Programming note: please join Mark later today at SteynOnline for a brand new audio edition of Steyn's Song of the Week.
~Welcome to Part Fourteen in our ongoing audio adaptation of a favourite book among SteynOnline readers: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. In the run-up to its twentieth sodding anniversary, it remains as relevant as ever:
Trump administration warns Europe of 'civilisational decline' in new national security strategy
You don't say!
The Trump administration has released a new National Security Strategy for the United States in which it describes Europe as a continent in decline, warns that European nations are facing "civilisational erasure" because of migration and proposes to "cultivate resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations".
Yeah, I could have told the White House that two sod-bollocking decades ago. Matter of fact, I did tell them that two sod-bollocking decades ago:
This rhetoric isn't new as well.
George Bush recommended Mark Steyn's book 'America Alone' to his staff in 2007.
Yet the demographics of both the US and Europe have still deteriorated since then.
— oblique (@Neotribonian) December 6, 2025
Actually, it wasn't 2007; it was October 2006 when the forty-third President started recommending America Alone to his staff. By 2007, his Vice President, the late Dick Cheney, was playing catch-up and calling me in to brief him on its thesis. "So this is a paradigm shift, right?" he said in his super-butch waterboarding voice.
Unfortunately, the super-butch waterboarder did nothing. Had Friday's "new" National Security Strategy been released twenty sod-bollockingly-sodding years ago, the "current trajectory" might be somewhat different. From our new America Alone adaptation just a couple of weeks back:
My old – very old – friend George Abbott, the director of On The Town, Damn Yankees and Pal Joey, died in 1995 at the age of 107 while working on a revival of The Pajama Game. A few years earlier, in his late nineties, he'd given up playing tennis because all his partners had died. That's the position America is facing in respect of its transnational social life: it'll be turning up to the G8, Nato, the EU-US summit only to find that all its partners have died.
On Friday, the White House signed on to that analysis, conceding that the "paradigm shift" was all but complete. From the Johnny-come-latelys at Fox News:
White House roadmap says Europe may be 'unrecognizable' in 20 years as migration raises doubts about US allies
New National Security Strategy cites mass immigration and declining birthrates as threats to NATO alliance
In our comments section, Tom Gelsinon remarks:
Seems that someone should have gotten the US Government a gift membership to our club way back when in the sod-bollocking past.
Actually, the most senior figures in the US Government were regular readers in the sod-bollocking days. But they failed to act. So the "twenty years" ship has sailed: as I wrote just a few days ago, the "free world" is down to its last decade-and-a-half, and in its major cities is already "unrecognisable". Still, I suppose one should be heartened that the US is belatedly giving a heavy hint to its closest allies that in such a world there will no longer be a "Five Eyes" - the intelligence-sharing partnership between Washington and His Majesty's four senior realms. The UK Home Office, including MI5, has already been hollowed out by Islam; why would you expect MI6 to be a lone hold-out?
For the past month, we've been posting a few moments from my one-and-only appearance at the mysteriously beleaguered Heritage Foundation. Viewers seem to have enjoyed it, so we thought we'd dust off a fifth and final excerpt. Here I am in Washington DC in January 2007, with a closing thought that seems obvious now, but which wasn't - not to ninety-nine per cent of western citizens - two decades ago:
"Muslim is the new gay": ah, those were the days! A year later, at the Robson Street courthouse in Vancouver, the Canadian Islamic Congress brought that up in court.
In today's episode, I look at the wretched state of the "mainline" - actually, post-Christian churches. Me in 2006:
If ever there were a time for a strong voice from the heart of Christianity, this would be it. And yet they're as wedded to the platitudes du jour as the laziest politician. These days, if it weren't for homosexuality, the "mainstream" Christian churches would get barely any press at all. In 2005, the big story in America was the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop; in Britain, the nomination of a celibate gay bishop; in Canada, New Westminster's decision to become the first diocese in the Anglican communion to perform same-sex ceremonies. In Nigeria, where on any Sunday the Anglicans in the pews outnumber those in America, Britain and Canada combined, the Archbishop is understandably miffed that the only news he gets from head office revolves around various permutations of gayness. Getting a reputation as a cult for upscale western sodomites and a few attendant fetishists doesn't help when half your country's in the grip of sharia and the local Islamoheavies are just itching to torch your churches.
Twenty sod-bollocking years later, and the torching of Nigerian churches is suddenly in the news. Back then, even those concerned about Islam were still willing to put their faith, so to speak, in secularism. Me two decades ago:
In 2006, a dozen intellectuals published a manifesto against Islamism and in defense of 'secular values for all'. The signatories included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian; Irshad Manji, the Canadian writer; and Salman Rushdie, the British novelist. All three are brave figures and important allies in the campaign against the Islamist tide. But they're making a mistake: secular humanism is an insufficient rallying cry. As another Canadian, Kathy Shaidle, wrote in response:
'It is secularism itself which is part of the problem, not the solution, since secularism is precisely what created the Euro spiritual/moral vacuum into which Islamism has rushed headlong.'
Two decades later, Miss Manji has somewhat dropped out of sight since retreating to Hawaii with her wife and her rescue dogs; Sir Salman was stabbed multiple times by a Muslim born a decade after the Ayatollah's fatwa and is blind in one eye and has lost the use of one hand; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a believing Christian. None of them is betting on "secular values".
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Fourteen of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, our latest Tale for Our Time is a Yuletide fancy from O Henry: Christmas by Injunction. Not in the mood for wild-west whimsy? Well, there are spy thrillers, comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to our six-dozen-plus cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio capers, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to seventy-five cracking audio adventures in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Fifteen of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
