Europe alarmed by US plans for security deal with Russia but Europe's alarm will be ignored

Europe alarmed by US plans for security deal with Russia 

This headline in the FT is encouraging. What the world needs is a new security architecture and a comprehensive peace settlement between America, Russia, and China. 

It is essential that European Union countries be left out of the negotiations because they would only join them in order to wreck them. 

As a teenager I welcomed Britain joining the European Economic Community (or Common Market) because I thought it would enable us to be a part of a great power. But in fact there's no advantage whatsoever in Britain or any other country being a great power and the European Union can never be a great power. 

Europe continues its relative decline despite the Common Market and the Single Market (those ideas are discrete) though thanks to the post-war economic miracle, Europeans have never lived such prosperous lives. 

The European Union makes things worse but if it didn't exist things Europe would still be in relative decline. 

The reasons are probably organic. If somehow immigration could be halted, the problems would still exist because the problems are caused by women not having children. These problems Europe shares with the whole of the developed world except for Israel and lots of less-developed places, like, for example, Iran. David Goldman said, "What does it matter who occupies Germany since the Germans aren't having children?" He joked that Germans could bequeath their country to their dogs.  

North America's growing population is the result of massive Third World immigration and that will cause its own problems. 

A smaller population is not in itself a bad thing. What is a bad thing is an aging population. This aging population, along with the consequences of the ill-judged and unprovoked American attack on Iran, is what is causing) rioting and protests across Europe. 

A solution will have to be found to this question of low birth rates but it's absolutely unclear what it is. At the moment the solution that governments choose is mass immigration. My best stab at an answer is to copy Japan and let people age without importing new people. But I see the problems with that. 

A smaller population of young people should mean more opportunities and higher wages for those young people, in theory, but not in practice, at least in countries as different as Spain, Sweden, and Romania.

In Romania general unemployment is low but unemployment of people aged under 25 is the highest in Europe, above 30%. One reason for that is that more people leave school without completing their secondary education in Romania than in any other country in the European Union.  Young people go abroad for work rather than stay in Romania and those who do stay are ones who do not want the badly paid jobs on offer or are not qualified for them. A large number of the unemployed young are not unemployed at all but working in subsistence agriculture in the countryside. But the paradox remains that youth unemployment is very high while very large numbers of unskilled workers are being imported from Third World countries to do jobs that Romanian young people do not do. 

When young Romanians do enter the workforce they have to shell out from their taxes for the welfare state from which the old benefit. 

The revolutionaries of 1848, in many cases, emigrated to North America, where they found the liberal ideals that they wanted to create on the old continent. The United States represents the triumph of the extreme 19th-century liberal ideas. 

Young people in Romania are protesting, like their contemporaries in places like France and Italy, protesting about issues like lack of educational opportunities and the outrageous corruption of the judges,, but the large diaspora of young people are also politically active and their vote is tremendously influential at elections. In the past they voted for the centre-right against the post-communist ascendancy but more recently they have voted for the populists. The diaspora, too, are protesting just like their contemporaries at home. It remains to be seen what political form these protests will take. 

It's very easy simply to concentrate on the problems caused by mass immigration, and this creates a noise which allows politicians to continue doing whatever they were doing while talking about cultural issues, but the problems caused by lack of economic opportunities are just as important for the future of Europe.