The Looming Muslim Demographic Crisis

By Marc Schulman, American Future

The Asian Time’s Spengler has written a couple of provocative columns on demographic trends. In “The Demographics of Radical Islam,” he avers that

Today’s Islamists think like the French general staff in 1914. Islam has one generation in which to establish a global theocracy before hitting a demographic barrier. Islam has enough young men - the pool of unemployed Arabs is expected to reach 25 million by 2010 - to fight a war during the next 30 years. Because of mass migration to Western Europe, the worst of the war might be fought on European soil.

It surprised me to learn that although the Muslim birth rate today is the world’s second highest, it is falling faster than the West’s birth rate. By 2050, according to the latest UN projections, the population growth rate of the Muslim world will converge on that of the United States. Spengler shows that the primary reason for the decline in the Muslim birth rate is the increase in literacy rates.

Spengler then cites a US Department of Energy study concluding that worldwide oil production will peak just before 2050 at the present 2% rate of production growth. Putting together the trends in Muslim population and oil production, he observes that

the Muslim world half a century from now can expect the short end of the stick from the modern world. It has generated only two great surpluses, namely people and oil. By the middle of the century both of these will have begun to dwindle. But at the moment it has 25 million idle young men. No leader can remain in power who does not give them a destination to march to.

By no means does that imply that all of these 25 million will become suicide bombers, but a great many of them are likely to emigrate to Europe, including Eastern Europe, where populations are stagnant and about to decline. A Muslim takeover of Western Europe surely is a possible outcome.

More recently, in “Demographics and Iran’s imperial design,” Spengler notes that

By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran - converging on America’s dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran’s per capita GDP of $7,000 - especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits.

He then asks “what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down . . . ”

The Islamists will not wait for traditional society to unravel. Take the case of Iran:

In programs made public on August 15, [President] Ahmadinejad revealed a response worthy of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin to the inevitable unraveling of Iran’s traditional society. He proposes to reduce the number of villages from 66,000 to only 10,000, relocating 30 million Iranians. That is a preemptive response to the inevitable depopulation of rural Iran, in keeping with a totalitarian program for all aspects of Iranian society.

[ . . . ] Reengineering the shape of Iran’s population . . . should be understood as the flip side of Iran’s nuclear coin. Aggressive relocation of Iranians and an aggressive foreign policy both constitute a response to the coming crisis.

Without citing his source, Spengler claims that internal Iranian estimates project that Iranian oil exports will fall sharply, perhaps to zero by 2020. But this isn’t the only explanation for its insistence on developing nuclear power:

Like Hitler and Stalin, Ahmadinejad looks to imperial expansion as a solution for economic crisis at home. Iran wants effective control of Iraq through its ascendant Shi’ite majority, and ultimately control of the oil-rich regions of western Saudi Arabia, where Shi’ites form a majority . . . Ahmadinejad wants to make Iran a regional power not only in production but in transmission, through a proposed oil pipeline through Iraq and Syria.

Spengler’s gloomy conclusions:

Iran’s ultra-Islamist government has no hope of ameliorating the crisis through productivity growth. Instead it proposes totalitarian methods that will not reduce the pain, but only squelch the screams. Iran envisages a regional Shi’ite empire backed by nuclear weaponry. And Washington, from what I can tell, has not a clue as to what is happening.

Apart from Iran, [demographic trends] will lead to more rather than fewer terrorist demonstrations . . . the Islamists have to strike quickly and decisively, not only to advance their cause in the West but also to consolidate their power in home countries where conditions will become unstable before long.

This attempt at connecting-the-dots may be the best that I’ve seen.