Will The 21st Century Be A Horror Show Of Epic Proportions?

Short Answer - NO

By Tim Reuter

In 2006, Mark Steyn reached two conclusions from his study of anemic Western demographics in his book America Alone. The post World War II global order led by the United States is literally dying, and the future belongs to Islam.

David Goldman, Spengler at Asia Times Online, dismisses those contentions as bogus. “The fastest demographic decline ever registered in recorded history is taking place today in Muslim countries.” World fertility fell from 4.5 to 2.5 children per woman over the past half-century, but “two or three times faster” in Islamic nations. Moreover, the severity of this drop is exacerbated by the “lapsed time” in which it is occurring. Europe spent two centuries descending to its present demographic nadir. Islamic societies are “attempting it [collapsed fertility] in twenty.”

But, this rush towards demographic oblivion is still cause for alarm. It “makes radical Islam more dangerous” because of “Spengler’s Universal Law #1 – A man or a nation at the brink of death does not have a rational self-interest.” As Islamic societies choose de-population, their rational calculus changes. The radicals’ boast that “you love life and we love death” is revealing in this regard. Radical Islamists have chosen to die fighting, rather than watch their societies self-terminate. As Goldman quips, “the flip side of suicide by infertility is jihad.” And, he marshals statistics, history, and philosophy to offer chilling predictions and disturbing recommendations.

Goldman draws on mounds of data to diagnose the Islamic world’s ills, and he dismisses Steyn’s thesis with the qualification of poverty. Old people are an existential threat to Islamic nations because they possess a fraction of Europe’s $30,000 GDP per capita circa 2009. The Middle East’s elderly “rely on their children to care for them.” But today’s bulge of young people will find that neither wealth nor descendants will exist to support them in their old age. The first signs of looming ruin are already apparent in states suffering drastic demographic drop-offs such as Iran (six children per woman), Turkey (five) and Egypt (four)

President Ahmadinejad started sounding the alarm back in 2006. His pronouncements have ranged from factual assertions that Iran faces “a tidal wave of elderly” to outlandish claims that Iran’s low birthrate is the result of a Western conspiracy. Yet, his anxiety is not misplaced. Iran’s $4,400 GDP per capita is primarily derived from oil exports. Furthermore, “today there are more Iranians in their mid-twenties than in any other age bracket. But they are not reproducing.” With a European birthrate of 1.7, and an economy dependent on exporting oil, the abyss seems inescapable.

And, demographic decay coupled with poverty is yielding a third problem. Beneath the façade of theocracy is social rot. Young women, even educated ones, are increasingly selling themselves as a means to make money and escape unemployment: “90% of Tehran’s prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam.” Others, five million by one estimate, use drugs. Stiff penalties, “a third conviction for alcohol possession merits the death penalty,” are not deterring this behavior. It seems that “on its own terms, Iran’s Islamist experiment has failed.”

The oil poor nations of Arab Spring fame are arguably in worse shape. Decades of economic underdevelopment, particularly in agriculture, have left these states dependent on importing half of their caloric consumption. The result is a merciless subjection to market volatility. Indeed, one trigger for the uprisings was the doubling of the price of wheat after a 2.4% drop in supply in 2009 and 2010. The reason for the price spike is cold economics: the increased wealth of Asian consumers has made food prices more inelastic. Stated succinctly, “Chinese and Indian demand has priced food staples out of the Arab budget.” Of course, an arguably bigger driver of nosebleed food prices is not scarcity, or rising demand from India and China, but the global run on paper currencies driven by policies in the U.S. to cheapen the dollar since 2001.

Egypt is a microcosm of the economic disaster wrought by the Arab Spring. Despite half the population living on two dollars a day, foreign aid and revenue from tourism kept Egypt afloat under Mubarak. But since the revolution in 2011, the economy has imploded. Unemployment has soared as key industries shrivel, and capital flight is causing foreign exchange reserves to plummet. And, the latter is lethal. Egypt, with five percent arable land and eighty million souls, is running out of money to buy bread. The prospective starvation may become “a catastrophe of, well, biblical proportions.”

But the demographic and economic numbers are just that, numbers. They do not identify the cataclysm’s cause, which Goldman claims is philosophical. Falling fertility is symptomatic of a society encountering modernity; education, urbanization, and women’s emancipation. The onset of modernity has already begun in the Muslim world as demonstrated by the impact of literacy, particularly female literacy, on its birthrates.

Increasing education is negatively correlated with decreasing fertility. This is a fact that Iran’s mullahs are painfully learning. Before his overthrow, the Shah launched a program to modernize Iran by eradicating illiteracy. The program was a smashing success. Iran now has literate and highly educated women with respect to the rest of the Muslim world. The result is “university-educated Iranian women had a fertility rate of 1.3.” It appears that Persian females are voting against the theocrats with their wombs.

Turkey faces an identical problem. Its strong economy, rooted in a good education system, has yielded women bearing few Turkish children. Perhaps in a moment of distress, Prime Minister Ergodan ranted in 2008: “they want to eradicate the Turkish nation.” Add in the long oppressed Kurds’ fecundity, and Ergodan is probably right. “If we continue the existing trend, 2038 will mark disaster for us.”

