It has been said that when German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the reconstitution of the military in 1955, he proclaimed: “It is crazy, gentlemen, that I have to create a German army, it is just crazy”.

Sixty years have passed, but that sentiment still seems very strong in Germany. A few days ago Sigmar Gabriel, the German foreign minister, said: “We have to be a bit careful here that we don’t over-interpret the 2 percent target.” Gabriel then became clearer: “Maintain perspective, stay focused on the target, but avoid being consumed by the bliss of a new rearmament spiral!”

A few days earlier, Germany had made an announcement: to raise the number of soldiers from 170,000 to 198,000 by 2024 — a modest “rearmament”.

It is a direct consequence of the Trump Administration’s important pressure on European allies, urging them to invest more in defense and security. European armies have become, to quote The Economist, “Potemkin Euro-armies“. Germany’s views are crucial to understanding Europe’s attitude about security and defense. Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy and Europe’s financial giant, is a military dwarf, proud of being weak and disarmed.

Take the countries which suffered most of terror attacks in the last two years. Belgium? It spends 0.85% of its gross domestic product on defense. France? 1.78%. Germany? 1.19%. Spain, which in 2004 experienced the most severe attack in Europe’s recent history? 0.94%.

Europe is enjoying a big siesta. It is disarmed not only militarly but also mentally. Seventy-five percent of Belgium’s military spending goes to pay army pensions. As NATO’s Secretary General Lord Robertson put it, “The problem in Europe is that there are far too many people in uniform, and too few of them able to go into action.”

Another NATO official, Joseph Ralston, the former supreme commander for Europe, defined European armies as “fat and redundant”.

These countries have all embraced the moral vanity of pacifism.

Thanks to it, Germany’s military supply depots are now almost completely empty, according to the newspaper, Die Welt. Possibly fearing a “rearmament spiral”, Germany in fact ended up with a shy army with no drums.

The German population is unwilling to defend itself. A survey by the research firm TNS Emnid showed that 73% of the Germans remain opposed to higher military spending by NATO countries. Manfred Güllner, head of the Berlin-based pollster, Forsa, said that many Germans “would rather have the military not be operational and stay at home”. For most Germans, “history is over“. After the reunification of the country, they seem to mean, they have no more enemies or threats; only friends and opportunities to build a better world, all together. According with Der Spiegel, “Germany is experiencing a relapse into pacifism”.

Born in the years of a Cold War that could become hot, the Bundeswehr, the German army, was the backbone of NATO forces. Today, it is Europe’s military soft underbelly. In contrast to its European neighbors (Belgium, Denmark, France and the Netherlands), Germany refused to deploy its military jets to attack Islamic State positions in Iraq. When, last September, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen visited Iraq to talk to the German officers training Kurdish fighters, she assured her troops that they would not be close to the battle zones. She added that for the German army, “Security is the highest priority”.

John Vinocur wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Germany, one of the largest manufacturers of weapons in the world, has made it clear again that even facing a barbaric enemy, such as ISIS, it is a non-lethal actor. “Diplomats in uniform” is how German soldiers have been called. In Germany, sending fighting troops abroad looks unthinkable today.

The military no longer figures in the German public’s consciousness. If a German chief of staff can be pressured to resign after a raid in Afghanistan did not go as well as planned, it means that he did not have the backing of his society and government.

The German army is now just 20% of what it was in 1990. The country is the economic leader in Europe, but Berlin refuses to invest in security and defense — even less so than the UK, France and other European nations.

Konstantin Richter wrote:

“In the decades since World War II, Germans have turned into genuine pacifists, enjoying their role on the sidelines of global conflicts. A majority of the German public opposes combat missions, and supports the Bundeswehr only as a quasi-humanitarian organization, a kind of Médecins Sans Frontières with guns.”.

