Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Europe as an Asset

It is a longstanding American interest to keep the tremendous warmaking potential of Europe from being controlled by a hostile power. Wars against the Kaiser and Hitler kept the continent from falling to an enemy. And our long Cold War struggle did the same in regard to the Soviet menace.

So there should be no shrugging of shoulders at the prospect of Europe falling to the Moslems through demographic absorption (a theme of Mark Steyn, too, I should add):

And as Bruce Bawer noted last year in While Europe Slept, "Already, in most of Western Europe, 16 to 20 percent of children are Muslims…within a couple of generations many [European] countries will have Muslim majorities."

Not since September 8, 1683, when the Ottomans were threatening to breach the walls of Vienna, has Islam been so perilously close to seizing control over Western Europe.

The implications of all this are far graver than we can even begin to imagine, and it is not just a matter of choosing new and more hospitable tourist destinations.

An increasingly Islamified Europe will prove ever more hostile to Israel and America, and this trend will only intensify as the Muslim population there continues to grow.


We have to fight for the soul of Europe and not just throw up our hands and retire to fortress America. We tried that before, and remember that the Kaiser's Germany, Hitler's Germany, and Soviet Russia had plans to wage war on us even though we lived across a broad Atlanic Ocean. In the end we had to stay engaged in Europe to defend our interests.

One method to keep the continent at least partly friendly is to work to break apart the awful European Union. A centralized government is easier to seize. But if different European countries succumb to the Islamic birth bomb, at least we will be talking about only certain states switching sides. And the loss of Greece or Spain might shake the rest of the continent into action to defend themselves.

I do think Europeans will fight back brutally rather than submit when the threat is obvious, but you never can tell.

Sure, within a couple generations the new Moslem owners will run the continent into the ground, but for forty years we'd face great residual strength at the disposal of a hostile jihadi population.

By then, "the West" may be composed of America, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and India. The West would have a difficult forty years if Europe falls.

Remember, there are worse things than having a Europe that won't fully help us. And we've fought and struggled for nearly a century now to keep that worse thing from happening--no enemy must be allowed to control the economic and scientific resources of the continent.