We are going the way of Europe to our doom

Fertility Rates Drop to Lowest Level Measured in the US, Says the CDC:

Fertility rates in America –- the number of babies born per woman between ages of 15 and 44 -– are at the lowest levels ever recorded, according to researchers in a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The findings are based on population data from the CDC that is released every quarter and tracks birth and fertility statistics dating back to 1909. This does not indicate there are more infertile women; rather it means that fewer babies are being born to women of likely childbearing age in the U.S. Measuring the fertility rate is viewed as a more accurate data compared to overall birthrate which measures the rate of babies born compared to the total U.S. population.

Today the fertility rate has decreased from 60 births per thousand women in the first quarter of 2015 down to 59.8 per thousand in the first quarter of 2016. This means there are on average less than 6 babies born for every 100 women in this age group. In 2010 there were 6.4 births for every 100 women in the group. This follows a trend in recent years of declining birth rates in the U.S. with general fertility rates declining more than 10 percent since 2007.

Europe went down this path many years ago. The result is that they are stuck with the "Mohammed Retirement Plan" because there are far too few ethnic Europeans to finance Europe's state-paid pension systems. So for decades Europe has imported foreign workers to keep their economies going. And we know how that has worked out. Besides, there as here in the US, migrants are giving birth as much higher rates than the native women, a huge demographic shift that will inevitably change the very nature of the countries concerned in every way you can think of. So Europe as a whole has a very non-European future because it is locked in a demographic death spiral.

That is why, as I have explained, NATO is doomed and why the United States should seriously reconsider its part in the alliance. If European women  won't have children to grow up to defend Europe, why should American women have children to grow up to defend Europe?

Take Ukraine, for example. As far as I am concerned, if Putin wants it he can have it. Ukraine's birth rate is 1.53 live births per woman, 27 percent lower than the 2.1 required just to maintain a level population. As for Russia, it has its own issues:

... in 2009 Russia recorded population growth for the first time in 15 years, adding 23,300 people. Key reasons for the slow current population growth are improving health care, changing fertility patterns among younger women, falling emigration and steady influx of immigrants from ex-USSR countries. In 2012, Russia's population increased by 292,400 people.

The number of Russians living in poverty has decreased by 50% since the economic crisis following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the improving economy had a positive impact on the country's low birth rate. The latter rose from its lowest point of 8.27 births per 1000 people in 1999 to 13.3 per 1000 in 2014. Likewise, the fertility rate rose from its lowest point of 1.157 in 1999 to 1.750 in 2014. 2007 marked the highest growth in birth rates that the country had seen in 25 years, and 2009 marked the highest total birth rate since 1991.

 Sounds good for them, right? Well, not so fast.

While the Russian birth rate is comparable to that of developed countries, its death rate is much higher, especially among working-age males due to a comparatively high rate of fatalities caused by heart disease and other external causes such as accidents. The Russian death rate in 2010 was 14.3 per 1000 citizens.

See also:
Abortion as surrender
Germany's birth rate falls off the cliff
The vanishing American family
Europe, East and West, wrestles with falling birthrates

Ah, those women-loving, progressive Russians!

Paid Maternity Leave Around the World

Naturally, the Left is trumpeting how progressive other nations are - like Russia, which gives women a year of paid maternity leave. And just as naturally, they think that Russia and other nations with long paid leaves support them because they are just so darn pro-woman.

Wrong.

Every nation in dark blue on the map has a birth rate that is catastrophically low or nearly so. Those governments pay for a year of maternity leave to get women to bear babies. In almost none of those nations (maybe none, period) is the present birth rate high enough to replace the people dying every year.

Take Russia.  Russia's birth rate fell off a cliff about 40 years ago (maybe more, the birth rate was a state secret under the communists) and Russia's population has been steadily declining a lot since at least the 1960s. That may be one reason that Putin is so expansionist now - if he waits 20 years he won't have enough men of military age to do it with. The year-long maternity leave is just one of the inducements the Russian government has in place to get women to bear children. They used to (and maybe still do) also pay a woman several thousand tax-free dollars (in rubles, of course) for every live birth.

It also doesn't bode well for Russia's future that not only is its birth rate bottoming, its death rate is one of the highest "among all countries with at least moderate levels of economic development," and the present life expectancy of Russian men is only about 58 years, lower than 30 years ago.

Russia has the highest death rates among all countries with at least moderate levels of economic development. The present life expectancy for a typical male is about 58 years, below what it was 20 years ago in Russia. ... Even more worrisome to many Russians are the very low birth rates during the past couple of decades. The total fertility rate- the number of children born to the average woman over her lifetime- is expected to be just 1.28 in 2006, or just a little more than one per couple. Russian fertility is among the lowest in the world. ... The Russian decline is currently about 700,000 persons per year, but the rate of decline will accelerate as the number of women in childbearing ages continues to fall. A World Bank report projects that with unchanged birth and death rates, Russia's population would fall from its present level of about 140 million persons to under 100 million by the year 2050. If this happens, such a huge nation would then be largely empty of people.

The old Soviet government "offered Medals of Glory to mothers who had many children," but the Russian government 

has proposed a ten-year program with very generous benefits for Russian women who have a second child- about 70 per cent of Russian women of child-bearing ages presently either have no children or only one child. Under his plan, women who do have a second child will get up to $110 more per month in child allowances, they would be able to take leave from work for up to eighteen months while receiving 40 per cent of their salaries, and they would get larger subsidies for child care. But the most novel aspect of Putin's proposal is to give a cash bonus of over $9000 to women who have a second child. This bonus is considerably larger than the annual earnings of a typical Russian worker, men or women, and it could be used for mortgage payments and for many other large outlays. Putin acknowledges that this program would require lots of money (perhaps 1 per cent of Russian GDP), but he claims that it is necessary in order to "change the attitude of the whole society to the family and its values".

China, OTOH, has the opposite problem. Because of its one-child policy, Chinese parents overwhelmingly abort unborn girls because Chinese society is still heavily patriarchal. That means that today there are about 20 million Chinese men reaching adulthood who have absolutely no hope of marriage; there just aren't enough women to go round. By 2030 the number of such men may reach 50 million.

What do do with tens of millions of young, virile, horny men whose lonely state is 100 percent the fault of the government? Why, kill them, of course. But not in death camps. Get ready for Chinese-expansionist wars the likes that history has never seen.

