The First Punic War began in 264 BC, lasted 25 years, and was fought between the Romans and the Carthaginians, a civilization in what is today modern Tunisia. The Carthaginians were the most powerful and prosperous force in the Western Mediterranean and North Africa, while the Romans were a growing power on the Italian peninsula. After two decades, with both sides financially and demographically exhausted, Rome prevailed. Carthage ceded Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and paid substantial reparations.

The Second Punic War lasted from 218 to 201 BC. This is the war that saw Hannibal attack from the north, taking his war elephants across the Mediterranean, then down over the Alps, becoming the scourge of the Italian Peninsula for more than a decade. Across the Italian mainland, Hannibal would go from city to city, winning virtually every engagement, including Cannae, which almost ended Rome. Rome recovered, however, and pursued a cat-and-mouse strategy with the goal of tiring Hannibal’s army.

Image by ChatGPT.

In one of history’s great mysteries, after a decade of winning almost every encounter and with virtual free rein over most of the Italian mainland, for some reason, Hannibal never attacked Rome to deliver the death blow that kept the Romans awake at night. Eventually, Publius Scipio, known to history as Scipio Africanus, would bring the war to Carthage itself, which would lead to Hannibal being recalled.

Unable to overcome the Roman cavalry advantage, Hannibal would be defeated, and Carthage would sue for peace. Again, Carthage would pay substantial reparations, concede wide swaths of land, and this time lose much of its autonomy.

The Third Punic War, begun in 149 BC, would be the shortest and the last. Using a Carthaginian response to an attack by the Numidian king and Roman ally Massinissa as a pretense, Rome declared war. Three years later, the city of Carthage lay in ruins as the Romans destroyed virtually every structure.

This would be final. Tired of having to fight the Carthaginians, Rome would obliterate them. They subsumed everything the Carthaginians had, declared it illegal to rebuild the city, and sold off its remaining population into slavery. As intended, Carthage would never again pose a problem for the Romans.

Fast forward two millennia, and you see echoes of one of the greatest conflicts in history. In 1914, the Germans launched Europe into World War I. For three years, the sides would largely battle over inches as soldiers looked at one another across the hundreds of miles of trenches dug on front lines that rarely moved. By 1918, the Germans were defeated and the allies—mainly France & the UK—imposed the draconian Treaty of Versailles, which included staggering reparations and strict military limitations.

Two decades later, Germany, once crippled by reparations and limitations on industry and its military, would launch a second world war. For the previous decade, it had slowly but consistently pushed the limits of what it was allowed to do under the Treaty of Versailles, and usually found little or no resistance. As such, Germany kept pushing until it was strong enough that the allies could do little to prevent its expansive designs. And thus began a true world war that would fully engulf half the planet, and it would take half a decade for victory to come.

Fast forward another eighty years, and the world once again finds itself in a crisis. A different crisis, to be sure, but one that threatens civilization every bit as much as the two world wars.

What crisis? Why the immigration crisis, of course. And why is it an existential threat to civilization? Because the West has been the primary driver of the advance of civilization around the world for the last 500 years.

The list of things Western civilization is responsible for that are central to the world today, while not endless, is very long. Flight, telephony, harnessing electricity, nuclear power, plastic, television, air conditioning, automobiles, the best of modern medicine, space travel, MRI machines, advanced agriculture, and much more, not the least of which was virtually ending slavery worldwide.

This Western civilization was built on Christianity, individual freedom, freedom of speech, religion, and the press, capitalism, liberal democracy, and relatively free markets. Other than that first foundation (Christianity), most of those elements developed into keystones over the last three centuries.

Today, all are at risk, and once again, the catalyst is Germany. In particular, German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2015, as the leader of what was then the most economically powerful nation in Europe, she essentially dictated that the continent open its borders to “migrants” from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. While ostensibly humanitarian, this policy was suicidal. Europe had been failing to integrate immigrants for decades, and now Merkel had opened the door to the entire Third World.

The consequences have been extraordinary. Thirty million, mostly undocumented male, military-aged “migrants” from the third world have inundated Europe over the last decade, overwhelming services, straining budgets, and committing crimes.

Today, across the West, there is a growing ideology that is anathema to free speech, freedom of religion, free press, women’s rights, and more. And it’s violently so. At the current rate of demographic change, native Europeans will be a minority in Europe soon after the middle of the century, and Western civilization will not be far behind, if it survives that long.

If it were just Angela Merkel, we might be able to give Germany a pass, but it’s not. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen and the WEF’s Klaus Schwab are both also spawn of Germany and were Merkel’s fellow travelers when she was in power—and maintained her cancerous ideas once she left.

At the end of the day, from giving us Karl Marx to facilitating the Bolshevik revolution by returning Lenin to Russia, to beginning two world wars and shepherding the current collapse of the West, Germany has been the fount of more strife and more bloodshed over the last 200 years than any nation on the planet. And it’s not even close.

It’s likely too late for Europe to save itself, although it’s possible that Western civilization could survive the collapse of the place of its origin. Nonetheless, while the odds are against it, there is hope, but it will take drastic measures.

The West should do to Germany what the Romans did to Carthage. Not in the literal sense of razing it to the ground, of course. Instead, it should split it into a dozen or more autonomous nations. Separately, these tiny states would spend so much time trying to survive that they couldn’t lead the world off another cliff.

Sure, you can say this proposal is insane, and maybe it is, but so too is leading the charge to destroy the most successful civilization in history. In thrall to the climate change hoax, Germany recently shuttered the last of its nuclear power plants and is well on its way to collapsing its economy.

It’s a statecraft version of someone who wants to commit suicide and decides to take as many others with him as he can. The West should not allow it. We know what the collapse of Western civilization looks like: It’s somewhere between Afghanistan and Communist China. Both spell the end of freedom and prosperity. If the West wants to avoid that fate, the first step is to eliminate the führer / Pied Piper leading the way. Maybe then it will be possible to focus on saving what’s left...

Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA