Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has been making noises about “Greater Venezuela,” meaning taking control of the south Caribbean islands of Dutch West Indies, lying near Venezuela’s coast.

What if the nutcase running Venezuela actually made a grab for the islands? Is it farfetched to anticipate? Venezuela’s economy is in the pits, wrecked by Chavez-flavored socialism. Hearken back to 1982, when Argentina was headed by a military junta, controlled by General Leopoldo Galtieri. Faced with economic crisis and growing opposition to the regime, Galtieri launched an invasion of the British territory of the Falkland Islands, about 400 km east of the country. Argentines have long considered the Falklands actually to be Argentine territory, las islas Malvinas, and Galtieri played on this sentiment in invading.

Could something like that be running through Chavez’s head? Like Britain of today, but unlike Britain of 1982, Holland has practically no power-projection capability. There is a modest Dutch military force stationed in the Dutch West Indies, but it would quickly be outmatched by Venezuela’s military.

In 1982, Britain sent a naval task force of two aircraft carriers, submarines and surface combatants to retake the Falklands. Other vessels brought Royal Marines and British Army troops. It was a bitter, hard-fought struggle and the British suffered significant losses, especially from Argie air power. However, the conscripts of the Argentine army in the Falklands were no match in the end for the Brits and the islands were returned to British control.

So what if Chavez moves against the DWI? Strategy Page analyzes the situation.

I’ve posted a number of times about the crisis of the declining birth rates in Europe. Now we learn that Germany’s birth rate has declined precipitously in just one year. But that’s not all - it’s deaths have increased.

Official figures show that the number of births fell by a further 2.8% last year. Meanwhile, the mortality rate rose by 1.5% compared with 2004.

The birth rate is exceptionally low in the former East Germany, where the city of Chemnitz is thought to have the lowest birth rate in the world.

Economists say Europe’s population decline threatens to damage economic growth for decades.

The data from Germany’s Office for Federal Statistics show there were 686,000 births last year - half as many as in the early 1960s.

It’s astonishing that Europe in general seems to be deliberately committing suicide. What can account for it?

UK baby shortage will cost £11 billion.

Via Blogging Tories.

With the demographics of ethnic Europeans apparently at the cusp of an irreversible death spiral because 17 countries of the continent have birth rates of 1.3 or lower, here’s a peek inside one of Europe’s chief problems by Bruce Bawer, author of the forthcoming book, While Europe Slept : How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Writing in the Hudson Review last fall after living in Europe for several years, Bawer observed:

Living in Europe, I gradually came to appreciate American virtues I’d always taken for granted, or even disdained—among them a lack of self-seriousness, a grasp of irony and self-deprecating humor, a friendly informality with strangers, an unashamed curiosity, an openness to new experience, an innate optimism, a willingness to think for oneself and speak one’s mind and question the accepted way of doing things. (One reason why Europeans view Americans as ignorant is that when we don’t know something, we’re more likely to admit it freely and ask questions.) While Americans, I saw, cherished liberty, Europeans tended to take it for granted or dismiss it as a naïve or cynical, and somehow vaguely embarrassing, American fiction. I found myself toting up words that begin with i: individuality, imagination, initiative, inventiveness, independence of mind. Americans, it seemed to me, were more likely to think for themselves and trust their own judgments, and less easily cowed by authorities or bossed around by “experts”; they believed in their own ability to make things better. No wonder so many smart, ambitious young Europeans look for inspiration to the United States, which has a dynamism their own countries lack, and which communicates the idea that life can be an adventure and that there’s important, exciting work to be done. Reagan-style “morning in America” clichés may make some of us wince, but they reflect something genuine and valuable in the American air. Europeans may or may not have more of a “sense of history” than Americans do (in fact, in a recent study comparing students’ historical knowledge, the results were pretty much a draw), but America has something else that matters—a belief in the future.

This is the continent that is the very front line against Islamism. Whatever one might say about Osaama bin Laden, et. al., that they lack faith in the future isn’t it. They are convinced to the marrow of their bones that Islam is mere years away from dominating not just Europe, but the entire planet.