I'm not saying that is certain, but it is definitely one very real possibility that American strategists are thinking about.

Related

USA falling of the demographic cliff

Fewer babies as US birth rate fails to rebound with economy

 The nation’s birth rates last year reached record lows for women in their teens and 20s, a government report shows, leading to the fewest babies in 32 years.

The provisional report, released Wednesday and based on more than 99% of U.S. birth records, found 3.788 million births last year. It was the fourth year the number of births has fallen, the lowest since 1986 and a surprise to some experts given the improving economy.

The fertility rate of 1.7 births per U.S. woman also fell 2%, meaning the current generation isn’t making enough babies to replace itself. The fertility rate is a hypothetical estimate based on lifetime projections of age-specific birth rates.

Whether more U.S. women are postponing motherhood or forgoing it entirely isn’t yet clear.

In a first-world society, it takes 2.1 live births per woman to maintain a level population. The 1.7 average is an all-time low for the United States. But birth rates have been falling for, well, 200 years.

However, the decline in only nine years, from 1.93 to 1.7, is precipitous.

Births were down across racial groups, with small declines for Hispanics, whites, blacks and Asians. The number of babies born to native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders was stable.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report also found:

—Overall, the U.S. birth rate for women ages 15 to 44 was 59 births per 1,000 women, an all-time low.

—Last year, there were 2% fewer births than in 2017.

Some observers of the trend say that the decline can partly be explained by the fact that women who bear children are doing so at an older average age, and that presently childless women will catch up as time passes. But that still does not account for the fact that women are still bearing fewer children than ever, no matter what age they bear them.

Demographers have pointed out that some European countries are gripped in a demographic death spiral, where the birth rate is so low that there is no realistic chance of recovery back to the 2.1 sustainment level.

What does America's falling birth rate portend? The WSJ explains (firewalled):

The nation's falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country's fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem—a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall—has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences. ...

Low-fertility societies don't innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don't invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don't have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

Simply put, a shrinking population means a bleaker, poorer, and less sustainable future.

"... our best hope is a quiet death ..."

"... in a clean facility where the immigrant workers speak our language."

So bemoans Margret Kopala, writing in The Ottawa Citizen. Canada's birth rate has fallen to 1.5 births per woman. As I've written about before, the West is committing demographic suicide. It takes 2.1 births per woman just to stay level in population. Canada's rate of 1.5 means that it is not far from falling off a demographic cliff. If the rate falls to about 1.3, as it has done in two or three European countries, there is almost no chance that it can recover.

There is no longer a single country in Europe where people are having enough children to replace themselves when they die. Italy recently became the first nation in history where there are more people over the age of 60 than there are under the age of 20. This year [1998 - DS] Germany, Greece and Spain will probably all cross the same eerie divide. [link]

Ms. Kopala also observes,

Greece has 1.3 births per couple -- the "lowest low" from which no society has ever recovered; Russia, where 60 per cent of pregnancies are terminated, has the fastest-growing rate of HIV in the world and, by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles. ...

Most European countries compensate for their low birth rate by importing very large numbers of immigrants, particularly from or through Turkey and from northern Africa. This habit produces its own set of problems, especially since most of these immigrants are Muslims and "Old Europe" has never actually desired that they become assimilated into traditional European culture. France especially has had very rough time which I wrote about in some length in Nov. 2004 in part four of "The Forever Jihad" (all parts combined here).

But back to the original topic. In Canada, Kopala says, one couple out of 15 are medically diagnosed as infertile. And women who do bear children are delaying it much longer than before; a mother's average age of of first birth is 29.5 years. But the older women are the less likely they are to conceive and the more likely the pregnancy will miscarry.

Compounding the problem, earlier and increased sexual activity means a greater likelihood for contracting gonorrhea or chlamydia. In women, pelvic inflammatory disease and, in turn, blocked fallopian tubes or ectopic pregnancy may result. In men, sterility is possible. According to healthyontario.

com, rates of STD infection are up 60 per cent since 1997, with girls between the ages of 15 and 19 incurring the highest rates. In 2003, 20,000 new cases of chlamydia were reported in Canada. ...

On this front, Mark Steyn blames the "progressive agenda" -- abortion, gay marriage, endlessly deferred adulthood -- and he's right. He doesn't get into many specifics but they are easily identified. In the U.S., 48.5 million abortions since Roe v. Wade only slightly exceeds the estimated 47 million civilians lost in the Second World War. And, as the University of Calgary's Rainer Knopf predicted, gay marriage means any public distinction between procreative and non-procreative sexuality is now totally abandoned.

On that last point, see my Wall Street Journal op-ed of march 2004, "Save Marriage? It's Too Late" - their title. not mine.

When society decided--and we have decided, this fight is over--that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of "saving marriage" is pretty specious. There's little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.

That the United States' birth rate is barely under the 2.1 repalcement rate should be of no comfort. The demographic trend has been for decades that American women are having their first children at steadily advancing ages (see "The Vanishing American Family).

"Shrinkwrapped," the nom de blog of a psychoanalyst, writes that the "me" generation (meaning practically anyone born after World War II) exhibits a kind of social narcissism that also helps drive down the birth rate:

People decide not to have children for all sorts of reasons and much of the time their narcissistic pathology doesn't enter into the calculation. However, on the margins, a society that has exalted the individual as its highest value, is a society that will have many individual members who do not know how, or are poorly equipped psychologically, to make the difficult compromises necessary to raise children. In such cases, eschewing children in favor of "self actualization" becomes the choice of enough people that Demographics are effected. When this is combined with a loss of faith in one's society (as seems to be so prevalent in Europe, where nothing but the profane is sacred), a staggering financial burden, and social opprobrium, Demographic decline can border on Demographic suicide.

