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collector’s approach to immigration issues, there were many fascinating differences: the French blamed difficulties with their Muslim population on the bitter legacy of colonialism; whereas Germans blamed theirs on a lack of colonial experience at dealing with these exotic chappies. And, if you were a small densely populated nation like the Netherlands, the difficulties of Islam were just the usual urban/rural frictions that occur when people from the countryside—in this case, the Moroccan countryside—move to the cities. It was the consequence of your urban planning, or your colonialism, or your wealth, or just plain you. But, if you were in some decrepit housing project on the edge of almost any Continental city from Malmö to Marseilles, it made little difference in practice. “If you understand how immigration, Islam, and native European culture interact in any western European country,” wrote Christopher Caldwell, “you can predict roughly how they will interact in any other—no matter what its national character, no matter whether it conquered an empire, no matter what its role in World War II, and no matter what the provenance of its Muslim immigrants.”14 European Islam turned out to be less divided than Greeks from Germans, Swedes from Portuguese. Many ethnic Continentals only discovered the post-nationalist identity they’d been long promised after they converted to Islam: when the mirage of the “European Union” faded, the Eurabian Union was the desert beyond.

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