Will Europeans succumb without a fight? Well, their governments certainly will, but that the people will is not at all certain. After the brutal, Islamist murder of Theo van Gogh in Holland, some ethnic Dutch torched some mosques, which was decried as a terrible thing at the time but which we realize from the cartoon protests is actually a valid response to being made angry. In The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?, Tony Blankley speculates that the coming years in Europe may be bloody as ethnic Europeans (my term, not his) realize that their governments are determined to surrender to the Islamists. The masses, he says, may suddenly decide not to stand for it and the prospect of open battles in the streets of major cities may become reality. Or maybe not, Blankley says, because it’s far from certain as well that the masses of Europe have that kind of energy or fight left in them.

But even if they do, they will still lose. The death spiral is real, not speculative. Unless the European masses decide to accept 20 years of a dramatically lower economy so that women can leave the work force to have 2-3 babies apiece, Europe, as a European continent, is done for. What do you think the odds of the masses deciding to do that are?

Alex Ravenel, a student at UNC Chapel Hill, is studying abroad for the year in Tübingen, Germany, a small university town south of Stuttgart. He’s blogging about it, natch. Read what he says is the GBU of the country. I lived in Germany from 1983-1986 and enjoyed it immensely, and I think overall Alex is pretty accurate. This is not a political analysis, just the impressions of a guy living there.

Part One

Part Two

In the previous four parts of “The Forever Jihad” (all found here),” I wrote about Islamism’s strategic goals, the distinction between Islamism and jihadism, asked whether suicide bombers are the new high priests of Islam, and explored where the riots in France last fall fit in to Islamic expansionism.

As a short review, here are the four goals of Islamism.

1. Expel America’s armed forces from Saudi Arabia, emplace Islamist regimes and sociopolitical order there and expel all non-Muslims of any sort,

2. Emplace Islamism in the other countries of the Persian Gulf,

3. Then reclaim Islamic rule of all lands that were ever under Islamic control and emplace Islamism there,

4. Convert the rest of the world to Islamism.

The distinction I drew between Islamists and jihadists is that while all jihadists are Islamists, not all Islamists are jihadists. Yesterday Dan Darling at Winds of Change pointed out that “al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s most [recent] statement … that included yet another denunciation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s” - Islamism Central, they - “participation in Egyptian politics.” Islamists are willing to achieve their goals without violence, although they don’t shrink from violence per se in achieving their goals. Pacifists they are not. Jihadists, on the other hand, reply almost exclusively on violence and make it their primary, if not only tool.

While jihadism is more lethal now, Islamism is more pernicious and more dangerous to the West in the long term. It’s important to remember that Islamism and jihadism are two sides of the same coin. They are each examples of extreme Islamic triumphalism. In addressing the riots last fall, I observed,

But Islamism is like a fog that enfolds itself within and around, over and through a society. Western countries have a long tradition of religious freedom, but this freedom is predicated on the presumption that religious freedom will not threaten the political nature and autonomy of the state. This is true even in Europe, where the “separation of church and state” took a very long time and no little blood to be gained. It is not complete there, of course; France is still officially a Catholic country, for example. But on the whole, Europe’s countries do not rely on religion to order their polity or the political orientations of their citizens.

The entry of large Muslim populations into this system, whether entry by immigration or conversion, is a deep challenge to Westernism’s survival. It simply remains to be seen whether Islam itself can be politically pluralist in countries where it holds sway. Islamism, of course, does not even pretend to pluralism.

Now comes Mark Steyn’s invaluable essay in The New Criterion, “It’s the demography, stupid.” He answers my question rather forthrightly up front:

Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.

This is a grim forecast, no doubt. Steyn’s arguments are daunting to rebut. Without excerpting them at length, he basically points out the demographic doomsday looming over Europe. Baldly put: ethnic Europeans are not having enough children. For 100 men and women (we no longer really say “husbands and wives,” do we?) of Europe to replace themselves in the next generation, they need to give birth to 105 children. That’s 2.1 children per woman. But they’re not.

Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent.

