Mark Steyn - America Alone

Russia is the bleakest example of misdirected worrying: there are too many people and too few resources! Exactly backward: poor old Russia is awash in resources but fatally short of Russians — and, yet again, warm bodies are the one indispensable resource. What would you do if you were the fellows in the Kremlin? What assets have you got to keep your rotting corpse of a country as some kind of player? You’ve got nuclear know-how — which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in. You’ve got an empty resource-rich eastern hinterland — which the Chinese are going to wind up with one way or the other. That was the logic behind the sale of Alaska: in the 1850s, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of Alexander II, argued that the Russian Empire couldn’t hold its North American territory and that one day either Britain or the United States would simply take it, so why not sell it to them first? The same argument applies today to the two thousand miles of the Russo-Chinese border. In the ever emptier Russian east there are sixteen million people and falling. In China, there are 1.5 billion and they need to stretch their legs. China is resourcepoor; the Russian east contains 80 percent of that country’s resources. Given that even alcoholic Slavs with a life expectancy of fifty-six will live to see Vladivostok return to its old name of Haishenwei, Moscow might as well flog it to Beijing instead of having it snaffled out from under. Facing extinction, Moscow doesn’t have much to barter with — except dangling the Chinese an offer that could solve several of their structural problems. In fact, Russia might offer a solution to the People’s Republic’s most distinctive structural flaw: the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun — “bare branches.” Since China introduced its “one child” policy in 1978, the imbalance between the sexes has increased to the point where in today’s generation there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. The pioneer generation of that male surplus is now in its twenties. Unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to those young men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are useful for manning the nuttier outposts of the jihad but not for much else. So, given Russia’s own imbalance — between sickly men of low life expectancy and longlived robust women — it’s not hard to see some mutual advantage in a bilateral mass hook-up for Slav women and Chinese men, even if the boys are a bit callow and the chicks somewhat long in the tooth.

That’s not the death whimper of their Tsarist/Communist dreams most Russian nationalists would have predicted. But then they’ve never been shrewd assessors of their own defects. One reason why al Qaeda seriously thinks it can destroy the West is because it believes that in Afghanistan, it — and not the United States — brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union. It will be Russia’s fate to have large chunks of its turf annexed by the Islamic world, and much of what’s left fall to the Chinese.

That’s the danger for Washington — that most of what Russia has to trade is likely to be damaging to U.S. interests. In its death throes, it could bequeath the world several new Muslim nations, a nuclear Middle East, and a stronger China. In theory, America could do a belated follow-up to the Alaska deal and put in a bid for Siberia. But Russia’s calculation is that sooner or later we’ll be back in a bipolar 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. I get a surprising amount of mail from Americans who say, aw, we’re too big a bunch of politically correct blue-state pussies to kick Islamobutt but fortunately the Russkies and the Chi-Coms have their own Muslim wackjobs and they won’t be as squeamish as us wimps when it comes to sorting them out once and for all. Maybe. One day. But right now they figure the jihad is America’s problem and it’s in their interest to keep it that way. Hence, Russo-Chinese support for every troublemaker on the planet, from Iran’s loony president to Hugo Chavez in America’s backyard.

So a combination of factors is bringing about a remarkable event: the death of a great nation not through war or devastation but through its inability to rouse itself from its own suicidal tendencies. As Mrs. Thatcher likes to say, “The facts of life are conservative.” nation that tried to buck those facts of life the most thoroughly is falling the fastest. Churchill didn’t know the half of it: Russia is a vacuum wrapped in a nullity inside an abyss.

Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestley suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:

Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20000 a head…. During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.

Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: if you’ve ever driven along the Loyalist Parkway east of Toronto to Kingston, you’ll know that large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what’s now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today’s Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French. That’s where civilizational confidence comes in: if “Dutchness” or “Frenchness” seems a weak attenuated thing, then the stronger identity will prevail. One notes other similarities between revolutionary America and contemporary Europe: the United Empire Loyalists were older and wealthier; the rebels were younger and poorer. In the end, the former simply lacked the latter’s strength of will.

Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.

If America’s “allies” failed to grasp the significance of September 11, it’s because Europe’s home-grown terrorism problems had all taken place among notably static populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern Ireland to what cynical strategists in Her Majesty’s Government used to call an “acceptable level of violence.” But in the same three decades as Ulster’s “Troubles,” the hitherto moderate Muslim populations of south Asia were radicalized by a politicized form of Islam; previously formally un-Islamic societies such as Nigeria became semi-Islamist; and large Muslim populations settled in parts of Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.

You can argue about what these trends mean, but surely not that they mean absolutely nothing; which is what the complaceniks assure us. On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for the obligatory “of courses”: Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists — though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists — though enough of them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as the “good cop” end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way it rationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of the terrorists’ demands. An IRA man blows up a pub in defiance of democratic reality — because he knows that at the ballot box the Ulster Loyalists win the elections and the Irish Republicans lose. When a European jihadist blows something up, that’s not in defiance of democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come. He’s jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way.