All good things come to an end

After decades in which they assured themselves that they had left all that nasty historical stuff behind them and from now on everyone could afford to take things easy, Western politicians and those who feed them ideas are ill-equipped to deal with the many challenges they face. Some challenges, like those flung down by headlong technological progress or by the now almost universal reluctance to breed, did not bother previous generations. Others would have been familiar to our Palaeolithic forefathers.

To the discomfort of those who simply want to live in peace, events are reminding them that there is no good reason to think that Jesus had it right when, according to the evangelist Matthew, he said that the meek shall inherit the earth. Over the centuries, such inoffensive people have been ground into the dust by hard men, and some women, who took a radically different approach.

This is not about to change. Experience suggests that, unless they shape up very quickly, large numbers of Europeans, North Americans and others could well share the unenviable fate of others who thought that their relatively comfortable, or at least tolerable, way of life would last forever without them having to do much to deter would-be predators.

A hundred or so years ago, not only the Jews but countless others in Europe were unprepared to confront the horrors that were barrelling towards them, as, more recently, have been Christian communities in the Middle East and northern Nigeria. In almost every part of the world, ethnic and religious minorities are getting put to the sword without anyone elsewhere lifting a finger to help them or even noticing their plight.

Pacifists may refuse to recognise it, but military weakness is provocative and causes wars. Flaunting it invites outsiders to take advantage of the opportunities they see opening before them. The European leaders – Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, Friedrich Merz, Alexander Stubb and Ursula von der Leyen – who accompanied Ukraine’s embattled president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Washington where, looking a lot like guilty schoolchildren, they did their humble best to win Donald Trump’s approval by unctuously praising him, let the world know that they still depend on the United States to protect them from aggressors, of whom some, no doubt, will feel greatly encouraged by the strange spectacle they saw taking place in the Oval Office.

Despite boasting an economy that dwarfs that of Russia, which apparently has a nominal gross national product that is not much bigger than Spain’s, the European powers are still unable to provide Ukraine with the arms that would be needed to drive Vladimir Putin’s forces back to where they came from. Though they may be investing more in their long-neglected armament industries, experts in these matters say that several years will have to go by before they manage to produce enough drones, artillery shells, missiles and tanks. It would seem that even the US is running out of such items.

Like many powerful entities that flourished for a while before disintegrating, big European nations and the US let themselves become complacent. Politicians and commentators kept asking why should tax-payers’ hard-earned money be spent on policing the world and came to the conclusion that it was none of their business and that, in any case, they had no right to tell others what they ought to do. However, though attitudes that were struck when Western collective supremacy was taken for granted and those who attacked it were applauded for their bravery may be changing, the divisions they created and then exploited continue to undermine morale. They have certainly made it far more difficult to confront the serious problems that are being caused by the influx of huge numbers of people, most of them male, from violence-prone non-Western parts of the world who have no intention of adopting the codes of behaviour prevalent in the host societies.

Those who point out that, while Hindus from India, East Asians, Latin Americans and African Christians who move to Europe or the United States fit in easily enough, many Muslims do not, are liable to be treated by progressives as right-wing extremists or even “neo-Nazis” who, they say, like picking on the innocent victims of Western colonial rapacity. For a time, such hectoring discouraged attempts to decide what, if anything, should be done to maintain social harmony in the wealthier parts of the world, but the political drift away first from the traditional left, which is blamed for the prevailing state of affairs, and then from the moderate centre, that so disturbs progressives, is due almost entirely to fears that at any moment fanatics from the rapidly growing Muslim enclaves found in most European cities could start launching large-scale Jihadist attacks on people living in surrounding areas.

Trump, who in his own country is driving out immigrants who entered without doing the requisite paperwork and is vigorously attacking what he calls the “enemy within,” by which he means those who apparently think that the US was a terrible mistake whose inhabitants should beg forgiveness for their collective sins, has taken to advising the Europeans to do the same. Both in the United Kingdom and on the continent, there are many who, encouraged by the example he is giving, are demanding that their politicians follow his example. Proposals that barely a year ago were derided as impossibly right-wing, such as the summary expulsion not just of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes but also of the many who refuse to integrate, are going mainstream. 

Opposition to the open borders favoured by those who think cultural differences are unimportant because all human beings are much the same under the skin, is often accompanied by hostility to “wokeism,” especially to the bits that are related to sexual preferences, like the notion that a man can become a woman by willing it so and should thereby be entitled to use the same bathrooms or compete against girls in sporting events. According to some, it was in large measure thanks to the Democrats’ willingness to pander to the woke brigade that Trump won handsomely in last year’s presidential elections, Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon got the comeuppance she deserved and UK Prime Minister Starmer is floundering in the opinion polls.