Europe’s socialist economy is ungodly expensive to maintain and no one, no one, there is willing to cut back on the governmental or government-mandated financial entitlements that have grown up since the end of World War II. Steyn is no Nostradamus about Europe; many others have pointed out the demographic bombs awaiting Europe. “Bombs” plural I say because the decline of the birth rate at the low end of the age scale always means that the populations gets grayer at the high end. As I pointed out almost three years ago, demography is a double-sprung trap. Right now the median age of Americans is in the mid-30s, with most of Europe a little higher. But American adults are barely replacing themselves while Europeans are not, so by mid-century our median age will rise a tick and the Europeans’ will rocket by 15 years to the low 50s.

So who is going to pay for all those luscious European retirement benefits, especially since right now more than half of men across Europe stop working between age 55-65? And there’s a financial paradox to be faced even if European governments and elites suddenly decided to encourage birthin’ more babies:

They need more births, but that takes women out of the work force - and for longer than it does here, because of Europe’s generally very generous labor-welfare rules. But taking women from the work force also decreases the tax revenue the state needs to continue propping up its welfare system.

Let us assume for argument’s sake that the welfare-near-crisis states achieved a substantial jump in birth rates starting next year. They will probably go broke sooner than they will now because it will be basically 20 years before next year’s babies become taxpayers and for those two decades they simply increase the welfare load by using government-provided services.

Can Europe bail water faster than the gunwales will go awash? I don’t think so, but I hope I’m wrong.

Guess who the gap filler is. Steyn again:

Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent. …

Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)—or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Consider Israel. I wrote about its demographic challenge as a beginning blogger in April 2002 in “The Palestinian population bomb” (all figures from 2002):

There are six million Israelis. Only 4.8 million are Jewish. Fifteen percent of Israel’s citizens are Muslim Arabs, 900,000 people. They are Israeli Palestinians. They are, or are descended from, persons who did not become refugee in Israel’s war for independence in 1947-1948. (The other five percent of Israelis are neither Muslim nor Jewish.)

There are more than three million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Right now there are four million Muslims in Israel/West Bank/Gaza. Jews outnumber them by a mere 800,000. At current growth rates of each, in 14 years the ratio will be reversed: 6.7 million Muslims and 6 million Jews. …

The only effective thing that Israel can do, militarily, is create conditions that force the Palestinians to abandon violence so that socio-political agreements may be reached. But even if this happens, the Muslim population bomb will keep ticking.

Maybe these data compelled Ariel Sharon to make the breathtaking concessions to the Palestinians.

So there is an enormous, if not actually massive, population shift going on between Europe and its southern and easter littorals. Except it’s not “between,” it’s one way. While the commentati lament the lack of economic integration of European societies for the North African and Middle Eastern immigrants, not altogether without justification, they may want to consider the population pressures that impel such large numbers of Muslims to move there. The Middle East itself is not exactly a land of brimming opportunity.

Europe long ago shed its Christian heritage. Church attendance in western Europe is generally less than 10 percent, often much less. I remember getting an email from a Norwegian pastor a few years ago in which he said that Sunday services were practically deserted; no one came to church except for weddings or funerals. When I lived in Germany in the mid-1980s, attendance was just under five percent. The result is not that for ethnic Europeans another religion has supplanted Christianity but that nothing has. Christian dynamism has been ejected from European society and has been replaced with . . . nihilism.

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.

… We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end.

The result? Steyn again:

[T]he political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path… .

Into this demographic and religious vacuum has stepped political Islam. Islam has in the last 35 years or so become deeply expansionist in general, not just in its Islamist fringe. While giving only lip service to the idea of economic integration into their countries, the Europeans, except the British, have shunned the idea of socio-cultural-political integration of the masses of Muslim immigrants. The second and third generations of the first wave of immigrants on the 1960s have basically renounced the whole integrationist enterprise altogther. New immigrants now need have no expectation or even use for integration; there are ready-made Muslim ghettoes awaiting them across the continent, bought and paid for by the socialist, entitlement-as-an-entitlement governments and societies who need their labor more than their integration.

But the Europe-dwelling Muslims won’t accept nihilism. It may be true that last fall’s rioters were not rebelling from a very Muslim basis - this time. But the disenfranchised, immigrant populations of Europe are where Islamist evangelists are having their greatest successes, especially among those who have run afoul of the law. They offer order, structure and discipline to strangers living in a strange land, and for certain Old Europe is no longer offering any of them. Unlike Old European churches, mosques promise righteousness can be attained in this world and heaven in the next.

