In a post that went up this morning on the Pajamas home page, Matt Patterson writes, “Caution: Bloody Century Ahead”:

The West, which invented and maintains the political and economic institutions that underpin the modern global system, is experiencing demographic, economic, spiritual, and military contraction. The result may be a bloody 21st century.

Consider first demographics: As Mark Steyn and others have extensively documented, European birth rates have plummeted.  Playgrounds and day cares are ominously empty all over the Continent. Many countries, like Italy and Spain, have entered the demographic point of no return and are now unable to replace their populations. (The United States is in much better demographic shape. It assimilates its immigrants better and generally holds a birth rate slightly above the replacement level, which is roughly 2.1 children per woman.)

But plunging birth rates are only the beginning of Europe’s troubles. Brussels, Paris, London, and cities all across the Continent teem with large, resentful, entirely unassimilated immigrant communities, some of whom occasionally riot and set fire to entire towns. Europe is in a deadly catch-22; it needs these immigrants to fund their lavish welfare states, yet refuses to assimilate them out of cultural cowardice.

As the West wastes away demographically, it also languishes spiritually, largely as a result of crushing nanny states which deliver comfort at the expense of liberty and self-reliance. The United States was once the sole hold-out against this Western trend — no more. President Barack Obama, openly and with popular support, has pledged to move America towards the welfare statism favored in Europe.

Economically, the entire West is on the precipice. Militarily, Europe is a eunuch, with only token forces meagerly and ineptly deployed.  The U.S. military still strides the globe — for now. But how our armed forces will fare in the face of Obama’s multi-trillion dollar deficits is not hard to predict. Something will have to give way for the president to pay for his promised universal health care, and the Defense Department will prove an irresistible temptation for him, as it always does for Democratic presidents.

And right on cue, from George McGovern, also today at the Wall Street Journal: “My Advice for Obama:  We could defend ourselves with a military budget half the current size.”