Dear President Trump: The West has already surrendered

In Poland Thursday, President Trump gave a speech that was truly historic. It was a speech that was near-Churchillian in focus and tone and world view. And it basically renounced successive American administrations of either party going back to at least Reagan's.

President Donald Trump waves to the crowd in
Krasiński Square, Warsaw, Thursday.

Speaking to a huge crowd in Krasiński Square, Warsaw, the president spoke of Poland's many decades of war against tyranny and oppression, but mainly he spoke thematically about what made Western civilization strong to begin with and why it must recover and reinforce its roots to prevail against Islamist imperialism, but also to suppress the waxing bureaucratic statism that grips every European country today. An excerpt:

Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger -- one firmly within our control.  This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles:  the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.  The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.  Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.  The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.  Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?  Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?  Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive. [Italics added]

Almost at the end, the president said,

 I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken.  Our values will prevail.  Our people will thrive.  And our civilization will triumph.  

Ah, how I want to like this speech. And at a very basic level, I do. A lot. But President Trump is sadly calling for ramparts to be manned that were abandoned decades ago and for which there are no human resources left to rebuild them. "Strong families" have disappeared from most of Europe, Mr. President, because families themselves are simply disappearing.

Put simply: Europe long ago broke itself. Its values will not prevail (they are barely hanging on now, and being weakened daily - by design and on purpose. See: Merkel, Angela).

And European civilization will not triumph. It is in full retreat now. Whether Western civilization can survive is still open to question, but if it does it will not be to Europe's credit and will almost certainly not survive there at all. Europe's future is distinctly non-European as history has known it and will be definitely non-Western.

Let's start with Poland. David Goldman posted on FB today,

There won't be a Poland in 100 years. At a total fertility rate of 1.29, Poland will have one retiree per working-age citizen by 2075. Poland in fact has one of the world's very lowest fertility rates, which means (in Mary Eberstadt's way of looking at the problem) that it is losing its religion. President Trump's speech was magnificent, but it brings to mind Schiller's dictum that history brought forth a great moment, but the moment encountered a mediocre people. Trump is doing the right thing, but we should remember that Europe is a case not for cure but for palliative care.

I have written a lot of demographic trends in the world, concentrating on Europe and the US. Nine years ago in, "What has NATO done for us?" In 2008, Russia was making military incursions into Georgia, on which Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin decided that NATO should bring Georgia into membership. I assessed not only why NATO is a strategic nullity but asked a pointed question concerning Europe's demographic death spiral:

There is another point that Mark Steyn touched on when discussing Sarah Palin's bright idea to bring Georgia into NATO. I can't find a link now, but Steyn pointed out is that Georgia's birth rate has tanked more than practically any other country in the world. In fact, by 2050 there will be only 100,000 Georgian women of childbearing age, if current trends continue. So, he said, if Georgians won't have children to grow up to defend Georgia, why should Americans have children to grow up to defend Georgia? I can't think of any good reason.

And the same question can be asked of every other European NATO member, except perhaps Britain and France. The birth rates of Germany, Spain, Italy and every other NATO country except Turkey are below the stable replacement rate of 2.1 average births per woman, most far below. Italy’s rate is 1.23 births per woman , for example, meaning that Italy’s population could shrink by one-third by mid-century. (Turkey’s birth rate is about twice as high as Italy's.)

Again the question for NATO’s countries: if you will not have enough children to preserve your country, why should American women bear children to make up your deficit?

Demographers agree that a minimum rate of 2.1 live births per woman is required to maintain a level population from one generation to the next. And what is the demographic trend across Europe?

When a culture decides not even to reproduce itself, then it had already surrendered. It had decided to go quietly into the night and fade away. That is what Europe is doing now. Despite the president's soaring rhetoric, there will be no recovery from this decision. There is far from enough time left to do so. Tens and tens of millions of women in Europe are not going to decide suddenly to start having and average of more than 2.1 children each. The Europeans economies cannot support such a change anyway. In fact, they cannot support their present, aging populations now, which is why so many Euro nations decided long ago to reply on "The Mohammed Retirement Plan" that will nail the continent's coffin shut.

Europe is not just millions of square miles of terrain. Our affiliation with Europe, and the reason our military shed so much blood on Europe's soil, was not to defend dirt. It was to defend and preserve a cultural heritage the was the wellspring of human flourishing of the modern era. That the Europeans themselves sometimes seemed hellbent on killing one another in carload lots did not negate the fundamental virtues of the Western heritage of faith and reason.

But those are the very virtues that most of Europe has abandoned. That is why I really want to like President Trump's Warsaw speech but cannot. It's at least 50 years behind the times and for all its rhetorical inspiration, there is almost no one left in Europe to hear it with understanding of what it really would have to mean, and I doubt that Trump himself knows, either.

Update: "... of the six founding members of what evolved into the European Union, five are now led by childless prime ministers or presidents." See more at Powerline.