this foreseeable? Well, it's eight sodding years - that's pre-George Floyd - since I noted en passant that Mark Bray, author of The antifa Handbook, was a professor at something called the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth. You might almost get the impression that The Day of the Tranny Jackal was baked in from the get-go, long before they took to the streets as antifa's shock troops. No prudent society would sit back and permit the mass incentivisation of mental illness.
And yet we did.
We do not know how all the above phenomena will intersect. Maybe Western Europe will finally succeed in taunting Putin into nuking 'em. Maybe it will turn into West Africa (North). Maybe white people will go extinct after all the white girls marry Muslim boys because all the white boys have transitioned into girls and are practicing with their sniper's rifles.
But what is the likelihood of the west's political class, outside of a few individuals, rising to the challenge of any of the above within the five years that remain to settle this more or less peacefully?
Now back to our 24/7 coverage of who's two points up in Iowa...
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