The story is slightly different in countries still enthralled to traditionalism’s worst excesses, but the ending is still disaster. Half of Egypt’s population is illiterate, while “97 percent of Egypt’s married women have suffered genital mutilation.” Yemen is even worse. It is overpopulating without any infrastructure, to the point that Yemen may run out of drinking water. Syria has already plunged into civil war. In this context, it seems the suicide bomber is the ultimate manifestation of traditional society’s existential despair before the encroaching modern world.

But while Goldman dazzles as an economist, he fizzles as a policy maker. His conclusions and recommendations reek of Bush Doctrine militarism and neo-conservatism. Consider “Spengler’s Universal Law #12: Nothing is more dangerous than a civilization that has only just discovered it is dying.” This begs the questions of dangerous to whom and how much so? Certainly weak states cannot effectively project conventional force against industrialized powers. No one expects Libya to invade Britain, let alone succeed. Moreover, even a repeat of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is dangerous. It would invite massive retaliation.

Goldman’s response is dying nations make suicidal decisions, consequences be damned. He cites the Ludendorff Offensive of 1918, among others, as proof that suicide occurs when hope of victory is lost. However, the German example is particularly problematic. His claim that “Germany knew it had lost the First World War by 1918” is erroneous. The Germans nearly won. After Russia surrendered in March 1918, German troops out east transferred west and nearly beat the American relief army to Paris. Indeed, a decisive victory before the Americans arrived was Germany’s best hope of ending the war on favorable terms. The offensive’s failure makes the decision wrong, not suicidal.

Moreover, it is difficult to name any state that willingly killed itself. Not even Red China at its revolutionary worst, Mao welcoming nuclear war and killing millions during the Cultural Revolution, self-liquidated. Those who argue that some regimes are irrational seemingly overlook that violence is employed purposefully and, yes, rationally. Even the Bolsheviks, with their belief in class warfare rhetoric against the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and kulaks (capitalist peasants), unleashed terror for rational ends. The Reds terrorized and murdered peasants to seize their grain, fight the civil war, and consolidate their power.

On the subject of irrationality, Goldman’s lethal logic invariably turns to Iran. Its demographic and economic bind will compel it to undertake one final action of glory: seizing oilfields in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. To secure this scenario, “Iran cannot do without nuclear capability.” Add in its “apocalyptic eschatology” and the U.S. has a mess on its hands: a terminally ill society led by religious fanatics seeking to wound the Great Satan with nuclear martyrdom. The answer is, of course, preemptive war. As Goldman explains:

“The lessons of the First World War, the Civil War, and the Cold War point to the same conclusion: preemption with overwhelming force is the appropriate means to contain an adversary who knows that he has nothing to lose. The strategy most likely to avoid war in the Middle East is not to reach out to Iran but to humiliate it.”

This is extraordinary threat inflation. The U.S. has no hostile and powerful neighbors or comparable military challengers at present. The previous opponent, the USSR, had an equally disturbing ideology (violent world revolution) as radical Islamists, but collapsed without a nuclear holocaust occurring. What makes impoverished Iran different? And even if it acquires a nuke, it lacks the delivery capacity of a warhead and faces annihilation from a retaliatory attack. It is also worth remembering that a suicide is only such if the despairing individual or nation pulls the trigger.

In the final chapter entitled “The Morality of Self-Interest”, Goldman argues for “Augustinian Realism.” He claims “America’s self-interest lies in alliances with countries that share our common love.” He clarifies his meaning this way: “Israel is the example par excellence of a state with a moral claim on American friendship [italics added].” It is a liberal democracy and a hub of economic activity. The same applies for India and South Korea other capitalist democracies.

This conflation of values with interests is beyond erroneous. It is dangerous. Alliances, if they have any meaning, force U.S. engagement in conflicts that do not, by themselves, imperil Americans. The Korean Peninsula and the Middle East are two excellent examples.

The US involved itself in Korea’s civil war to halt the spread of communism. Sixty years later, Korea remains divided because of great power politics. China views North Korea as its buffer between the Yalu River and the US Army. Absent U.S. troops in South Korea or an alliance, China has little reason to use the DPRK as border security. By contrast, the present situation is the worst of all worlds. Few of the parties involved feel territorially secure, and one miscommunication or stray bullet along the 38th Parallel could start a war.

Likewise, an “eternal alliance” with Israel, to use President Obama’s words, ensures continued motivation by jihadists to kill Americans. Terror attacks then generate a predictable American response: more meddling in Middle Eastern conflicts it does not understand to secure supposedly vital interests. This is an absurd situation considering, as Goldman comments, that “the Muslim world is of small interest to America” aside from oil which is part of an integrated global market. There is little reason to expend American blood and treasure in a region of remote concern beyond oil and the presence of a liberal democracy.

Goldman’s book is paradoxical. It is an economics tour de force and a set of disturbing policy prescriptions. He brilliantly demystifies Islamic demographics, yet counsels preemptive war against terminally ill Iran. He stylishly suggests a new strategic way forward for U.S. foreign policy that smells of early 2000s neo-conservatism.

At bottom, Goldman’s book is an apocalyptic prophecy. He spins a terrifying tale of a world on the cusp of radical change as civilizations fail. His goal is to horrify the reader, and he succeeds. One might even say upon finishing his book, mission accomplished.