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attacks by their coreligionists in Montreal, Yorkshire, Copenhagen, and elsewhere. How many of us knew there were quickly growing and culturally confident Muslim populations in Scandinavia?
    Demography doesn't explain everything, but it accounts for a good 90 percent--including the easy stuff, like why Jacques Chirac wasn't amenable to Colin Powell's schmoozing on Iraq: if the population of your cities was 30 percent Muslim, with spectacularly high youth unemployment rates and a bunch of other grievances, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Great Satan? Stick a pin almost anywhere in the map, near or far: the "who" is the best indicator of the what-where-when-why. Remember how it was when you watched TV in the eighties? You'd be bombarded with commercials warning that the Yellow Peril was annexing America and pretty soon they'd be speaking japanese down at the shopping mall. It didn't happen and it's never going to happen. In the nineties, I tended to accept the experts' line that Japan's rising sun had gone America Alone

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    into eclipse because its economy was riddled with protectionism, cronyism, and inefficient special-interest groups. But so what? You could have said the same in the sixties and seventies, when the joint was jumping. The only real structural difference between Japan then and Japan now is that the Yellow Peril got a lot wrinklier. What happened in the 1990s was what Yamada Masahiro of Tokyo's Gakugei University calls the first "low birth-rate recession." It's not the economy, stupid. It's the stupidity, economists--the stupidity of thinking you can ignore demography. Japanese society aged, and aged societies, by their nature, are more cautious and less dynamic: old people weigh exposure to risk more than potential for gain.
    Another example: will China be the hyperpower of the twenty-first century? Answer: no. Its population will get old before it's got rich.
    Another: why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44
    percent. In a democratic age, you can't buck demography--except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out--as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em. The problem Europe faces is that Bosnia's demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
    The literal facts of life are also what underpinned the so-called "cartoon jihad" of early 2006. It was a small portent of the future: the publication by one Danish newspaper of various cartoonists' mostly very mild representations of the Prophet Mohammed was the pretext for weeks of protests, lawsuits, death threats, rioting, torching, razing, and killing by disaffected Muslims from Calgary to Islamabad, London to Jakarta. On September 10, 2001, not many of us thought it would soon seem perfectly routine to hear news announcers read headlines like: "The Danish cartoon death toll is now up to nine." No laughing matter, especially as that number multiplied into double and triple figures. But it's remarkable how quickly we've internalized the underlying demographic reality. Like all the mini-crises afflicting the Continent since September 11, its subtext derives from the belated realization among Europeans that they're elderly and fading and that their Muslim populations are young and surging, and in all these clashes the latter are putting down markers for the way things will be the day after tomorrow, like the new owners who have the kitchen remodeled before moving in. When it came to those cartoons, every Internet blogger was eager to take a stand on principle alongside plucky little Denmark. But there's only five million of them. Whereas there are twenty million Muslims in Europe--officially. That's the equivalent of the Danes plus