Un Tour d'Horizon

By Mark Steyn

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.

The President of the United States has 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 latter half of the 2020s will be Western Europe's last meaningful electoral cycle.

Western Europe 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 demographic point of no return has already been passed. 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.

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?

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 up to three quarters of all humanity's population. This has profound implications for global politics and economics.

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.

The Age of Assassination

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?