It's the end of the world!! Head for the hills!!!
No, wait. Don't head for the hills--they're full of Islamist terrorist camps. Let me put it in a slightly bigger nutshell: much of what we loosely call
the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most
European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's
still a building known as Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise,
Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.
That's just for starters. And, unlike the ecochondriacs' obsession with rising sea levels, this isn't something that might possibly conceivably hypothetically
threaten the Maldive Islands circa the year 2500; the process is already well advanced as we speak. With respect to Francis Fukuyama, it's not the end
of history; it's the end of the world as we know it. Whether we like what replaces it depends on whether America can summon the will to shape at least
part of the emerging world. If not, then it's also the end of the American moment, and the dawn of the new Dark Ages.