In a recent Foreign Policy article, Hans Kundnani found that “a simple comparison between the American and German military budget illustrates the problem”. In 2015, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the U.S. defense budget was $597.5 billion. Germany’s was $36.7 billion, one-twentieth the size of America’s. The same is true for the number of soldiers: Germany army has shrunk to 176,752 active military personnel, a seventh of the 1.3 million of the United States.

Soldiers of the German army on parade in 2009. (Image source: Włodi/Flickr)

That is why Jochen Bittner of Die Zeit wrote: “For the foreseeable future, don’t count on us Germans”. The late Guido Westerwelle, as Germany’s foreign minister from 2009 to 2013, made the withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Germany one of his top priorities.

According Kundnani, this military dysfunction reflects a cultural one:

“In the first decade after reunification in 1990, Germany seemed to be converging with France and the U.K. on the question of the use of military force. This incremental shift culminated in Germany’s participation in the Kosovo War in 1999. ‘Never again Auschwitz’ seemed to have replaced ‘never again war’ as a fundamental principle of German foreign policy. But in the 2000s, against the backdrop of the deployment of the Bundeswehr to Afghanistan and the perceived failures of military interventions elsewhere, Germans seemed to revert to the principle of ‘never again war.’ Germany refused to participate in the military intervention in Libya in 2011 — a decision that many Germans feel has been vindicated. And even the strategic shock of the Ukraine crisis hasn’t changed German attitudes about the use of military force.”

“Pacifism became the German lifestyle“. So a few weeks ago, a German MEP expressed his anger after his 16-year-old daughter received a letter from the army in search of volunteers. “It is outrageous that people so young are being targeted”, said Özcan Mutlu to the news website taz.de. “Young people need protection”. And what does a modern Western society need to be protected? Germany and Europe are not able to answer this question. That is why they are all desperate about Trump’s request to invest more in defending themselves, as if they hope to continue their siesta forever.

The relative abundance enjoyed by the Western post-war generations have created a kind of shame instead of pride. Being born in Europe after the Second World War meant belonging to the dregs of humanity, an execrable society that, for centuries, oppressed almost all the rest of the planet. Europe’s commitment for the Third World and the “wretched of earth” is accompanied by a strange fatalism: Why defend the feeble Western democracies, since the path of history requires their disappearance? We are supposedly at “the end of history”. That is the moral arrogance pervading the Europeans today: at the time of twilight, we just have to work to our own downfall. That is the mentality through which “pacifism, sometimes in a self-righteous manner, has become part of the German DNA”.

What did Spain do after al-Qaeda bombed Madrid’s trains? It withdrew its army from Iraq. What did France do after the carnage at the Bataclan Theater? It played John Lennon’s “Imagine”. What did Belgium do after the bombings in Brussels? It lit candles. What Germany did after the massacre at the Christmas market in Berlin? It cried, “Je suis Berlin”. There is something so tragic and despairing in the Germany’s lack of will to hunt down and eradicate the Islamic State.

See Germany, which destroyed Europe with its arms race under the Nazis. It is now putting Europe at risk again — but this time out of the fear of a supposed “rearmament spiral”. It is as if they think that just because you do not have an army, this means there can be no fight. But there is good news: the US Marines have just arrived in Syria to fight the Islamic State!

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Deaths that exceed births might sound like science fiction, but they are now Europe’s reality. It just happened. During 2015, 5.1 million babies were born in the EU, while 5.2 million persons died, meaning that the EU for the first time in modern history recorded a negative natural change in its population. The numbers come from Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), which since 1961 has been counting Europe’s population. It is official.

There is, however, another surprising number: the European population increased overall from 508.3 million to 510.1 million. Have you guessed why? The immigrant population increased, by about two million in one year, while the native European population was shrinking. It is the substitution of a population. Europe has lost the will to maintain or grow its population. The situation is as demographically as seismic as during the Great Plague of the 14th Century.

This shift is what the British demographer David Coleman described in his study, “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries: A Third Demographic Transition.” Europe’s suicidal birth rate, coupled with migrants who multiply faster, will transform European culture. The declining fertility rate of native Europeans coincides, in fact, with the institutionalization of Islam in Europe and the “re-Islamization” of its Muslims.