The procreation of children is the ultimate expression of faith in the future. Yet to come, how religious environmentalism devalues human life and has convinced countless people (most astonishingly, Christians) that human beings are bad for the planet. Some advance reading assignments:

Nature is not your friend

"Environmentalism as Religion," by Michael Crichton

"Children 'bad for planet'"

"Eco-Extremist Wants World Population to Drop below 1 Billion. Sea Shepherd founder says mankind is a 'virus' and we need to 're-wild the planet.' "

Europe's demographic death spiral

Reposted from donaldsensing.com; links were good at time of original

Through the efforts of journalists such as Mark Steyn and others, the peril of Europe's low birthrates is becoming better known. An industrialized society must average 2.1 births per woman simply to maintain a level population number. More than that, poplulation rises, less and it falls. Most European nations have lower-than-stable birth rates, and many have rates so low that they have been termed a "death spiral," too low to recover without massive changes in social mores and economic-legal standards that seem most unlikely. The Stanford Review explains,

Not even one EU member state has a fertility rate that will replace the death rate... . In fact, eleven EU countries, including Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy have a negative population growth rate. Instead of Europeans, the population is being replaced by Muslims, whose birth rates are much higher than those of Europeans. French cities such as Lyon and Marseilles have become mostly Muslim Arab cities. European identity is being usurped, and Europe is in a death spiral, demographically and culturally.

The International herald Tribune reported in September on "Empty playgrounds in an aging Italy."

GENOA There are hundreds of stores in the Fiumara Mall - Sephora, Elan, Lavazza Café. But in a nation long known for its hordes of children, there is not one toy store in the sprawling mix, and a shiny merry-go-round stands dormant. "This is a place for old people," said Francesco Lotti, 24, strolling with his fiancée in Genoa's medieval old town. "Just look around. You don't see young people." Even for people their age, "there are not many places - no clubs, for example." Playgrounds? He looks quizzically at his fiancée. They can count them on a few fingers. While all of Europe has suffered from declining birthrates, nowhere has the drop been as profound and prolonged as in this once gorgeous Mediterranean city, the capital of Italy's graying Liguria region. Genoa provides a vision of Europe's aging future, displaying the challenges that face a society with more old than young, and suggesting how hard it will be to reverse the downward population spiral.

Nowhere, though, is the issue more urgent than in Russia.

Russia has the highest death rates among all countries with at least moderate levels of economic development. The present life expectancy for a typical male is about 58 years, below what it was 20 years ago in Russia. ... Even more worrisome to many Russians are the very low birth rates during the past couple of decades. The total fertility rate- the number of children born to the average woman over her lifetime- is expected to be just 1.28 in 2006, or just a little more than one per couple. Russian fertility is among the lowest in the world. ... The Russian decline is currently about 700,000 persons per year, but the rate of decline will accelerate as the number of women in childbearing ages continues to fall. A World Bank report projects that with unchanged birth and death rates, Russia's population would fall from its present level of about 140 million persons to under 100 million by the year 2050. If this happens, such a huge nation would then be largely empty of people.

The old Soviet government "offered Medals of Glory to mothers who had many children," but the Russian government

has proposed a ten-year program with very generous benefits for Russian women who have a second child- about 70 per cent of Russian women of child-bearing ages presently either have no children or only one child. Under his plan, women who do have a second child will get up to $110 more per month in child allowances, they would be able to take leave from work for up to eighteen months while receiving 40 per cent of their salaries, and they would get larger subsidies for child care. But the most novel aspect of Putin's proposal is to give a cash bonus of over $9000 to women who have a second child. This bonus is considerably larger than the annual earnings of a typical Russian worker, men or women, and it could be used for mortgage payments and for many other large outlays. Putin acknowledges that this program would require lots of money (perhaps 1 per cent of Russian GDP), but he claims that it is necessary in order to "change the attitude of the whole society to the family and its values".

Meanwhile, back in France, the government has awakened, too, and is offering financial incentives for more children. Unlike Genoa and other Italian cities, French cities are far from devoid of children. Reports the WaPo,

When the municipal day-care center ran out of space because of a local baby boom, the town government gave Maylis Staub and her husband $200 a month to defray the cost of a "maternal assistant" to care for their two children. ... While falling birthrates threaten to undermine economies and social stability across much of an aging Europe, French fertility rates are increasing. France now has the second-highest fertility rate in Europe -- 1.94 children born per woman, exceeded slightly by Ireland's rate of 1.99. ... France heavily subsidizes children and families from pregnancy to young adulthood with liberal maternity leaves and part-time work laws for women. The government also covers some child-care costs of toddlers up to 3 years old and offers free child-care centers from age 3 to kindergarten, in addition to tax breaks and discounts on transportation, cultural events and shopping. This summer, the government -- concerned that French women still were not producing enough children to guarantee a full replacement generation -- very publicly urged French women to have even more babies. A new law provides greater maternity leave benefits, tax credits and other incentives for families who have a third child. During a year-long leave after the birth of the third child, mothers will receive $960 a month from the government, twice the allowance for the second child.

This being France, the subsidies of children are not only cash incentives but also a burgeoning of the socialist state apparatus, with very generous, paid work leaves and even tax deductions for nanny payments. We should recognize that the United States also subsidizes children with deductions from taxable income amounting to several thousand dollars per child and certain child-related expenses - but unlike Russia and France, there is no increase in the financial incentive for more than one child. French women may yet achieve true replacement rates of birth. But even with Russia's strong financial incentives for having children, its birth rate is so low that even an enormous improvement - say a demographically huge increase of one-third from the present 1.28 births per woman to 1.7 - means that the country's rate of decline slows but does not stop. And no one really expects such a large increase to be attained. But bless them for trying. It has to be done.

Related:
Europe's non-European future
Abortion as surrender
Germany's birth rate falls off the cliff
The vanishing American family
Europe, East and West, wrestles with falling birthrates

Having children: costs and ideology

Reposted from donaldsensing.com; links were good at time of original

The demographic "death spiral" of most European countries has been analyzed and written about for a few years now. In first-world countries it takes an average of 2.1 births per woman to maintain a stable population. More births than that and the population grows, less and it declines. Thirteen European countries are solidly below 2.1 and several are way below. America's overall average is 2.08, but some demographic sectors of our society are carrying the freight for the rest - Hispanic women, for example, have a higher average birth rate than white women. Why has the birth rate declined so much? Glenn Reynolds has an incisive piece is TCS in which he explores the shrinking American family of a cost-benefit perspective.

Children used to provide cheap labor, and retirement security, all in one. Now they're pretty much all cost and no return, from a financial perspective. ... There's also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren't seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world.

It's true that raising children is expensive - heck, just getting newborns home from the hospital is pretty expensive! But of the two sides of this coin, the social costs that Glenn talks about are far more important.

