Will The 21st. Century Belong To Europe?

Conceding that the 20th. century (and the 19th for that matter) belonged to the United States, Europe is hoping that it will dominate the 21st.

They're not off to a good start.

But, as Mark Steyn notes: [What] " “old Europe” – wants to know is: what will it take to nobble the Yanks? Or, to be more accurate, what will it take for the Yanks to nobble themselves? The corollary to the Euro-Canadian redefinition of “great power” is that a lone cowboy who sticks to tired concepts like guns’n’ammo is bound to come a cropper. As Matthew Parris put it last week, “we should ask whether America does have the armies, the weaponry, the funds, the economic clout and the democratic staying power to carry all before her in the century ahead. How many wars on how many fronts could she sustain at once? How much fighting can she fund? How much does she need to export? Is she really unchallenged by any other economic bloc?”

My colleague is falling prey to theories of “imperial overstretch”. But, if you’re not imperial, it’s quite difficult to get overstretched. By comparison with 19th century empires, the Americans travel light. More to the point, their most obvious “overstretch” is in their historically unprecedented generosity to putative rivals: unlike traditional imperialists, they garrison not remote ramshackle colonies but their wealthiest allies. The US picks up the defence tab for Europe, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, among others. As Americans have learned in the last 18 months, absolving wealthy nations of the need to maintain their own armies does not pay off in the long run. This overstretch is over. If Bush wins a second term, the boys will be coming home from South Korea and Germany, and maybe Japan, too. So the EU will begin the second decade of the century with an excellent opportunity to test Mr Lipponen’s theory: it can either will the means to maintain a credible defence, or it can try to live as the first “superpower” with no means of defence. In other words, the first victim of American overstretch will not be America but Europe."


And Mark Steyn predicts that it will only get worse as low birth rates will force European counties to import their work force from Arab countries. "Worst case scenario: Sharia, circa 2070."