Where "Money Drains, Power Drains"

Kevin Libin: What do the U.S. mid-term elections, China and Omar Khadr have in common? Mark Steyn knows

For one, he believes latest economic crisis represents "the first great demographic recession." The scheme of Western nations to gorge on entitlement programs financed by debt to be paid for by children that, diminishing birth rates prove will not materialize, is rapidly unravelling.

"The entire Western world has for some time now voted itself a lifestyle it is not willing to pay for," he says. The riots in Greece and France are the refusal of those societies to give up their freebies. In the United States, the interest payments on public debt borrowed from Beijing will in just five years be so large as to finance the entire budget of the Red Army which, it so happens, is becoming increasingly muscular in challenging American dominance in the Indian and Pacific oceans and the sea routes to the Middle East.

"This is the most ridiculous moment in global history where the dying empire is, in effect, funding the dominance of the would-be successor power."

Where "money drains, power drains," he argues, noting the way Washington strong-armed even its friend and ally, Britain, over the Suez Crisis, refusing to help prevent a run on the pound. China is neither a friend nor ally and it has, he believes, an interest in seizing its own Suez moment quickly and powerfully: It's own demographic pinch-point looms only a few decades away.

What happened in the U.S. mid-term elections, however, was evidence, he believes, that Americans still value their survival over the ballooning handouts that make them vulnerable to decline.

"They've looked at their situation and decided in the last two years, Obama made the drift of recent decades explicit, and a lot of Americans woke up to that and decided they didn’t like where they were drifting to," he says. "America was the only country in the Western world where, over the last two years, millions of people have taken to the streets and said ‘we could do just fine if you, the government, would just get the hell out of our pockets and stay out.' "