[P]arenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there's less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.

There is enormous social pressure on parents to have two kids and stop, especially since most adults have been brainwashed over the last forty years or so to think that the world is badly overpopulated and human beings are a blight upon the planet. As my high-school son told me this school year, the not-very-subtle message of his required block of ecological studies was that there is nothing wrong with earth's environment that the disappearance of humanity couldn't solve. As Ronald Bailey wrote in Reason Online,

"Coercive population control has long been an established and widely accepted precept of ideological environmentalism."

But the anti-human bias of the environmental movement is only one part of the picture. Since 1970 or so the feminist movement has continuously and often rabidly devalued mothering as something successful women do. Motherhood has been propagandized (even demonized) as what losers do when they can't hold down a real job, or better yet, a profession. The social pressure on young women to "succeed" at something before having children - even before getting married at all - is huge. More and more women who have babies are having them at later ages, and this fact tends to push down the total number of babies a woman will have. A woman whose firstborn comes along when she's 30 is a lot less likely to have three more kids than a woman who first gives birth at 23. Some data - births by age, 1970 v. 2003:

1970:

Age 20-24 -- 1,418,874 

Age 25-29 -- 994,904

Age 30-34 -- 427,806 

Age 35-39 -- 180,244

2003:

Age 20-24 -- 1,032,337 

Age 25-29 -- 1,086,898 

Age 30-34 -- 975,964 

Age 35-39 -- 467,520

It's true that advances in prenatal medicine have made it safer for women to give birth at older ages than they could before, but the figures still show that overall, first babies are being born to older women than ever before. A corresponding social fact of life is that women are getting married much later than before, too, if they get married at all (nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43 percent since 1960). Obviously, a lot of women have children without ever being married, but marriage followed by children is still the norm. In place of marriage is cohabitation, which has increased tenfold since 1960. This development was impelled by the Pill, which has served to separate having sex from its reproductive consequences for married and unmarried women alike. In pre-Pill days a married couple might want two children and settle for four, but no longer. As well, men are affected by the separation sex from fatherhood. I explored this issue from a related angle in the Wall Street Journal back in 2004.

Over the last four decades, men have discovered that marriage is no longer the sure way to sex. Women have discovered that men's sexual and emotional commitment to them isn't usually gained by giving men sex before marriage. As the old saying goes, "Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?" If most women offer men sex apart from marriage, then the need for men to commit to sexual loyalty to a particular woman is greatly lessened, even eliminated. Then women look around and wonder why so many men they know all seem to be rotters who aren't interested in marriage.

See also my op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, "Save Marriage? It's too late."

The decline of marriage has undoubtedly had a significant effect on the birth rate, although the rate of children born to unmarried parents is rising. But the costs such as Glenn discusses are so high for single parenting that while more unmarried women are giving birth than before, they are having no more children apiece than married women (lots of birth-related stats here).

Update: ShrinkWrapped blog says that widespread "narcissistic pathology" is one reason for the shrinking family. See also Dean Esmay's observations, echoed by several commenters, that anti-male bias in divorce law and society in general inhibits men from marrying more than before.

Update: Joshua Zeitz, writing in American Heritage magazine, says that the birth rate per woman had fallen to three by 1920, and that the sexual revolution began decades before the Pill, with World War II being a major contributor. "The pill didn't create America's sexual revolution, but it may have accelerated it—and that revolution had been had been a long time in the making." Link.

Germany's birth rate falls off the cliff

I've posted a number of times about the crisis of the declining birth rates in Europe. Now we learn that Germany's birth rate has declined precipitously in just one year. But that's not all - it's deaths have increased.

Official figures show that the number of births fell by a further 2.8% last year. Meanwhile, the mortality rate rose by 1.5% compared with 2004.

The birth rate is exceptionally low in the former East Germany, where the city of Chemnitz is thought to have the lowest birth rate in the world.

Economists say Europe's population decline threatens to damage economic growth for decades.

The data from Germany's Office for Federal Statistics show there were 686,000 births last year - half as many as in the early 1960s.

It's astonishing that Europe in general seems to be deliberately committing suicide. What can account for it?

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.

Europe has simply given up

Here is a chart by Eurostat showing European nations' birth rates by decade beginning at 1960 and by year 2012-2014. See a trend there? And do you see that Turkey is the only nation to show a steady, upward trend?

Demographers agree that a birth rate of 2.1 live births per woman is what it takes to maintain a level population level. When the rate falls below 1.8 it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse and below 1.5 it approaches near-impossibility. That's why rates that low are often called a "demographic death spiral."

And that is one reason why I have for many years advocated America's disentanglement from the military part of the NATO alliance. As I have said before, if NATO’s countries will not have enough children to preserve protect themselves, why should American women have children to protect them?

The chart:

Spain's government is so alarmed that it has literally set up an official office to address the problem and,

... has tasked demographic expert Edelmira Barreira with sorting out the problem. The move comes after the country reported a higher number of deaths than births for the first time in 2015.

Spanish women between 18-49 reportedly had an average of 1.3 children in 2015 - below the European Union’s (EU) figure of 1.58. Spain’s birthrate has fallen by 18 percent since 2008, according to figures from Eurostat.

And between 1977 and 2015, the number of childless couples tripled from 1.5 to 4.4 million... .

As a demographer, though, Senora Barreira cannot be optimistic since once a society's rate drops to 1.3, more than a marginal increase over the long term is almost impossible. And besides, Spanish couples "blamed long working hours and late nights for the decrease" - whatever that really means.

Long ago Europe's countries decided to build a welfare state instead of bear children. But as the birth rate correspondingly fell, who would provide the labor and wealth to pay for Europe's very generous retirement payouts and nationalized health care? They answered that question, too, but did not foresee or did not care the long-term outlook: "The Mohammed Retirement Plan Will Kill Europe."

Once again, European values are in conflict with European survival.

The European values that require Europe to commit suicide are about ideology, not language, culture or nationhood. But the incoming migrants don’t share that ideology. They have their own Islamic values.

Why should 23-year-old Mohammed work for four decades so that Hans or Fritz across the way can retire at 61 and lie on a beach in Mallorca? The idea that Mohammed would ever want to do such a thing out of love for Europe was a silly fantasy that European governments fed their worried citizens.

