Read Closely

Mark Steyn's not happy that when James Kitfield talked to a bunch of foreign policy experts from both parties and several ideological tendencies (Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Francis Fukuyama, etc.), he didn't make time to give equal weight to the views of crazy people. Fair enough. Then this:

But, if the jig is really up, you could just as easily make the case that it dates back to what Mr Kitson considers that golden age "less than a decade ago" - ie, America's holiday from history, when the wise old foreign-policy stability fetishists had nary a word to say about resurgent Islam, freelance nuclearization, and the demographic decline of the west which makes traditional great-power clubs like the G7 about as relevant to the future as dinner theatre in Florida.

It's obviously quite false to say that the 1990s-vintage foreign policy establishment had nothing to say about nuclear proliferation. But note that the "demographic decline of the west" is paired here quite simply with "resurgent Islam" -- not Islamism or Islamic radicalism or any other kind of qualified version of the worry. The thing we should have been worrying about is simply a resurgence of Islam. I'll count it as a damn good thing that the country wasn't run by people whose idea of the key foreign policy issue of our time was finding a way to get Christians to outbreed the Muslim hordes.