Greetings from Odesa, where I passed a night of comparatively light droning. For, oh, two months or so now we have been using this ongoing Sunday-morning End of the World audio adaptation additionally to provide any weekend updates re Iran and related matters. However, facing a looming sixty-day deadline for Congressional authorisation of his war, the President has now declared hostilities "terminated" - thereby apparently rendering the approval of Congress unnecessary. So the new war need discombobulate us no longer.
Nor need the old war. Chances of American negotiators intruding on a beautiful spring day in Ukraine? Zero per cent. Because the only way to penetrate the country from the west is by rail, which is how the King of Sweden and Duke of Sussex made it to Kyiv last month. Ha! Losers. No self-respecting Yank billionaire is going to ride commercial:
"They have their own issue with having to take the train," one person familiar with the discussions said. "It's difficult for Witkoff."
So we can proceed direct to today's episode of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Which gets to the heart of the matter:
There are three possible resolutions to the present struggle:
a) Submit to Islam;
b) Destroy Islam;
c) Reform Islam.
Because most of us don't take (a) as a serious possibility, we're equally unserious about being forced to choose between (b) and (c). But submission to Islam is very possible, and to many it will still seem ridiculous even as it happens: like John Kerry during the 2004 campaign, we'll be spluttering that we can't believe we're losing to these guys. But we can lose (as I've always believed) and (as I've come to believe) we might lose it more easily than even the gloomiest of us thought.
Twenty years ago, The Economist and other publications thought a) was "alarmist". Others reckoned there was still plenty of time to fix things - that was the view of young Douglas Murray, as it happens, sharing a panel with me in New York. We all know that, in contemporary western politics, it's the things there's plenty of time to fix that never get fixed. See, inter alia, the US debt, which won't be "fixed" until after the dollar collapses. So, with regard to (a), it's happening right now:
Britain Will Become a Muslim Country
That's Andrew Gold of HuffPost and the BBC. So from alarmist to inevitable in a mere twenty years. Any chance of anyone resisting the inevitable? Or is it easier to sacrifice our women and children?
A Young woman brutally stabbed to death in random unprovoked attack yesterday morn on busy Esplugues de Llobregat st nr Barcelona.
Pedro Sanchez granted 500k people like this bastard Spanish citizenship.
RIP to Europepic.twitter.com/41B4l4WsKQ https://t.co/41B4l4WsKQ pic.twitter.com/JxTUAGJhzh
— Zee 🔥 (@Zeeeee_xx) May 3, 2026
Nevertheless, this is the chapter that, were I to live long enough to publish a revised edition, I would tweak just a little. Upon publication of my book, President Bush was kind enough to send me a very nice letter about it. Which was awfully sporting of him, considering I'm what Al Gore would call a bit "snippy" about him in the text - which did not stop him giving copies to all his senior staff, who then spread it around their junior staff. In his letter, he was extremely complimentary and insightful about America Alone - and concluded by referring to my ten-point list beginning on page 205: Point Ten, he said, "on page 206 makes sense to me."
Point Ten crops up in this week's episode, and reads:
Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself.
I would not write that sentence today - and in fact was a little queasy about it by the time the President's missive arrived. I wrote it principally in reference to the US failure to use other levers of national power - diplomatic, financial, cultural, etc - whereas it certainly knew how to blow things up. However, in the months between submitting my final manuscript and its publication, I had been to the Pentagon for the first time, upon the invitation of Secretary Rumsfeld, and had been fairly horrified by what I had seen. "Congress," sighed Rummy, "always wants to give you money for things you don't want to do, and never for what you do want to do."
"What do you mean?" I asked. And he told me about the room down in the basement where senior officials whiled away the hours war-gaming tank battles on the East German plain against the Soviet Union - even though the designated adversary had ceased to exist a decade-and-a-half earlier.
Which back then was an all too real glimpse into the military's inclination to fight the World War Two model now and forever. But now it's even more embarrassing. I mean, we're now in the fifth year of running a war that's as close to fighting the Soviets on the East German plain as you can get - fighting the Russians on the east Ukrainian plain. And how's that going?
Ah, well. Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear my thoughts from twenty years ago in Part Thirty-Five 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, 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 almost eighty cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio adventures, 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 nearly eighty gripping yarns in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Thirty-Six of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
