Fading, forgotten Europe has been dropped from the world order

Metaphors mislead. What is going on in the world in the first month of the second quarter of the 21st century is unlike anything that has occurred before. This is not “a shifting of tectonic plates” or “the Titanic sinking”.  We have entered a new quaternary, which is itself a metaphor, but one that is sufficiently large and abstract not to be too misleading. 

Europe, which effectively invented the world order, has, equally effectively, now rudely withdrawn from it. European leaders born after the Second World War – and that includes all British prime ministers since Margaret Thatcher – have turned their half of the Eurasian landmass into a smug, welfarist, immigrationist ruin, incapable of defending itself or projecting its power even into its own skies or seas. 

The states that are inheriting the globe, for all their many deficiencies, take their own identity very, very seriously indeed. These are China, India, Russia and the USA, namely the CIRU bloc. We know of Russia’s many weaknesses: But a lack of a coherent sense of self is not one of them. The liberal-globalists within the USA still control much of the internal workings of that country, but its outward reach very much (thank God) belongs to the America-first school.  The liberal-globalists might well triumph in the coming mid-terms and then in the presidential election. In which case the USA will probably resume its journey towards extinction, as conceived by the Clinton-Obama regimes, and nearly brought to catastrophic fruition by the Biden-Harris alliance. Meaning that China-India-Russia will inherit the earth, and probably reap a whirlwind. Yes, I know: Metaphors. Sorry. More to come.

It is usually said that the Cold War began in 1945, though it really started with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, which divided the world between open, accountable, semi-democratic regimes (even imperial ones) and closed criminal cartels run by secret police. The war against that alliance was half-won by the Anglophone entente created by the two British empires. The next phase of the war was briefly won by the USA, after which Russia reverted to ancient type. Meanwhile, Europe, including the post-Thatcher UK, was committing national suicide, as any visit its capitals – London, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Stockholm – will attest. This time, not a metaphor.

The former British ambassador to the USA, Peter Mandelson, recently wrote that President Trump is himself more a consequence than cause of the current era. That is only partly correct. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of Trump in response to the collapse of American values. Sometimes great turns in history are only possible through the dynamism and vision of great men (and “great” here does not mean approval) such as Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt and Reagan, and of course Thatcher, the last great European statesman, in which, of course, “-man” is ungendered, and “great” really does mean approval.

Put aside the little tragedy of Minneapolis, one woman (probably wrongly) killed: The USA has been under sustained attack in asymmetric acts of war throughout this century.  According to two American specialists in the field, Jonathan Caulkins and Peter Reuter, writing in The Washington Post, in 2023 alone, 114,466 people in the US died of drug overdoses, 77,695 of them killed by fentanyl-based opioids. The primary source of the world’s fentanyl is China, also the world’s largest manufacturer of drugs. Perhaps not coincidentally, the supplies of fentanyl from China into North America dwindled after the Chinese unleashed COVID 19 on the world. Moreover, few observers will admit that Greenland, with its calamitous addiction problems caused by the Innuits’ genetic inability to process alcohol, is on the verge of a societal catastrophe. The US will probably be as unable to solve this problem as it was its  own fentanyl crisis, and no doubt an ever-generous China will probably try to lend a helping hand here also.

The comforting fiction to which the EU and UK adhesively cling is that up until the arrival of Trump, the world was run on rules-based lines. The utter absurdity of this is revealed by China’s membership of the World Trade Organisation, despite its use of slave-labour, the absence of a predictable and consistently applied law in its courts, the arbitrary use of capital punishment and the vital role of the People’s Liberation Army in its economy. Why would the Chinese not think that they had a legitimate claim to Greenland? None of their other claims to legitimacy, all of them equally absurd,  have ever been rejected by the EU or caused their expulsion from the WTO. 

The world will now be managed by the CIRU axis. Europe is a maimed, self-regarding irrelevance. All breath regarding its future is a waste of precious lung-air. It has no future, other than as an open-air museum in honour of the cultural and racial origins of the USA and source of many of the ideas that make the Chinese, Indian and Russian states possible.  These three entities have profound demographic and cultural challenges ahead, many of them perhaps insurmountable. But the polity with the most vibrant military-industrial complex and which is still demographically thriving, despite its many problems, remains the USA. 

Almost alone in the free, largely post-Christian Caucasian world, it understands that control of the Arctic is the key to mastery of space, not quite the next frontier so beloved of Star Trek so much as the next Western Front. (Yes, metaphor, sigh). At the equator, the world spins at 1,000 miles an hour, or 1,600 kph, but at the north pole, it is almost static, meaning communications between space and there are vastly simplified. Moreover, like it or not, and I for one very much do not, the Chinese have revived their ancient belief that they are mankind’s natural leaders. Their historic mission now is the conquest of space to command this world. The only Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yau, steadfastly refuses to condemn state-censorship of dissenting Chinese artists. That such a toady was even awarded a Nobel Prize says more about Swedish – and by extension, European – values than about his merits as a writer. 

But no matter. Before the second quarter of this century is done, Nobel Prizes will be as relevant as both British empires, between which Shelley penned this immortal observation on imperial vainglory:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Where simple truth fails, we enlist metaphors. The final imperial embers flicker wanly in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Rome and London. One day not far into the future, Greenland’s icy shores will probably mark the start-point of what remains of our western civilisation.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.