Welcome to Part Five in our new audio adaptation of a favourite book among Steyn readers: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
In this week's episode, we start by surveying the demographic scene worldwide. Me two sodding decades ago:
Almost every geopolitical challenge in the years ahead has its roots in demography, but not every demographic crisis will play out the same way... In Japan, the demographic crisis exists virtually in laboratory conditions – no complicating factors; in Russia, it will be determined by the country's relationship with a cramped neighbor - China; and in Europe, the new owners are already in place – like a tenant with a right-to-buy agreement.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Five of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
Thank you for your kind comments about this latest of our audio serialisations. Israel Pickholtz, an Israeli member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
Mark, I have been listening to you doing America Alone and enjoying it in your voice. Considering you wrote it some years ago, are you ever tempted to slip in comments based on, say, subsequent development. Or I daresay even a correction or two?
Well, no: The audio is the text as published in 2006. However, we've been annotating in this space as we go along - not with "comments" on "subsequent developments" but with updates on specific factual assertions. For example, today's episode focuses mainly on Japan, Russia and China, and in it I claim that Russia's population could be down to 130 million by now. That's wrong. It's currently down to 146 million. However, that number is bulked up by extraterritorial millions by including, inter alia, the seizure of the Crimea from Ukraine - and further augmented by a conscious strategy of importing other ethnic Russians from beyond the country's present borders, as if, say, the UK had embarked on a policy of repatriating Anglo-Celtic Canadians and Australians, rather than opening its doors to Albanian sex traffickers, Afghan paedos and Sudanese clitoridectomists.
Which is to say Putin's policy is a lot saner than Britain's or western Europe's. That's also why he's taken the Donbas, and hasn't yet given up on Odessa.
However, just because it's not as loopy as Merkel-Johnson doesn't mean the Kremlin's policy doesn't have its own limitations. When the Ukraine war began, many western Russophiles commented to the effect that you don't know these guys, they're tough hombres: remember WW2 - the Siege of Leningrad?
For purposes of comparison:
In 1927 (the earliest available numbers, per L'Histoire démographique de la Russie 1927–1959 by Messrs Andreev, Darski and Kharkova) the birth rate per 1,000 people was 49.6 - and the total fertility rate was 6.73 children per woman.
That's the manpower that held off the Krauts at Leningrad.
By 2000 - that's the generation in the Ukraine meat grinder - the birth rate per 1,000 people had fallen from 49.6 to 8.6, and the total fertility rate was down from 6.73 to 1.19.
The nation that held off the Siege of Leningrad no longer exists. This war is only fightable because Ukraine's demographics are even worse.
Demographic decline has an impact not just on toy sales but on basic maxims of geopolitical prudence. Me in 2006:
Russia's calculation is that sooner or later we'll be back in a bi-polar world and that, in almost any scenario, there's more advantage in being part of the non-American pole. If a Sino-Russian strategic partnership has a certain logic to it, so, in a darker way, does a Sino-Russo-Euro-Muslim alliance of convenience.
And so, notwithstanding the EU's sabre-rattling, it is proving.
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