Then there is this informative little chart: "Muslims have an average 3 children per family (or woman? The data does not clarify this). Not hard to calculate how large the population will explode into within the next three decades."

This is one reason Europe's future decades will be decidedly non-European in ways that we recognize Europe now.

Update, March 1: The trend is also worldwide:

Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and will overtake Christianity as the most popular before the end of this century, according to an analysis of religious surveys published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

With 1.6 billion, Muslims made up 23 percent of the world’s population, according to a 2010 Pew estimate. That figure was still some way short of the 2.2 billion Christians which comprised 31 percent of the population.

However, by 2050 there could be near parity between the numbers of adherents of the two religions for the first time in history. The reasons for this rapid growth are thought to be the greater number of children Muslims have compared to other religious groups and the comparatively young age of Muslims.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Europe's children

US Secretary of Defense James Mattis addressed NATO's defense ministers today and laid down the law: "Defense Secretary Mattis Tells NATO Allies to Spend More, or Else"

BRUSSELS — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, echoing his boss in Washington, warned on Wednesday that the amount of American support for NATO could depend on whether other countries meet their own spending commitments.

“Americans cannot care more for your children’s future security than you do,” Mr. Mattis said in his first speech to NATO allies since becoming defense secretary. “I owe it to you to give you clarity on the political reality in the United States and to state the fair demand from my country’s people in concrete terms.”

“America will meet its responsibilities,” he said, but he made clear that American support had its limits.

“Americans cannot care more for your children’s future security than you do."

In 2008, I posted, "What has NATO done for us?" and the answer then, as now, is pretty much zip, nada, null set.

NATO was founded in 1949 to form a bulwark against Soviet invasion of western Europe. ...

So just what does this mean today? Pretty much nothing. ... Who is there to attack either North America or Europe? There are really only two threats reasonably imaginable - Russia and Islamist terrorists. Let's consider them seriatim. 

I explained in some detail why NATO can't stop Russian moves against Georgia (which was going on at the time), Ukraine (which events proved me correct) or the NATO-member Baltic states.

In summary: Russia is no military threat to western Europe. And though its threat to the Baltics and Ukraine is more realizable, there is not much NATO can do about it in the event, anyway.

As for terrorism, that's obviously a real and in fact ongoing threat in Europe.

But let us imagine that al Qaeda [ISIS didn't exist then, but include it] mounts a truly devastating attack against a NATO capital city, killing thousands. Just how can NATO respond? It can't, certainly not for any response that would require self-lifting across strategic distances. The strategic transportation of NATO has always been oriented one way: US and Canadian forces flowing into Europe to defend it from the USSR, not forces flowing out of Europe to somewhere else in the world. NATO forces cannot go anywhere in the world in substantial force without the US Air Force or Navy carrying them.

Let us then ask the pointed question: Just how does continued NATO membership actually benefit that United States? I can think of only one way - forward stationing of US forces as a deployment point to locales farther east or toward the Middle East.

That's it. Is that worth the cost of national treasure and aggravation we have with the alliance, and which show no sign of abating?

And this relates directly to what Mattis said today:

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 the US make up your deficit?

Update, 28 Feb., 

Spanish women between 18-49 reportedly had an average of 1.3 children in 2015 - below the European Union’s (EU) figure of 1.58. Spain’s birthrate has fallen by 18 percent since 2008, according to figures from Eurostat.

And between 1977 and 2015, the number of childless couples tripled from 1.5 to 4.4 million... .

All NATO members agreed many years ago to spend at least two percent of the GDPs on defense. Today, only five nations do:  the UK, Poland, Estonia, Greece and the United States. The other countries are all significantly below that benchmark, many very steeply below (Canada spend less than one percent).

Bluntly, NATO countries won't bear enough children to defend their countries in the 2020s and even less so in the decades following, and they won't spend enough on their military to equip them anyway. I said nine years ago,

I think the United States should reassess whether the NATO alliance really is serving American interests. I don't think it is, and I don't think it will do better in years to come.

It certainly has not since then. I cannot think of a reason not to kiss NATO goodbye right now.

Update, 28 Feb: See also, "Europe has simply given up," with an up-to-date look at European nations' birth rates and their implications.

RealClearReligion - Faith, No Faith, and 2.1 Babies

Demographers have long know that in a modern society, it takes an average birth rate of 2.1 live-born infants per woman to maintain a steady population level. Almost all of Europe, however, has been for many, many years now is a "demographic death spiral" with dramatically falling birth rates.

Not coincidentally, the smaller families have become (and even in many cases, vanished altogether), the lower the ratio of people in Europe who adhere to religion (any religion, but especially, of course, Christianity).

However, the news about falling fertility rates, vis-a-vis religion, is not all bad:

Since the 1980s, fertility rates in several Muslim countries have collapsed at rates even faster than Europe's. The change is most spectacularly marked in Iran, where a typical woman can expect to bear 1.88 children in her lifetime (down from over 6.0 in the mid-1980s). Almost as dramatic are the falls in North African countries such as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

Coincidentally or not, the wave of social protest that we call the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, where sharply declining fertility illustrated the radical ongoing changes in gender and family structures, and individual expectations. I believe that these changes are the harbingers of a long-term secularization that within a few decades will make countries like Iran as cool to organized faith as Western Europe itself.

Read the whole thing:
RealClearReligion - Faith, No Faith, and 2.1 Babies

However again: As Mark Steyn has pointed out,

... demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage.

Despite their falling birth rates now in Iran and many other other Muslim lands, the rate is till very well above the replacement rate.

When Japan will become extinct

Did you know that whole countries can become extinct? In Japan's case it will take place in August 3776. It may seem like a long time from now, but demographically, it's not.

The reason for the upcoming national extinction is simple: they are not having babies. 

But not just in Japan. I have posted a few times that apparently Europe has just given up on the future and that IMO, one of the main reasons NATO is an albatross around America's neck is that Europeans' birth rate is so low that they cannot even maintain a level population. As I have said before, if NATO’s countries will not have enough children to preserve protect themselves, why should American women have children to protect them?

