As Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse smile in their graves, the West they targeted poisons itself with utopian, phantasmagorical, hate-filled propositions that hasten its decline at a speed that would have made Rome blush. Causes and descriptions may someday be addressed at Gibbon-length, but insufficient attention has been directed to the external forces that contribute to the dissolution and may someday deliver the coup de grace.

With the primacy of American power lost, the world is divided into four jockeying systems: the democratic and republican West, Russian authoritarianism, Islamicist theocracy, and Chinese totalitarianism. China has the greatest population, the most promising internal market, the central geopolitical advantage in Eurasia, and a talented, hard-working people on the upswing from centuries of sleep and possessed of ‘asabiya (esprit de corps), that quality historian Ibn Khaldun attributed to the spirit of the Islamic conquests.

In the absence of revived American strength, Europe is dead as a significant force and destined to become the poodle of Russia and expansionist Islam. In a gift of historical proportions to a revanchist Russia, President Trump expressed his pique at Angela Merkel by reducing to 25,000 the 52,000 troops deployed in Europe at this writing—itself a long way from the hundreds of thousands during the Cold War.

South