RUTHFULLY YOURS

While often dismissed as just a troublesome voting bloc in the United Nations, the 57 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) are posing an ever greater threat to the West. As Leslie Lebl of the Foreign Policy Research Institute notes, the OIC is far from a benign, peace-seeking group of nations. Rather, “the [Muslim] Brotherhood and OIC see Europe as part of a future global Caliphate, an Islamic empire governed by an Islamist version of traditional Islamic law, or sharia. This competition extends to the United Nations where the OIC is seeking to enforce global prohibitions on criticism of Islam.”

And by the West, we now mean the United States of America. The “rest of the West” has largely turned away from the fundamentals of Western civilization, choosing instead to either seek detente with the range of threats against it (Russia, China, the OIC, etc.) or to even submit.

Back in the 1980s, the West’s attention was elsewhere — namely, on the Soviet threat. Groups such as the OIC could be dismissed as a lesser problem that could be dealt with sometime in the future as needed. That “future” is now, as the following charts illustrate.

At present, the OIC comprises an economy just 6 percent smaller than the USA (and only a 1 percent smaller share of the global economy). The IMF predicts that before 2020, the OIC’s economic weight will exceed that of the United States. The cross-over point is approaching rapidly, much as it did for China — whose economy is already projected to be 5 percent larger than America’s by the end of 2015, with the U.S. falling further behind each year into the future.

The OIC has long had a larger population than the USA, but back in 1980 the differential was “only” 3:1. Now it is over 5:1 and closing in on 6:1 during the coming decade.

Even the military spending gap is closing fast. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. was consistently spending about five times as much as the OIC on defense. Over the last decade, this ratio is down to 2.9:1 and falling rapidly — the product of ongoing U.S. defense spending cuts and the corresponding rapid rise (with no end in sight) of OIC military spending.

The times are becoming very dangerous indeed for what is left of the West. The United States stands nearly alone and the threats are multiplying as the years pass by. One almost yearns for the simplicity of dealing with a single major threat again. But, alas, that is wishful thinking. And the longer what is left of the West continues to play ostrich with regard to geopolitics, the more dangerous the threats become. The lesson of leaving a rising threat for a later day should have been learned for all time by the West during World War II. Sadly, the memories of many are too short (if they ever learned the lesson), as our wartime veterans will often remind us.