In Japan indicators of the aggravating factors are:

1. Adult diapers outsell baby diapers. The over-65 demographic is the fastest-growing one.
2. Last year, for the first time since century-before-last, births were fewer than one million. 
3. Young people have started "granny dumping." "It describes the unfortunate practice of younger citizens bringing their senile elders to hospitals or charities and essentially abandoning them — generally because they can't afford care anymore." As of now, the number is in the low hundreds. As of now.
4. Prisons are turning into nursing homes. An aging general population means an aging prison population. One-fifth of all crimes committed in Japan are committed by the elderly. Many turn to crime to get elder care in prison that they cannot get elsewhere.
5. The extinction clock: at present birth rate, the last Japanese person will die in 3776.
6. Friends are getting married out of desperation. The relatively few young people in Japan spend so much time and resources working (Japan is a a very expensive place to live) that they don't court one another. So many marriages occur between friends or mere acquaintances for reasons, mainly financial, other than making families.  
7. Speaking of work, one-fifth percent of adults surveyed by the government said they worked at least 80 per week overtime, meaning that total hours worked per week greatly exceeds 100. This results in so many suicides that there is a special name for it, karoshi. 

Maybe that's why "It just got easier to become a permanent resident of Japan."

Update: Business Insider has a another good read, "'This is death to the family': Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before"

Back here in the States, this is why Social Security is going to be reformed. Not "should be" reformed, but will be reformed. Remember, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, deliberately designed to always be funded by another set of suckers. In S.S.'s case, benefits paid out today are (theoretically) paid for by S.S. taxes paid by younger, working men and women. (They are really paid from borrowed money.) Social Security inherently relies on increasing numbers of workers to pay benefits-via-taxes. How has that worked out for us?

As economist Herbert Stein pointed out, "When something can't go on forever, it won't."

Romney prepares for the last war

Mitt Romney on NATO: "Reinforcing alliance's military might is vital"

This piece is hopelessly backward looking. We need to de-link our national security from NATO starting, oh, six years ago. While I find almost nothing to commend Obama on concerning defense, that he has started moving our security concerns' locus toward Asia is exactly right.

The problems is that Europe faces no credible threat for which NATO is the answer.

See my explanation here.

Furthermore, Europe's native birth rate has fallen off a cliff so that many Euro countries are well into what demographers call a demographic death spiral, where the birth rate is so low that it is effectively impossible for it to recover. See here. So the question is begged (and the Europeans have no answer): If Europeans won't have children who will grow up to be soldiers to defend their countries, why should American women bear children to grow up to defend Europe?

NATO is literally pointless militarily and the USA should withdraw from the military alliance, though intelligence sharing and the like will still do us well.

First, we kill all the newborns

William M. Briggs, Statistician » Academics—Who Else?—Call For The Killing Of Babies:

Academic philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva—shockingly working in Australia1, a land where commonsense was once held sacred—have written a peer-reviewed paper in which they say that killing newborns is A-OK, and even in some cases to be encouraged.

Their “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” is in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

The academics argue that killing a newborn should be legally permissible because the baby could have been aborted and even if not, there is no "personhood" distinction between a fetus and a newly-born infant. Of course, observes Mr. Briggs, "They do not choose to call this killing infanticide, presumably because they are squeamish." Well, not very squeamish - the reason they do not use that word, I think, is because "infanticide" is a legal term for the unlawful killing of an infant, precisely the thing that G-M are arguing should not be illegal.

They begin by claiming that “having a child can itself be an unbearable burden” to a mother. Unbearable is that which cannot be born. It is an extreme word describing an impossibility and not an unlikelihood. Since a birth and the subsequent care of a child is a contingent event, we cannot claim that any birth and rearing is unbearable in advance. Even if it turns out unbearable in some instances, it is not always so and cannot be predicted to be so perfectly.

What this proposal really means is that not only should an abortion be available on demand by the woman for any reason she wants - for whom else could possibly decide what is "unbearable?" - she can also decide post-partum that she can abort retroactively, so to speak:

To answer my own question at the end of that post, G-M say that in fact there is no moral difference at all, and that not only are pre-delivery and partial-birth abortions quite okay, but so is taking the newborn baby and snuffing its life out.

But why stop there? I have long argued that the very same arguments pro-abortion advocates use to support abortion can be used to support capital punishment. We would simply no longer sentence convicts to death, we would simply perform a post-live-birth abortion. So what if the live birth was, say, 60 years ago?

And since “having a child can itself be an unbearable burden” to a mother, who can set moral limits on just when that burden becomes unbearable? The "burden" might be light for several years but then become unbearable after the child is still of minor age. Why not let the mother decide on "after-birth abortion" then? Consider these unbearable circumstances:

1. Child is perfectly healthy and normal until she is brain damaged in an auto accident at age 12 and in unable to dress or feed or bathe herself. Mom decides that this burden is unbearable. Abort? Why not?

2. Boy reaches age 14 and becomes rebellious and "wild" - finally becoming a drug addict and is finally arrested for assault and robbery. Cops call the mom to let her know and she replies, "This is unbearable. Just go ahead and abort him."

Briggs comments on this kind of question:

What contingent, measurable event turns the newborn baby into a human being? When it can talk and say, “I want”? Their lame response is “we do not put forward any claim about the moment at which after-birth abortion would no longer be permissible.”

Translation: "We do not see any meaningful point at which after-birth abortion would no longer be permissible."

At heart, the two academics are anti-human and specifically anti-child. At the outset they characterize parenthood (well, motherhood, since dads don't seem to exist in their ivory-tower minds) as a "burden" that is all too easily "unbearable." And so, of course, the children concerned should die.

That they should hold such a view is shocking enough, but even more disturbing is that apparently this very point of view is "not uncommon in bioethics."

And so we have arrived at what I can only characterize as moral arson with no comprehensibility.

Update: Discussion: Hot Air, Weasel Zippers, Verum Serum, LifeNews.com,Wake up America and Conservative Hideout 2.0, National Catholic Register, First Things.

Wheat and Weeds remarks,

Can you all please now agree that "Ethicist" is a bogus profession, existing for the sole purpose of rubber stamping whatever Mengelean wickedness we care to dream up?

Um, yes. Didn't used to be, though. One of my most subsequently-useful classes in seminary was ethics, but even in the ,latter 1990s at Vanderbilt, the subject was still taught from a classical tradition, starting with Aristotle and working up through the centuries to H. Reinhold Niebuhr.

