The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Mass immigration has already begun. In 2000, England took in 185,000 immigrants, a record.7 In 1999, 500,000 illegal aliens slipped into the European Union, a tenfold increase from 1993.8 In May 2001, the Washington Post reported:

  Just a year ago, discoveries of foundering ships jammed with human cargo of 500 to 1,000 people would have been a novelty that generated headlines and outrage across Europe. But now they have become routine in the waters between ‘Turkey and destinations in Greece, Italy, and as far north as the French Riviera.9

  The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail’s 1972 novel about an invasion of France by an armada of destitute Third World people, whom Europe, paralyzed by its egalitarianism and liberalism, is powerless to resist, appears to have been prophetic. History has begun to imitate art.

  Europe appears unable to stop these millions from coming and taking the jobs opening up as the war generation passes away. Indeed, employers will demand they be brought in. So will the growing millions of seniors and elderly. And as the millions pour into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East, they will bring their Arab and Islamic culture, traditions, loyalties, and faith, and create replicas of their homelands in the heartland of the West. Will they assimilate, or will they endure as indigestible parts of Africa and Arabia in the base camp of what was once Christendom? Consider the numbers.

  As the populations of Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Greece all shrink, on the other side of the Inland Sea, in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, populations will explode by seventy-three million in twenty-five years. In 1982, when the author was in Cairo, there were forty-four million Egyptians. By 1998, it was sixty-four million. By 2025, Egypt’s population is projected to hit ninety-six million. In the nineteenth century, Europe invaded and colonized Africa. In the twenty-first century, Africa invades and colonizes Europe. Writes Nicholas Eberstadt, the AEI population expert, “In 1995 the estimated populations of Europe (including Russia) and Africa were almost exactly equal. In 2050, by these projections, Africans would outnumber Europeans more than 3 to 1.”10 Only the AIDS epidemic stands in the way of a Europe overshadowed and eventually overwhelmed by African peoples.

  UNLIKE AMERICA, EUROPE’S nations are homogeneous. They have no history of welcoming strangers or assimilating immigrants. These peoples of different colors, creeds, and cultures will also be arriving in Europe as its nation-states are crumbling. Since 1990, three European nations—the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia—have subdivided into twenty-one nations. Two more, Kosovo and Montenegro, may soon be born. Secessionist movements are alive in Russia, Macedonia, Italy, Corsica, the Basque country of Spain, Scotland, Wales, Bavaria, the Skane region of Sweden. In Belgium, the ancient language-and-culture conflict between Flemish and Walloons is flaming up.

  “In Europe, with its 40,000-year-old indigenous white population, the rise of a nonwhite majority may not be greeted with … equanimity,” dryly noted London’s Guardian in October 2000.11 Then spring race riots in Oldham and Leeds, Bradford and Burnley, between South Asians and whites, underscores the Guardian’s point. Anti-immigration parties have sprung up—the National Front of France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Freedom party of Austria’s Jorge Haider, the Swiss People’s party of Christoph Blocher. As waves of immigration from the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Mideast and black nations of the sub-Sahara rise, crest, and crash into Europe, the immigration issue will become even more explosive. Major parties will seize the issue from the minor parties, or minor parties will become the major ones.

  The German Christian Democratic party leaders Angela Merkel and Edmund Stoiber already appears to be moving to capitalize on the backlash against Islamic immigration. “The idea of a united Germany as a multicultural society of almost 80 million people with more than 7 million foreign-born appears to trouble [Ms. Merkel],” writes the New York Times. “No other nation in Europe has as many foreigners.” 12

  Ms. Merkel is irritated at U.S. demands that Turkey be brought into the EU, as membership would confer on Turks the right to move freely across Europe. “About 75 percent of the Turks in the world who live outside Turkey are in Germany,” Merkel told the Times’s Roger Cohen.

  We don’t say they should not be Muslims. But we do say that we are a country with a Christian background, and Turks must understand this … . Inviting Turkey to become a candidate for the European Union membership was a mistake. There are differences of values. We do not have the same understanding of human rights. Try opening a Christian Church in Istanbul.13

  Europe’s nations are small, densely populated, and have no experience as “melting pots.” Thus, their ruling elites seem more alert, apprehensive, and tough-minded about the social perils of mass immigration than Americans. But those same nations, and their ruling elites, are late, very late, in awakening to the demographic danger presented by a dying population.

  “CATASTROIKA”

  No nation will be more adversely affected by its collapsing birthrate than Russia. Her population is projected to fall from 147 million to 114 million by 2050. As Russians are dying, China, even under its one-couple-one-child policy, expects 250 million more people by 2025. They will not be staying home. Chinese men already outnumber the women available to marry by 40 million. If Mother Russia is nervous, she should be. For even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has twice as much land as China.

  Three-forths of the enormous Russian land mass lies east of the Urals, but only 8 million Russians live in the trackless expanses of the Russian Far East, fewer people than there are in the Czech Republic. To their south, however, live 1.25 billion Chinese, with 250 million more on the way. This relative handful of Russians occupies the northern half of the largest continent on earth, a land mass larger than the United States, filled with the world’s most vital and desirable resources: timber, oil, gold.

