America Alone The End of the World as we know it Mark Steyn - Regnery Publishing 214p Steyn ends this book with this statement: This book isn't an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will I have to tell you that I am depressed by this book. We all know that the United States at this time in history could not be overcome militarily by any coalition of the world's forces you want to name. We all know that the only thing that can beat us in any endeavor is a lack of will to do what is necessary. We know that. While I realized the US has been going it alone lately, I never internalized why that was so. In this book, Mark Steyn tells us why. The answer is Demographics and Willpower. He believes Europe is gone and should only be used as a canary in a mine shaft would be used - as a warning to the Anglosphere West that remains. If his demographic figures are correct, and I see the same numbers every day in the news, then Europe will have half the number of Europeans it has now in two generations. The only source of the 50 million immigrants they need to survive is in Africa and the Middle East. Even China's population will shrink to the point where they won't be able to take global advantage of the economic power they are building. Greece is losing half it's population each generation. Do you remember 20 years ago when Japan was buying up everything in sight in the United States and we were going to speaking Japanese and using the Yen as currency before too long? Why didn't it happen? With a population replacement rate that is the lowest in the civilized world at 1.1, with a population that is averaging the oldest in the world, and no immigration to replace population - they ran out of people to take advantage of that growth within one generation. All of that is known, so why did this book depress me? There is no guarantee that America and the remaining West will prevail. It's the Demographics Stupid Actually, I don't think everything's about jihad. But I do think, as I said, that a good 90 percent of everything's about demography. What a black, black picture Steyn portrays. Russia is the sick man of Europe with a population which will drop to under 50 million by the end of the century (from a current 140 million). The average life span of Russian men is lower than that of men in Bangladesh and 70 percent of pregnancies are aborted. Except in the 12 of 89 Russian federal regions which are predominately Islamic and which have healthy birthrates. Saving Ireland, it is the same all over Europe….from London to Athens. The Europeans are being out bred in a shift of population which is unprecedented in a world not in the grips of a major war or plague. Steyn doesn't mention it, but of all our allies, only India is maintaining its population. Not England nor Canada nor Australia. Only the US and India of westernized countries over 20 million are maintaining population. These populations shifts are changing so quickly that we are looking at major bad things happening within the next twenty years…much less 50 or a hundred. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent's population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear - in effect, by choice. So what possibly can the US do about it? Steyn lays out three possible resolutions: 1. Submit to Islam 2. Destroy Islam 3. Reform Islam Because most of us don't take number one as a serious possibility, we're equally unserious about beiing forced to choose between two and three. Steyn doesn't believe we can hold onto the planet alone..."a totalitarian China, a crumbling Russia, an insane Middle East, a disease-ridden Africa, a civil war-torn Eurabia - and a country that can't even enforce its borders against two relatively benign states will somehow be able to hold the entire planet at bay? Dream on. He wants to create conditions that increase the likelihood of Muslim reform: 1. Support Womans Rights - not feminist pieties 2. Roll back Wahhabi, Iranian, and other ideological exports 3. Support economic and political liberty in the Muslim world 4. Marginalize Moslim states that persecute non-Muslims 5. Throttle the funding of madrassas 6. Create a civil corp to match America's warrior corps to conter Islamism in the ideological wars 7. Marginalize NATO, the UN, the Atomic Energy Agency and concentrate on results-orientated multilateralism 8. Stop bankrolling oil dictatorships by transforming the energy industry 9. End the Iranian regime 10. Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself ...and of course he expands on each of them. He ends the book with a passage from Conan Doyle's The Tragedy of the Korosko "A man or a nation is not placed upon this earth to do merely what is pleasant and what is profitable. It is often called upon to carry out what is both unpleasant and unprofitable, but if it is obviously right it is mere shirking not to undertake it." He feels we've been shirking too long, and that's unworthy of us.