Update: Reader P.S. writes,

In pagan times it was customary for the father to have the right to decide whether newborn children would live or die. Infants were generally killed because they were deformed in some way, and the most common method of killing unwanted newborns was exposure.

Now we have abortion on demand, for the mere convenience of the mother, not because of some deformity.

So:

Is the West returning to the evils of its pre-Christian past?

Babies were sacrificed to Baal (and other gods) in order to bring some benefit on the community.

Now we have babies sacrificed in order to bring some benefit to the mother. (Or to the community--see Steven Pinker's argument that abortion lowers the crime rate by reducing the number of unwanted children of poor mothers.)

I think one can argue that our bloody sacrifices, done for rationalistic utilitarian reasons, are morally inferior to the pagan sacrifices done in the service of ignorant superstitions: We are supposed to know better.

The next question must be: Is there anything that the West will not stoop to, for crass utililtarian advantage? Is everyone a candidate for sacrifice when it becomes convenient? Life is not sacred, and I get the impression that my liberal friends would not stand in my defense if that would endanger them--or even inconvenience them.

One could make a viciously bitter joke about those academics' argument for "post-birth abortion": Since abortion is sanctified under the cliche "a woman's right to choose", could one suggest, in a return to tradition, that the decision to kill newborns be left to the father as "a man's right to choose"? Or perhaps another one about how not so long ago it was "a white man's right to choose" whether a dark-skinned person was a human being or not.

Time to do something else; I'm too angry to go to bed right now.

The 21st-century human is not morally superior to his ancestors, and paganism is not a bad way to describe our growing spiritual and psychological dysfunctions.

Update: How exactly have G-M proposed anything different from "life unworthy of life?"

"If the cradles are empty, the future is bleak"

The Z Blog › Empty Cradles:

Is Putin moving on Ukraine in a bid to get Russians to bear more children? Hmmm....

And here is a handy little "List of sovereign states and dependent territories by fertility rate," although its data are five or more years old by now.

Ukraine has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. It hit a low in 2001 of 1.08 live births per woman, and even though it had rebounded to 1.53 in 2012, that is still very much below mere replacement rate.

Most of the rest of Europe is no higher or not much higher, and of the major European NATO powers, only the UK and France are higher. Germany and Italy are in a race for the bottom of all Europe. Poland, which would be key terrain in defending either Ukraine or the NATO-member Baltic states, has a birth rate only marginally higher.

So my question to anyone proposing such military action by the United States: if the European nations threatened by Russia will not have children to grow up to defend their own nations, why should we ask American women to bear children to go defend those nations? It seems to me that they have already decided that their country is not worth dying for. I do not see why we should.

HT: American Digest

What has NATO done for us?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has no rasion d'etre any more and is proving it almost daily.

To the point: it's time for the US to disengage from NATO.

NATO was founded to form a bulwark against Soviet invasion of western Europe in 1949. As the charter's Article 5 states,

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them ... will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith ... such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

So just what does this mean today? Pretty much nothing. Strictly interpreted, Article 5's provisions are not tripped by an attack on United States' interests outside North America. One must wonder whether an attack by someone against Guam, a non-North American, American territory, would trigger Article 5, but the question is actually moot since there is no imaginable threat to mount such an attack.

So: Who is there to attack either North America or Europe? There are really only two threats reasonably imaginable - Russia and Islamist terrorists. Let's consider them seriatim:

1. Russia.

The original threat for which NATO was founded, there's no chance that Russia either would or could invade western Europe now or in the far foreseeable future.

Certainly Russia's invasion of Georgia shows that Russia's militarism is alive and well, but the prospect of Russia invading western Europe is simple nitwittery. Russia, oil flush though it is, is not rich enough, militarily powerful enough, nor populous enough to extend a campaign that far or that long. Western Europe in aggregate is still more powerful than Russia militarily (on its own soil, defending its home territories) and is rich enough to outlast Russia in such a war. But the real bottom line is that Russia needs Europe peaceful and prosperous rather than wrecked and impoverished.

But what of the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania? Certainly Russia could invade them, and they are NATO members. They are also defensible by NATO to some minimal level because their sea approaches are a short trip from Germany's and Poland's northern ports.

I am trying to remember the good reasons that the Baltics were admitted into NATO, but memory fails me except to remember that there were no good reasons. (Review NATO's own assessment and see whether it's held up.) At the time, even Russia was being talked about as a potential NATO member of some kind, political membership if not part of the military alliance. See here, for example. It was then presumed membership would have a tamping effect on Russian militarism which would help ensure peace in our time. Russia has in fact been a "partner country" with NATO since 1997. (Some “partner.” As Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that worked out for us?”)

Ukraine? Not a NATO member, and Russia could easily march in. But Ukraine is hardly defensible by NATO. From the west, NATO forces would have a very long ground journey, across NATO-member Poland, then another 300 miles just to reach Ukraine's capital, Kiev. The logistics problem would be immense, especially for ammunition and spare parts.

Ukraine’s sea approach, from the Black Sea, has a natural choke point at the Bosporus straits. The sea approach to the Bosporus has its own choke points, the Dardanelles strait which empties into the Sea of Mamara, between the Aegean Sea and the Bosporus straits. Fortunately, Turkey is a NATO member whose forces have been focused for decades on keeping the sea lanes open. Of course, Russia has worked the opposite problems for decades, too. So there would almost certainly be a battle royal there between NATO and Russian air and naval forces.

Finally, Ukraine is a big country, almost 800 miles east to west, 233,000 square miles, and NATO's manpower commitment would have to be correspondingly large, probably too large for NATO's existing forces, even under mobilization, since substantial forces would need to be retained in Poland and points west to deter Russian moves in that direction.

As well, western Europe's standing forces are too few to offer substantial, long-lasting reinforcements to deployed units. Many of their regular brigades are permanently staffed by regulars at a fraction of full strength, with the rest (usually one-third or even more) of the troops being reservists whose readiness level is substantially lower. If you use your reserves to man up your regular battalions, who exactly is manning the reserves? In all, since the dissolution of the USSR, Europe's defense planning has been focused on economy rather than war readiness.

Don't count on NATO's new NATO Response Force (NRF), which consists of only 25,000 troops of all arms.

This includes a brigade-size land component with forced-entry capability; a naval task force including a carrier battle group, an amphibious task group and a surface action group; and an air component capable of 200 combat sorties a day.

