~Lou Aguilar writes in The American Spectator:

In 2006, the brilliant geopolitical scholar Mark Steyn wrote a depressively prescient book about the imminent fate of the Western world, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Steyn posited that Europe would collapse from three main causes: Islamic domination, an unsustainable welfare state, and anti-spiritual solipsism. He added that the United States would be the last nation standing as a majority united Christianist country with the will to power. And that America's very rejection of the leftist hive mentality would draw the ire of its diminishing allies across the pond...

It took almost 20 years for his assessment to be proven right.

The fortnight since JD Vance's Munich speech certainly seems to have restored an America Alone dynamic to transatlantic affairs. The United States, at least for the moment, is once again different; Europe remains mired in what I called eighteen years ago "ineffectual poseur multilateralism". See Starmer, Macron and Cruella von der Leyen at Lancaster House on Sunday. After being received by the King at Sandringham, Zelensky pledged that any end to the war "is still very very far away". Trump immediately paused all US military aid, which might make Sweater Girl's promise what the climate crowd call unsustainable. For good measure, the President added:

We should spend less time worrying about Putin, and more time worrying about migrant rape gangs, drug lords, murderers, and people from mental institutions entering our country — so that we don't end up like Europe!

He's not wrong. If you were not merely "ineffectual poseur multilaterists" and you believed your rhetoric about Putin, you would not remain dependent on Russian energy and thereby enrich him on a scale far beyond anything you give to Ukraine. The biggest threat to the stability of western Europe is not Tsar Vlad but ongoing, remorseless Islamisation. Which, as JD Vance noted in Munich, no European voted for, but which seems to have happened anyway.