Nobody special

⚡️Europe is going to stop being a serious civilization within this generation and almost nobody is willing to say it in those terms. Europe is actually ending as the thing it has been for the last five hundred years. The continent that produced the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, global empire, liberal democracy, and most of the intellectual and cultural inheritance the modern world runs on is genuinely going away. What replaces it will share some of the same geography and some of the same languages but it will not be the same civilization. The six weeks of jet fuel is not the story. The story is that this is the visible consequence of a civilization that has lost the will to sustain itself. Europe stopped having children. Europe stopped producing its own energy. Europe stopped defending itself militarily. Europe stopped building industrial capacity. Europe stopped growing its economies in real terms. Europe stopped believing in its own cultural inheritance enough to transmit it to the next generation. Each of those is individually a crisis. Together they are civilizational suicide in slow motion. The demographic collapse is the terminal condition. 1.3 to 1.5 fertility for a generation means the native population will halve within two generations. Replacement migration from culturally distinct populations is not continuity of the civilization. It’s substitution. The continent will still exist. The population will be different. The culture will be different. The political systems built around the old population will be under stress they weren’t designed to handle. This is happening now and it’s not reversible because the children who would have been the Europeans of 2060 simply were not born. The energy crisis is the near term manifestation of a deeper rot. Europe built its prosperity on cheap Russian gas and cheap Middle Eastern oil while taking moral stances against both. It shut down its own nuclear capacity. It limited domestic extraction. It bet that the transition to renewables would happen faster than the old supply chains would fail. It lost that bet. Now it’s rationing energy in its wealthiest cities and telling citizens to stay home in pajamas to save fuel. A continent that was producing most of the world’s advanced manufacturing in 1990 is now debating whether to run the air conditioning. That’s not a crisis. That’s a collapse. The military situation is the silent emergency that will determine everything else. Europe has functionally disarmed over the last thirty years. NATO defense spending is a fiction in most European countries. Ammunition stockpiles are months, not years. Industrial capacity to produce military equipment at scale doesn’t exist. The continent cannot defend itself from Russia without American support and American support is not reliable. If the US decides Europe’s security is Europe’s problem, which Trump has been explicit about, Europe has no independent capability to protect itself. A continent that can’t defend itself is not a civilization. It’s a protectorate.

POTUS is laying out two courses of action—a negotiated settlement, or a major escalation. There is a third option, and he should take it: recognize there is no way to force a positive outcome and simply leave. The region is not ours to fix. President Reagan chose this path in Lebanon in ‘84, withdrawing U.S. forces after the Beirut barracks bombing once it became clear the mission’s stabilization goals could not be met, effectively ending direct American military involvement and avoiding a deeper quagmire and long-term entrenchment in the region. A negotiated settlement is unlikely to work or be taken seriously by the Iranians unless we make concessions on the enrichment issue. As we saw yesterday in the SOH, the IRGC is empowered to act without the consent of the civilian leadership, so it’s likely they won’t honor any deal reached. A major escalation will lead to a very destructive outcome for Iran, the region, and eventually the U.S. If POTUS chooses brute force and targets civilian infrastructure, we will create another generation of radicalized Iranians who will rally around the regime and escalate the war by any means possible. If POTUS opts to strike the civilian infrastructure, declare victory, and then leave, we will only further erode our standing in the world, the petrodollar, and eventually our status as the world’s reserve currency holder. We need to get out now. Don’t double down on failure. Avoid the sunken cost trap, leave now, and put America’s interests first.

"Assuming the current trend of AI and robotics continues, which seems likely, the AI and robots will be able to do anything that that humans want them to do, essentially, so hopefully not more than that, but AI and robotics will be able to provide us all the goods and services that anyone could possibly want so you wouldn't need to work. People will be able to wherever they want with their free time. Work will be optional. I just want to separate out from like what I wish would happen versus what I predict will happen. Because people get confused about that. They think that what I predict will happen is what I wanted to happen. What I predict to happen is not the same as what I want to happen." 一 Elon Musk