A brigade-size ground force (5,000-6,000 soldiers) is barely speed bump size defending Ukraine or the Baltics. And 200 combat sorties per day would be exhausted before noon in mid-intensity operations.

Sarah Palin said in her Gibson interview that the US should push to admit both Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. I have two words: In. Sane. The idea that the United States should (or can) go to war to eject Russian forces therefrom is foolish in the extreme. A return of Russian occupation of Ukraine or the Baltic countries would be dreadful for the people of those countries. But it's hard to see what US national-security interest would make warring with Russia worth it. NATO's relations with Ukraine, very extensive since 1991, are almost exclusively political-commercial rather than military, or even political-military. Even the NATO Handbook admits tacitly that its goal is development of a market economy and human rights in Ukraine, rather than strengthening of NATO as a military alliance.

It may be argued that for the US to withdraw its NATO military membership would in fact invite Russian moves against Ukraine or the Baltics. I think Putin's government is a more calculating than that. Putin, et. al., surely realize that moving against Ukraine would not evoke military counter-moves from NATO, whether Ukraine is a NATO member or not. The reason is very simple: NATO nations simply do not have the military forces, nor strategic "throw," to make the counter. Simply getting tactically significant forces to the right places in Ukraine, then supplying them, would be an enormous challenge that could well be insurmountable. Only recently have Canada and the UK begun to fly strategic-range airlift, C-17s manufactured by the US. "Ironically," says commenter Adam, "Canada also leases Strategic Airlift capability from the Ukraine, which has a fairly extensive collection of late Soviet-era Antonov heavy lifters designed for strategic airlift." Even so, the great majority of such flying would fall to the US Air Force.

In summary: Russia is no military threat to western Europe. And though its threat to the Baltics and Ukraine is more realizable, there is not much NATO can do about it in the event, anyway.

2. Islamist terrorists.
Islamo-terrorists have already attacked both North America and Europe, it hardly bears pointing out. And what was NATO's response? Except for Canada and Britain, pretty much nothing. Even worse, near surrender: al Qaeda killed 191 Spanish train commuters in March 2004, demanded Spain's withdrawal of its forces from Iraq, and Spain rolled.

We'd also wish to ask just why Islamists would attack Europe in the first place (well, yes, they're terrorists) when if they just bide their time, most of western Europe will become substantially Muslim in just a few decades, and some nations majority Muslim.

What NATO has not done, even under Article 5, is actually fight al Qaeda or the Taliban (again, except for Britain and Canada). For example, Germany sent an entire special-forces detachment to Afghanistan. They literally never left their base camp for a whole year, then Germany brought them home. Except for Canada and Britain, this is typical of the NATO troops, paltry as they are, in Afghanistan. (NATO, qua NATO, had no involvement in Iraq.)

But let us imagine that al Qaeda mounts a truly devastating attack against a NATO capital city, killing thousands. Just how can NATO respond? It can't, certainly not for any response that would require self-lifting across strategic distances. The strategic transportation of NATO has always been oriented one way: US and Canadian forces flowing into Europe to defend it from the USSR, not forces flowing out of Europe to somewhere else in the world. NATO forces cannot go anywhere in the world in substantial force without the US Air Force or Navy carrying them.

Let us then ask the pointed question: Just how does continued NATO membership actually benefit that United States? I can think of only one way - forward stationing of US forces as a deployment point to locales farther east or toward the Middle East.

That's it. Is that worth the cost of national treasure and aggravation we have with the alliance, and which show no sign of abating?

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?

I think the United States should reassess whether the NATO alliance really is serving American interests. I don't think it is, and I don't think it will do better in years to come. Though we must stay politically engaged, I think we'd be better off withdrawing from the military alliance, and work toward building an Anglosphere military alliance in its stead.

Update: Yes, I titled the post having in mind Monty Pythons sketch from Life of Brian, in which some ancient Judeans ask, "What has Rome done for us?" Unlike them, however, we have no important, affirmative answers to the question of my post.

Some follow-on posts:

NATO: Broke, Leaderless and Pointless

What has NATO done for us redux

NATO continues to pretend it matters

The pointlessness of NATO

No Action, Talk Only

Europe's non-European future

Europe's demographic death spiral

Update, July 2017: "Dear President Trump: The West has already surrendered"

Update, July 2018, Victor Davis Hanson:

In most high-stakes diplomacy—denuclearizing North Korea, attempting to make China play by international norms of trade and commerce, keeping Vladimir Putin within his borders, destroying ISIS, isolating a theocratic and potentially nuclear Iran, and the perennial Israel and Palestinian problem—Europe is largely a spectator. Its once heralded “soft power” of the 1990s and early 21st century is more soft than powerful. The friends of Europe no longer count on it; its enemies do not fear it.

The high-tech revolution that birthed Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft passed Europe by. Judged by the great historical determinants of civilizational power—fuel, energy, education, demography, political stability, and military power—Europe is waning. It is spending a mere 1.4% of its collective GDP on defense. Most analysts conclude that even what Europe does spend on security does not translate directly into military readiness, at least in comparison with the U.S. military. And with a fertility rate of less than 1.6%, Europe is slowly shrinking and aging—hence the short-sighted immigration policy of Angela Merkel who apparently sees immigration also as a solution to the demography crisis and a shortcut to low-cost labor.

Across the continent, laws against fracking, German dismantling of nuclear power plants, and massive green subsidies for erratic wind and solar generation—all self-inflicted wounds—have made European gasoline and electricity costs among the highest in the world. Europe remains dependent on Russia, Central Asia, and the OPEC countries for much of its energy needs. In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings of the world’s top 20 universities, only 1 was a continental European university; in contrast, 15 were American and 4 British.

Politically, the European Union has not squared the circle of uniting diverse peoples, languages, and cultures with long historical grievances into a pan-European nation—at least without a level of coercion that is inconsistent with democratic values. Instead, members increasingly find European Union dogma at odds with human nature, at least in terms of entitlements, immigrations, and national security. For a continent that celebrates diversity, the European apparat is quite intolerant of dissident voices.

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Update, January 2022: "Fateful Collision: NATO’s Drive to the East Versus Russia’s Sphere of Influence" by James Kurth. An excellent explanation of how and we got to the mess we're in.