A perceptive and thoughtful article by Spengler. For a while, I have considered the Islamic world to be entering into something akin to the Thirty Years War, brought on by a existential crisis at the heart of Islam.The Middle East today
The Causes: Several important countries in the Middle East are subject to perfect storm of demographics and economics. The population cohort aged 15 to 24 years in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran jumped from 15 million in 1995 to about 30 million in 2010. This bulge population has poor prospects. Youth unemployment, according to the World Bank, stands at 30% in Iran and 35% in Iraq. The concept hardly applies to Syria, whose economy is in ruins after five years of a civil war that has displaced perhaps 10 million Syrians out of a population of 22 million. Never, perhaps, has such a large military-age population encountered such poor future prospects in a war zone dominated by non-state extremist actors.
The prospects for economic stabilization of the region’s main actors are poor. The official unemployment rate is 11%, but only 37% of the population is considered economically active, an extremely low ratio given the concentration of Iran’s population in working-age brackets. Social indicators point to deteriorating conditions of life are alarming. The number of marriages has fallen by 20% since 2012. “In Iran, the customary marriage age range is 20-34 for men and 15-29 for women … 46% of men and 48% of women in those age ranges remain unmarried,” according to a June 2, 2015 report in AL-Monitor.[xxii]
Economic problems explain part of the falling marriage rate, but the corrosion of traditional values also is a factor. Iranian researchers estimated late in 2015 that one out of eight Iranian women was infected by chlamydia, a common venereal disease that frequently causes infertility.[xxiii]
When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, the average Iranian woman had seven children; today the total fertility rate has fallen to just 1.6 children, the sharpest drop in demographic history. Iran still has a young population, but it has no children to succeed them. By mid-century Iran will have a higher proportion of elderly dependents than Europe, an impossible and unprecedented burden for a poor country.
At $30 a barrel, moreover, Iran’s oil and gas revenues are less than $30 billion a year, by my calculations, and less than half of the country’s $64 billion budget for fiscal year 2014.[xxiv] Iran’s sudden aging will be followed by Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia. Iran is the most literate Muslim country, thanks in large part to an ambitious literacy campaign introduced by the Shah in the early 1970s. Literacy is the best predictor of fertility in the Muslim world: Muslim women who attend high school and university marry late or not at all and have fewer children.[xxv]
Between 2005 and 2020, Iran’s population aged 15 to 24, that is, its pool of potential army recruits, will have fallen by nearly half. Meanwhile Pakistan’s military-age population will rise by nearly 50%. In 2000, Iran had half the military-age men of its eastern Sunni neighbor; by 2020 it will have one-fourth as many. Iran’s bulge generation of youth born in the 1980s is likely to be its last, and its window for asserting Shiite power in the region will close within a decade.
More important, 45% of Iran’s population will be over the age of 65 years by 2050, according to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects constant fertility scenario. No poor country has ever carried such a burden of dependent elderly, because poor countries invariably have a disproportionate number of young people. Iran is the first country to get old before it got rich, and the economic consequences will be catastrophic. This is a danger of which Iran’s leaders are keenly aware.
Saudi Arabia has the opposite problem: it has a high fertility rate and a growing cohort of young people, and may lack the financial resources to meet their expectations. At present oil prices, Saudi Arabia will exhaust its monetary reserves within five years, according a 2015 report by the International Monetary fund.[xxvi]
There are no official data on poverty in Saudi Arabia, but one Saudi newspaper used social service data to estimate that 6 million of the kingdom’s 20 million inhabitants are poor, some desperately so. After the 2011 “Arab Spring” disturbances, Riyadh increased social spending by $37 billion–or $6,000 for every poor person in the kingdom–in order to preempt the spread of discontent to its own territory.
Saudi Arabia now spends $48.5 billion on defense, according to IHS, and plans to increase the total to $63 billion by 2020. The monarchy has to match Iran’s coming conventional military buildup after the P5+1 nuclear agreement to maintain credibility. If oil prices remain low Saudi Arabia will have to sharply reduce subsidies, opening the risk of social instability.
Turkey faces yet another sort of demographic challenge. It fought a four-decade war with its Kurdish separates that killed perhaps 40,000 people. The problem is that Turkey is gradually becoming Kurdish. The Kurds have 3.3 children per female versus only 1.8 for ethnic Turks, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt estimates, which means that within a generation, half the recruits to the Turkish army will come from Kurdish-speaking homes. Turkey’s intervention in the Syrian civil war is motivated in large measure by its fear that the Kurds will succeed in creating an independent self-governing zone on their border, and link up with the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq.
Demographics, economics and ideology in Asia Minor, the Levant and Mesopotamia combine to create the conditions for a perfect storm. Political analysis of the region tends to focus on the ideological and religious rivalries among Iranian Shi’ism, Sunni Wahhabism and Turkish neo-Ottoman aspirations. To this must be added the demographic and economic challenges that face oil monocultures in an adverse financial environment in the midst of a treacherous demographic transition.
That challenges conventional ways of assessing the options open to rational actors. Game theory considers the behavior of individuals with well-defined interests; it does not consider situations in which one or more of the players (for example) suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. Iran may decide that its existential interest require it to expand its Shi’ite empire now, before its rapid aging deprives it of manpower and financial resources. Saudi Arabia may decide that its ability to control its own restive population requires pre-emptive action against its Shia opponents. Turkey may decide that the threat of territorial amputation requires pre-emptive action against the Kurds.
30% solution here again?
To a great extent, all of this is happening now, through proxy wars: Saudi Arabia and Turkey are engaged in a proxy war with Iran in Syria and to some extent elsewhere in the region. Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops are heavily engaged in Syria, and Saudi Arabia has threatened to introduce its own troops in the country. The problem is that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all face fundamental economic and demographic challenges to internal stability that will get worse within a horizon of five to ten years.
American planners have sought to stabilize the region through proxies (supporting “moderate Islamists” in Syria against the Assad regime, encouraging the Iranians to join the regional security architecture, and so forth). Conditions for a perfect storm on the scale of past wars of exhaustion already prevail, and the likelihood of another war of exhaustion on the scale of the Napoleonic Wars or the Thirty Years War is much higher than foreign policy analysts seem to appreciate. The result may be the 30% solution we have seen so many times in history, and the appropriate American response may be not to extinguish the fire, but to maintain a controlled burn.
I fear Spengler is spot in, and in the coming decades we will see massive bloodshed across the Middle East and with huge waves of Muslim migrations trying to get into a relatively stable Europe. There is a very real danger that the EU, by letting these people, will bring upon itself its own instability and breakdown of civil disorder as a growing minority of its young men will be angry, poor and disposed young Muslim men, susceptible to the siren calls of radical Islam.
