James makes note of a Mark Steyn bit at Outside The Beltway today. Steyn says:
CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I’d say, as predictions of doom go, that’s a little on the cautious side. But either way the notion that it’s a superpower in the making is preposterous. Most administration officials subscribe to one of two views: a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg’s about to go up.
For what it’s worth, I incline to the latter position. Europe’s problems — its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed — are all of Europe’s making. By some projections, the EU’s population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Already, more people each week attend Friday prayers at British mosques than Sunday service at Christian churches — and in a country where Anglican bishops have permanent seats in the national legislature. Some of us think an Islamic Europe will be easier for America to deal with than the present Europe of cynical, wily, duplicitous pseudo-allies. But getting there is certain to be messy, and violent.
Steyn thinks Europe will implode under it’s own weight, and unlike James, I tend to agree. However, where Steyn (And Boortz, apparently) takes comfort in this, I find it alarming. In his own text Steyn points to the population shifts; Of interest here is the swing toward Islam that Steyn mentions.
Steyn seems comforted in his quote, thinking that an Islamic Europe will be easier to deal with than the current one. Steyn, apparently, has forgotten all about the last forty years, and particularly the last four. While Steyn is correct that an Islamic Europe would be no comeptition in terms of economics…(A visit to Beruit should prove that point)… imagine with me if you will Islam with the Nukes and other heavy firepower etc., that the EU currently has.
I’m sure there will be a number of people celebrating the lessening of influence of western culture as we see old Europe fall, but I will not be among them. Like it or not one reason the US has survived in the 1900’s, was Europe. With Europe already going increasingly Islamic, and with Islam itself being driven increasingly anti-western by it’s radicals, and the Western cultural Europe suffering under it’s own socialist excesses to the point of collapse, the question going forward is clearly, would America survive an Islamic Europe?
Forgive me, but I have cause to doubt it would.
For whatever differences there have been between the US and Europe, we are bound by a common history, and to a large degree a common culture. The EU, for whatever other problems it has with us, is not likely to use that weaponry against the US. I’m not convinced an Islamic EU would think itself so limited.
Am I the only one seeing this issue on the horizon?
Update: I now see by way of McPhillips that VDH is singing the same song Steyn is.
Son of an update: McPhillips and I are having a chat about this at his place.
Also, I see Austin Bay and Steyn are having a long chat about this as well, apparently concentration on the social dynamics of it all. I add some comments there, as well.
Tags: BitsBlog
