Chronicles’ readers probably know James Kirchick better as the author of articles on Ron Paul’s newsletters than as an expert on European politics. The up and coming neoconservative journalist published his exposés of Ron Paul in The New Republic in 2008 and revisited the issue in the pages of The Weekly Standard in 2011. Friends secured him a yearlong gig at Radio Free Europe in Prague, which allowed him to travel extensively. The End of Europe is the result.
The title of the book makes clear that Kirchick is worried about Europe’s future. But his are neoconservative concerns. In 2010, for example, the well-respected German Social Democrat Thilo Sarrazin published Germany Is Abolishing Itself. He predicts that growing Muslim immigration and the falling German birthrate will produce a Muslim majority in Germany by 2100—in other words, the end of Germany. Kirchick, the neoconservative, has no interest in encouraging Germans to have more children. Kirchick starts and ends the book with Russia. Fear of the reassertion of Russian power represents the leitmotif for the whole book.
Kirchick wants to know what went wrong. In the 1990’s it looked as if all of Eastern Europe would join the European Community and NATO, followed by the states of the former...