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Of course, one danger is that strong mutually antagonistic governments can get into shooting wars with each other, much as, say, Russia and the Ottoman Empire did 101 years ago. Their descendants could slip into doing that again after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border on Tuesday.

Putin and Erdogan are rulers of vaguely similar views, so it will be illuminating to see if they can avoid conflict.

Israel is not a large country, but it’s a politically sophisticated one in which much of its top talent eventually goes into politics. So it’s a bellwether. Israel’s first eight general elections were won by Socialists, but either Benjamin Netanyahu or the late Ariel Sharon has captured most of its contests for the past two decades.

Because of Israel’s public obsession with fertility, it’s clear that the Jewish right has been outbreeding the Jewish left.

But that’s a general pattern: The more conservative the culture, the higher the fertility. For example, the highest-fertility country in the world is the extremely backward Islamic state of Niger just south of the Sahara, with a total fertility rate of 6.76 babies per woman.

Likewise, the highest fertility in Asia is in Islamic fundamentalist Afghanistan (5.33 children per woman), followed by other throwback places like Iraq and Yemen.

The combination of Third World backwardness”€”such as lack of education for girls”€”and Western medicine generates huge surplus populations, who naturally clash over power and resources, with the losers increasingly trying to flood into the advanced West.

The U.N. predicts there will be 3 billion more Africans by the end of the century. So the West will be stressed to avoid being more overrun by flash mobs of the indigent like the one Chancellor Merkel foolishly invited into Germany this year.

The leading writers of the age are growing concerned about this central challenge of our time. Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Submission, envisions a future France where the white left and center, simply for the satisfaction of frustrating the white right, barter the presidency to the Muslims. Even more disturbingly in Houellebecq’s insidious plot, disloyal, deracinated men of the right then find justifications to welcome their new Iron Age overlords.

In reality, of course, advanced countries such as France, Germany, and the United States enjoy all the material resources we could need to protect ourselves from demographic inundation. The question of the century will be whether we Westerners can set aside our self-indulgent resentments of our fellow citizens to bond together in self-defense.