Not what Europe wants to hear

Between the revolution and the firing squad, a Russian aristocrat once observed, there is always time for a bottle of champagne. Between the demographic disaster and the collapse of Western civilisation, Mark Steyn appears to believe, there’s always time for a rip-roaring op-ed and a series of blistering jokes.

No writer I can think of manages to combine utter bleakness about mankind’s prospects with a genius for one-liners like Steyn. More gloomily pessimistic about our civilisation’s future than Peter Hitchens at a fetish night in Heaven, and yet consistently funnier than any mere humorist or jobbing stand-up, Steyn is a master of gallows humour. And in this book we Europeans are the condemned men.

I know that for many of my fellow panty-waisted, cheese-eating, surrender monkeys being harangued about our propensity for cultural suicide by cheerleaders for Bush can grate a little. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the author of America Alone as simply a jester at the court of King George W.

Steyn succeeds in packing a series of provocative contentions into this relatively short book in a way which demonstrates a serious engagement with some of the biggest issues in geopolitics. That he does so with humour, lightness of touch and brutal clarity, only demonstrates what a talented writer he is, and takes nothing away from the seriousness of the challenges he poses. That many of Steyn’s conclusions will be unpalatable to the European consensus only underlines how much a failure to face harsh truths has characterised the European response to the scale of the terrorist threat we face.

Steyn’s arguments are, of course, framed by the War on Terror, but they are not limited to it. He considers how demographic change will affect power politics and discusses the impact of declining and ageing populations on Japan, Russia and Europe, set against the projections for America’s relatively steady growth in population and the expectations of explosive population growth in the Arab and Islamic world.