Nor could the over-Europeanized cult of transnationalism survive in the wider world. As the EU, the UN, and the G7 seized up, the tranzis turned elsewhere, ever on the lookout for the Newest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game on the geopolitical circuit. For a while, in the wake of the 2008 downturn, they pinned their hopes on the G20: same great poseur multilateralism, brand new secretariat. You could see what was in it for EU prime ministers: the transnational talking-shops were the equivalent of those all-star charity fundraisers that spent so much money chauffeuring the stars to the stadium there was no cash left for the charity. Diplomacy used to be, as Canada’s Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other fellow have your way.¹⁵ By the twenty-first century, “soft power” had become more of a discreet cover for letting the other fellow have his way with you.

The Europeans “negotiated” with Iran over its nuclear program for years, and in the end Iran got the nukes and Europe got to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no purpose for the best part of a decade.

In Moscow, Vladimir Putin, self-promoted from president to de facto czar, decided it was well past time to reconstitute the old empire and start re-hanging the Iron Curtain—not formally, not initially, but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks would keep their distance. Russia, like China, was demographically weak but geopolitically assertive. The Europe the new czar foresaw was one not only energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too. Hence, his mischievous support for a nuclear Iran—because mullahs with nukes served Russia’s ambitions to restore its hegemony over Eastern Europe. Only Washington was surprised at how far west “Eastern” Europe extended by the time Moscow was done.

In an unstable world, the Russians offered themselves as the protection racket you could rely on, and there were plenty of takers for that once every European city was within range of Teheran and the other crazies. Look at it from their point of view: as America’s “good cop” retreated to the precinct house, there was something to be said for a “bad cop” who still had some credibility when it came to head-cracking.

In the nineteenth century the Anglophone powers killed or captured pirates. Two centuries later, with primitive vessels seizing tankers the length of carriers off the Horn of Africa, it was all more complicated. The Royal Navy, which over the centuries had done more than anyone to rid the civilized world of the menace of piracy, declined even to risk capturing their Somali successors. They had been advised by Her Majesty’s Government that, under the European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live on welfare for the rest of his life.¹⁶ There was a film series popular at the time: Pirates of the Caribbean. I doubt it would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown Mr. Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in council flats in Manchester and going to the pub for a couple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of “Aaaaargh, shiver me benefits check, lad.” For his part, the U.S. Attorney-General, the chief law-enforcement official of the world’s superpower, was circumspect about the legal status of pirates, as well he might be. Obviously, if the United States Navy had seized some eyepatched peglegged blackguard off the coast of Somalia and hanged him from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would have risen as one to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals… and the network talking-heads would have argued that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause… and judges by the dozen would have ruled that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that under ObamaCare their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

Conversely, a 2010 headline from the Associated Press: “Pirates ‘Have All Died,’ Russia Says, After Decrying ‘Imperfections’ In International Law.”¹⁷ Perhaps it seemed just as funny at the time.

The Somalis had made the mistake of seizing a Russian tanker. When Moscow’s commandos took it back, they found themselves with ten pirates on their hands and the prospect of submitting them to an “imperfect” international legal regime. So, as a Defense Ministry spokesman explained, they “released” them. The Russians supposedly put them in a boat and pointed it in the general direction of Somalia. “They could not reach the coast and apparently have all died,” said the official, poker-faced.

Oh.

Bad cop or metrosexual Euro-cop? On the high seas of reality, it was not a tough call.

FIVE BILLION GUYS NAMED MO

To state the obvious, the world after America is a lot more Muslim.