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stark: Europe has all but succumbed to the dull opiate of multiculturalism. In its drowsy numbness, it stirs but has no idea what to do and so does nothing. One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want - including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, during America Alone

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    the Danish "cartoon jihad" of 2006, Jack Straw, then British foreign secretary, hailed the
    "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending representations of the Prophet. No doubt he was similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Burger King, which withdrew ice cream cones from its British menus because Mr. Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word "Allah" in Arabic script. I don't know which sura in the Koran says, "Don't forget, folks, it's not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name," but ixnay on both just to be "sensitive." And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciated the "sensitivity" of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And maybe he even admires the "sensitivity" of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
    One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and sharia. As a famously sensitive noncartooning Dane once put it: "To be or not to be: that is the question."
    And, in the end, the answer to that question is the only one that matters. America Alone

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    Part I
    The Gelded Age
    D e m o g r a p h y , D e m o c r a c y , D e s t i n y
    America Alone

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    Chapter One
    The Coming of Age
    B I R T H S V S . D E A R T H S
    Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.
    ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE, A STUDY OF HISTORY (1934-1961)
    My old - very old-friend George Abbott, the director of On the Town, Damn Yankees, and Pal Joey, died in 1995 at the age of 107 while working on a revival of The Pajama Game. A few years earlier, in his late nineties, he'd given up playing tennis because all his partners had died. That's the position America is facing in respect to its transnational social life: it'll be turning up to the G-8, NATO, and the EU-US summit only to find that all its partners have died.
    The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population - i.e., no growth, no decline, just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010 - you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That's what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than any of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handguns, more UN peacekeepers, etc.) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38; Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries - or, more precisely, these people - are going out of business.
    There's nothing wrong with old folks: speaking for myself, if I'm