Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Unlike his more stolid colleagues in the right-wing commentariat, Mark Steyn frequently draws from a seemingly bottomless bag of anecdotes about obscure jazz musicians, forgotten geniuses and long dead Broadway types to score a clever political point. He leaves his best rhetorical tools behind, however, in ``America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It,'' which joins Al Gore's ``An Inconvenient Truth'' in threatening apocalyptic events upon the world unless everyone comes over to the author's point of view within the next 90 minutes.

Unlike Gore, Steyn's concern is with the future of the cultural environment, not the physical. Birthrates in many European countries fall well below the replacement rate of 2.1 for every woman, compared to regions of the Muslim world where women typically bear seven children each. The result, Steyn posits, will be a dramatic shift in global power in the coming decades, with the chief beneficiary being radical Islam.

``How bad is it going to get in Europe?'' he asks. ``As bad as it can get, as in societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and then the long Eurabian night, not over the entire Continent but over significant parts of it.''

The United Nations statistics he cites do tell a stark tale of demographic woe for Europe. With a European Union average of 1.38 births per woman in the 25-member organization, Europe's population may fall by about 100 million from its current 460 million by mid-century, absent an uptick in the birthrate, a change in immigration policy, or both.

European Elites

Steyn's choicest attacks are reserved for a Europe run by closeted elites. For the past 60 years, he insists, they have sustained an environment of weak social contracts where the relationship between rights and responsibilities for a European and his or her government ``is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship.''

A European welfare state that promotes dependency and extended adolescence is, in Steyn's eyes, as grave a cultural sin as can be committed, leading to divided communities, large-scale violence and a wholesale replacement of Europe's dominant culture.

``In a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults are stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys,'' he writes. ``We are the children we never had. The modern Western democracy is perfectly feminized in every respect except its ability to reproduce.'' (Next, he'll be blaming female literacy and near full female employment for the current confrontation.)

Snide Asides

Steyn is known in his humorous columns in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere for stuffing clever asides into places where no giggles have gone before. Yet in this book they're usually more snide than funny, often referring to the fictional ``Wackistan'' and its President ``Sy Kottick'' rather than developing a more involved commentary on the geopolitical consequences of Iran's nuclear research program.

Steyn's attacks on militant Islam are built to generalize, with little attention devoted to detailing internal theological or historical dynamics within the religion that may upset his thesis. And yet he criticizes secular elites in the developed world for failing to take religious belief seriously enough in the first place.

``It condescends to it,'' he writes, adding that in Europe's ``wholly secularized environment, the enduring religiosity of America is not just odd, but primitive.''

Steyn doesn't spend much time on American religiosity or on America for that matter, which makes the book's title even more overweening, except to write that the U.S. is probably fervent enough in its various faiths to withstand any onslaught from Islamic efforts within its borders.

Recent political victories by anti-immigration forces in Sweden and Belgium support Steyn's thesis of rising cultural confrontations in Europe. Whether this trend radically changes the world beyond all conceivable recognition remains a matter for debate.

``America Alone'' is published by Regnery (224 pages, $27.95).

(Bill Murray is a reporter for Bloomberg News in London. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Last Updated: October 26, 2006 00:12 EDT