Mark Steyn writes that,

… the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

For all the concern and countermeasures that jihadism commands for us now, it is non-violent Islamism that poses the greatest threat to the survival of the West as the West. Europe has simply abandoned the playing field. America is still on it, but only barely.

In a wide-ranging piece about the F-35 fighter project, Joe Katzman discusses Britain’s imminent pullout from the project because of too-restrictive American laws govcerning technology transfer. Joe says Britain’s departure, which may be too late to stop, may permanently fracture the very basis of the Atlantic alliance, much to the detriment of the United States. The issue is that Britain must have foreign partners for its high-tech weapons programs, especially aircraft. If the n ot USA, then whom? Well, says Joe, the next partner might be a “French maid.”

Britain would look elsewhere for defense development cooperation - to European industry, and to EU-led programs to create both a common European defense industry and a European force independent of NATO or the USA. A British military that is more and more interoperable with its European partners, and less and less common with the USA, and also not fostering ties at the weapons program level because cooperation is curtailed… is a Britain that will find itself, slowly but surely pulled away from its special defense relationship with the USA. This will, of course, have ripple effects on its foreign policy. …

But the US needs foreign partners as well in order to amortize the costs of the aircraft for the US Air Force.

If Britain leaves, and a chunk of fighter orders go with it, the USA has to either choose to subsidize development of the F-35 for other nations, or raise the price. If it raises the price too high, however, other nations may find the F-35 too expensive and buy alternatives. Worse, the F-35 has parts from all the consortium members. Fewer F-35s sold means smaller industrial benefits for participating countries.

But what caught my eye was the way Joe explains the global-strategic picture and why the US Congress needs to understand the future context of the American laws that risk fracturing the alliance: The US, UK, Australia and a few other countries are bound by more than defense relationships hearkening back to World War I. They form a distinctive civilization in their own right that needs not only to be distinguished from but strengthened against future competitors:

Cicero, and others here on Winds, have described the competing ideologies our world faces. Let me offer my take:

The continental European EU model of top-down transnational socialism insulated from democracy is one. It is doomed by demographics, by the corrosive effects of its inherent unaccountability and inflexibility, and by the emptiness that lies at its heart. What is in question is what will come after, and whether its roots in the Enlightenment, Western Civilization and the dignity of man will prove strong and deep enough to overcome its failures.

The authoritarian quasi-capitalism of China (which could morph into something either better, or far worse) and Asia is another option, one that will present a rising challenge both geopolitically and ideologically. Can material prosperity be insulated from political freedom? For how long? If so, there are many places where such a model will be attractive - and a resource-hungry colonialism that depends on its export is hardly out of the question.

There is, of course, the Islamist alternative, which may acquire an ability to destroy that far surapsses their fallen civilization’s utter inability to create. It has blended with the detrius of the 20th centry’s failed totalitarian experiments, and that truth is now being observed in affiliation and action as well as in theory. In the end, what remains of Islamic civilization will either learn to love the kuffar [unbeliever] as its brother, or its own internal logic will lead to its death - at another’s hands, or at its own. The Fascist death-impulse is strong, and intrinsic, but they rarely die alone. It is time for the decent people to choose, and make a stand.

And don’t forget the Anarchy alternative of warring tribes, artificial failed states, and the shadowy criminal organizations that both feed on and depend on them. for the foreseeable future they, too, will be with us. There are a number of plausible scenarios in which al-Qaeda is just the first challenge of its type, the early wave of a trend rather than the last wave of a long civilizational death-spiral.

Against all of these, there is another tradition. One of civic society organized of individuals, and characterized by accountability, flexibility, and the rule of law. It is not a tradition bound by ethnicity, geography, or past historical status - though it has many of its origins in the historical experiences of the British people and blends deeper Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins. James C. Bennett and The Anglosphere Institute call it The Anglosphere, and to the extent that Western civilization and its ideals retain a fighting chance in this world, this is where they reside most firmly.

It’s a model that has proven its sustainability, and now it is learning the balance between respect for others, duty to others, and its own self-preservation. It is imperfect. It is also, I believe, the best hope for a world that represents a better future for ALL humankind.

Exactly so. It’s time for the Congress to relax the laws and keep Britain in the fold.