  “Russia has been hemmorhaging humanity at a rate unprecedented for a modern, industrialized nation, except during times of famine and war,” writes British journalist John O’Mahony.14 In the winter of 2001, he traveled to the Far East and Kamchatka Peninsula, and returned with a grim tale of despair and death. Since the fall of communism, Kamchatka’s capital has already lost a fourth of its population. In nearby regions, the virtual death of civilized society is imminent:

  However, it is at the exposed and vulnerable extremities of the vast Russian territories that the atrophy of the population has been most acute. Perhaps the most startling example is Chukotka, a massive chunk of the far east three times the size of Britain, where the population has withered by a staggering 60% from 180,000 in 1990 to just 65,000 today, a figure that is expected to slump to just 20,000 within the next five years, making the region’s infrastructure unsustainable.15

  China has long looked on slices of Siberia as “lost territories,” stolen in the nineteenth century when China was weak and beset by revolution and preyed upon by Western imperial powers. During the Taiping revolt that took twenty-five million lives, the czar’s agents swindled the Chi’ing Empire out of 350,000 square miles north of the Amur and between the Ussuri and the sea. This land, now Siberia’s Maritime Province, is twice the size of California, and fits around Manchuria like a cupped hand. Vladivostok, Russia’s port on the Sea of Japan, naval base of her Pacific Fleet, was founded in 1860 on land that had belonged to the Chinese until that year. And as Russia has had to surrender all the lands taken from Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Uzbeks, Tadziks, and Turkmen, what was taken from China will also be reclaimed.

  In Mr. Nixon’s first months in office in 1969, Chinese and Russian troops clashed on the long Amur-Ussuri frontier. And, while an entente currently exists between Beijing and Moscow, the Chinese have not forgotten. Before the middle of this century, Beijing will likely try to regain those lands, and Alaska’s neighbors across the Bering Strait could be tough young Chinese pioneers, rather than elderly Russians. Already, Chinese settlers are moving into Russian territory, just as Americans once moved into Mexico’s northern provinc
e of Texas before tearing it away.

  “Russians in the Far East worry about China to the point of paranoia,” reports the Financial Times, “An opinion poll conducted last year [2000] in Primorive, the province around Vladivostok, to the south of Khabarovsk, found 74 percent of the population expected China to annex all or part of their region ‘in the long run.’”16

  RUSSIA’S OTHER THREAT comes from the ex-Soviet republics to its south—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan. Let us add Afghanistan, where Islamic rebels delivered the coup de grace to the Soviet Empire. Moscow seeks to reassert its authority in this region it calls its “near abroad,” but Russians are historically European and Orthodox Christian, while these people are Asian and Islamic and bitterly resentful at having been colonized and communized. It seems less likely that Russia will be driving south to recapture these lands than that Islamic migrants will be coming north, with, perhaps, Islamic warriors to tear off chunks of Russia, such as Chechnya. Russia’s ally in the Caucasus, Armenia, another Christian nation, has joined Russia, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Spain among the nations with the lowest fertility rates on earth. Armenia, too, has begun to die.

  By 2025, Iran’s population will be approaching that of Russia. Already, Iranians are menacing the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Moscow’s retreat from Asia appears as inevitable as Chinese and Islamic encroachment on territories once dominated by czars and commissars. Gazing at these population projections, Russia’s Academy of Science has coined a new term, catastroika.17 The scientists understand: demography is destiny. As Russia’s population shrinks, consider what will be happening elsewhere in Central Asia.

  CENTRAL ASIA

  (Millions of People)

  2000 2025

  Afghanistan 22.7 44.9

  Kazakhstan 16.2 17.7

  Uzbekistan 24.3 33.4

  Kyrgyzstan 4.7 6.1

  Tajikistan 6.2 8.9

  Turkmenistan 4.5 6.3

  78.6 117.3

  With half of Russia’s population today, these six nations in twenty-five years will have almost as many people, and the Russians will be older and grayer and these Islamic peoples younger and more virile.

  In the nineteenth century, immense, mighty, and populous Russia pressed down upon what the czars called “the sick man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire. By present projections, the populations of Turkey and Russia will be comparable in 2050. By 2100, there will be only eighty million Russians. Who will be the “sick man of Europe” then; who the predator and who the prey?

  Long before then, says Anatoly Antonov, head of the Department of Family Sociology at Moscow State University, a crisis will come: “‘This is the dilemma of all Western civilizations. Why do we feel happy without having children?”18 Antonov wants the government to use the media to boost the image of the family. If Russian men and women do not act soon to increase the population, Antonov fears that extremists could seize power in the name of the survival of the Russian people. “If the population decline isn’t reversed,” warns Antonov, “we will get a fascist state.”19

  If Russia could put its Cold War defeat and resentment at the loss of superpower status behind it, Moscow would see that America is a natural ally in preserving her unity, integrity, and independence. And Americans should recognize that in any “clash of civilizations,” Russians will man the eastern and southeastern fronts of the heartland of the West.

  As for Ukraine, the second-most-populous former Soviet republic, the UN projects a population loss of 40 percent, reducing Ukrainians from fifty million today to fewer than thirty million in 2050. And this is optimistic, based on a significant rise in Ukraine’s fertility rate from 1.26 children per woman today to 1.70.

  FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

  From the the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the great Western nations colonized most of the world. Beginning in 1754, Americans crossed the Alleghenies and drove the French and then the Spanish off their continent, swallowed half of Mexico, corralled the surviving Indians on reservations, pushed over the Rockies to the Pacific, and vaulted to Hawaii, Midway, Guam, and the Philippines. On the other side of the world, Russians under the Romanovs were seizing all the lands from the Arctic to Afghanistan, from Prussia to the Pacific, and down the panhandle of Alaska to Sitka. Led by the British, European nations were invading and colonizing Africa, south and southeast Asia, and establishing enclaves on the coast of a helpless China.

  The reels of history are now running in reverse. The great retreat of the West, begun with the collapse of Europe’s empires after World War II, reaches climax this century, as the second great Islamic wave rolls into Europe and the peoples of Central Asia and China reclaim what the czars took from them in centuries past. By 2050, Russia will have lost slices of Siberia and will have been pushed out of the Caucusus and back over the Urals into Europe. “If a clod be washed away by the sea,” wrote the poet Donne, “Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were … therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

  IRAN AND THE GULF

  In the run-up to Desert Storm, the author argued against the Gulf War thus: an American victory would leave us with imperial duties Americans would not indefinitely sustain. The emirate of Kuwait was not a viable nation; it could not survive without a powerful protector. But Americans would eventually tire and go home, just as the British went home, and Kuwait would be absorbed by Iraq or Iran. All we could do was hold Kuwait temporarily. Moreover, the great adversary in the Gulf, with three times Iraq’s population and territory, was Iran.

  We lost the debate, and the United States won the war, but the argument seems even more compelling today. With America having adopted a policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq, consider the population projections over the next twenty-five years alone.

  PERSIAN GULF (Millions of People)

  2000 2025

  Iraq 23.1 41.0

  Iran 67.7 94.5

  In 1990, the United States boasted of the six-hundred-ship navy of Ronald Reagan. Since the Gulf War, the U.S. Navy has been cut in half, the army has been cut in half, the air force has been cut in half. By 2010, the United States anticipates a two-hundred-ship navy. The great coalition assembled by the first President Bush to defeat and contain Iraq has collapsed. Arab nations have defected, as have Europeans, save for the British, whose armed forces have also been cut in half since the end of the Cold War.

  General Schwartzkopf’s army could have marched into Baghdad, hanged Saddam, and imposed a “MacArthur Regency.” But, with existing U.S. and allied force levels, and the reluctance of Europeans and Arabs to march again with us, it is not likely there will ever be a Desert Storm II.

  By 2025, Iran will have 94.5 million people, a population far greater than that of any European nation but Russia. The technology of the atomic bomb will be eighty years old, and Iran, which already has ballistic missiles, will almost surely have acquired the bomb. And since the atomic age began, no nation with atomic weapons has ever had its homeland invaded or a major war launched upon it. The only nuclear nation ever attacked was Israel, by pin-prick Scud strikes from an Iraq that was being demolished.

  As the North Koreans have shown the world, even a rogue nation can get a respectful hearing from the United States if it can build an atom bomb.

  EUROPE-DEAD MAN WALKING

  When Bethmann-Hollweg returned from Vienna to brief the kaiser on the condition of their Austro-Hungarian ally on the eve of war, the shaken foreign minister stammered, “Sire, we are allied to a corpse.”20 So are we. Once-great warrior nations that put millions of soldiers onto the battlefields of Europe in the twentieth century today field armies that are little more than national police forces. The Balkan wars of the nineties exposed their impotence without the United States. In Bosnia, Britain and France had to call for the Americans lest their troops be taken hostage by local Serbs.

  Alliances are entered into
to strengthen nations. How is America strengthened by a treaty to defend forever a continent that refuses to raise the armies to defend itself and whose populations have begun to die? Turkey and Britain excepted, the NATO nations are more dependencies than allies. AWOL in Vietnam, they were only marginally helpful in the Gulf. Outside Europe, their troops are used mainly for UN police duties in sub-Saharan Africa. No longer do they seem able to call up the loyalties and sacrifices of olden times. Today, the fifteen-nation European Union needs several years to muster sixty thousand soldiers for its vaunted Rapid Reaction Force. European threats to “go it alone” are the threats of children to run away from home, who never quite succeed because their mothers told them not to cross the street.

  Something vital has gone out of Europe. Once, Western nations were willing to sacrifice for “the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods.”21 But Europeans today, though far richer and more numerous than in 1914 or 1939, are not.

  The day of Europe is over. The coming mass migrations from the Islamic world will so change the ethnic composition of the Old Continent that Europeans will be too paralyzed by a threat of terrorism to intervene in North Africa, the Middle East, or the Persian Gulf. Europeans already ignore U.S. sanctions on Iran, Iraq, and Libya. As their populations become more Arabic and Islamic, paralysis will set in. We should know. From the 1850s until World War I, U.S. policy toward the British Empire was held hostage by the Irish, whose votes were decisive in states like New York.