In 2015, Portugal recorded the second-lowest birth rate in the European Union (8.3 per 1,000 inhabitants) and negative natural growth of -2.2 per 1,000 inhabitants. Which EU country had the lowest birth rate? Italy. Since the “baby boom” of the 1960s, in the country famous for its large families, the birth rate has more halved. In 2015, the number of births fell to 485,000, fewer than in any other year since the modern Italy was formed in 1861.

Eastern Europe now has “the largest population loss in modern history“, while Germany overtook Japan by having the world’s lowest birth rate, when averaged over past five years. In Germany and Italy, the decreases were particularly dramatic, down -2.3% and -2.7% respectively.

Out with the old, in with the new… Europe, as it is aging, no longer renews its generations, and instead welcomes massive numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who are going to replace the native Europeans, and who are bringing cultures with radically different values about sex, science, political power, culture, economy and the relation between God and man.

Some businesses are no longer even interested in European markets. Kimberly-Clark, which makes Huggies diapers, has pulled out of most of Europe. The market is simply not cost-effective. Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble, which produces Pampers diapers, has been investing in the business of the future: diapers for old people.

Europe is becoming gray; you can feel all the sadness of a world that has consumed itself. In 2008, the countries of the European Union saw the birth of 5,469,000 children. Five years later, there were nearly half a million fewer, 5,075,000 — a decrease of 7%. Fertility rates have not only fallen in countries with aching economies, such as Greece, but also in countries such as Norway, which sailed through the financial crisis.

As Lord Sacks recently said, “falling birth rates could spell the end of the West“. Europe, as it is aging, no longer renews its generations, and instead welcomes massive numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who are going to replace the native Europeans, and who are bringing cultures with radically different values about sex, science, political power, culture, economy and the relation between God and man.

Liberals and secularists tend to dismiss the importance of demographic and cultural issues. That is why the most important warnings come from some Christian leaders. The first to denounce this dramatic trend was a great Italian missionary, Father Piero Gheddo, who explained that, due to falling birth rates and religious apathy, “Islam would sooner rather than later conquer the majority in Europe”. He was followed by others, such as Lebanese Cardinal Bechara Rai, who leads the Eastern Catholics aligned with the Vatican. Rai warned that “Islam will conquer Europe by faith and birth rate“. A similar warning just came from yet another cardinal, Raymond Leo Burke.

In one generation from now, Europe will be unrecognizable. People in Europe now largely seem to feel that the identity of their civilization is threatened primarily by a frivolous libertarianism, an ideology under the guise of freedom, that wants to deconstruct all the ties that bind man to his family, his parentage, his work, his history, his religion, his language, his nation, his freedom. It seems to come from an inertia that does not care if Europe succeeds or succumbs, if our civilization disappears, drowned by ethnic chaos, or is overrun by a new religion from the desert.

As a paper in the Washington Quarterly explains, the fatal meeting between Europe’s falling birth rates and rise of Islam has already had significant consequences: Europe has turned into an incubator of terrorism; formed a new poisonous anti-Semitism; seen a political shift to the far right; undergone the biggest crisis in European authoritarian unity and witnessed a refocusing of foreign policy since Europe’s withdrawal from the Middle East.

Demographic suicide is not only experienced; it appears to be wanted. The xenophile European bourgeoisie, which today controls politics and the media, seem imbued with a snobbish and masochistic racism. They have turned against the values of their own Judeo-Christian culture and combined it with a hallucinatory, romanticized view of the values of other cultures. The sad paradox is that Europeans are now importing young people in large numbers from the Middle East to compensate for their lifestyle choices.

An agnostic and sterile continent — deprived of its gods and children because it banished them — will have no strength to fight or to assimilate a civilization of the zealous ad the young. The failure to counter the coming transformation seems to come down on the side of Islam. Is what we are seeing the last days of summer?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.