We have met senility, and he is us.

It isn’t just poor Joe Biden who has aged ungracefully. The wealthy nations of the world are aging and the consequences will be far more painful than the passing humiliation of one Western leader.

Without an unprecedented (and practically impossible) sea-change in fertility, the working-age population of the high-income countries of the world (above US$16,000 in per capita GDP) will shrink by 20% during the present century. This will have disruptive economic consequences over time. It is already having disruptive consequences in global strategy.

Countries without children are indifferent to their future and apathetic about their present.

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That is the tectonic force pushing the world into multipolarity, I argued July 10 in an essay for Law & Liberty. The working-age population of the so-called middle-income countries will continue to rise through the remainder of the century, if more slowly, and the Global South will have the preponderant share of the world’s scarcest resource: Working-age people who can be trained to perform functions in a modern economy.

As Grant Newsham reported on this site July 9, Japan failed to recruit half the military personnel it required last year. Colonel Newsham wrote: “The JSDF has never fought an actual war, but it suffered a crushing defeat last year – missing recruitment targets by 50%.  The year before it was a 35% miss. And for years it has had 20% shortfalls.  Thus, JSDF is something of an old, undermanned and overworked force.”

The Japanese don’t want to fight. Neither do the Germans, whose armed forces have shrunk since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Europeans and Japanese don’t want to fight. Why should they? Who will lay down his life for future generations, if there aren’t going to be any future generations?

In 2015, the Gallup Poll asked citizens of more than sixty countries whether they were willing to fight for their country. Japan came in dead last with an affirmative rate of just 11%. By no coincidence, Japan ranks close to the bottom in terms of fertility. Israeli Jews, with a fertility rate of three children per female, are the sole instance in the upper-right-hand quadrant of the chart below.

There is a strong relationship between fertility and fighting spirit among the world’s industrial nations.

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Fertility doesn’t explain everything; both Russia and Ukraine had very low fertility when the 2015 Gallup Survey was taken, but relatively high willingness to fight.

The Ukraine war engages a few hundred thousand combat troops on the same land where millions fought during World War II. When the Soviets recaptured Kharkov in 1943, they threw 1.2 million men at the city and lost 200,000 of them. Russia has perhaps a hundredth of that number around the city today.

For all the demands on America’s NATO allies to bulk up their armies, the opposite is happening. Japan and Germany, the American allies with economies big enough to make a difference in defense spending, are quietly abandoning their commitments to higher defense outlays.

Japan pledged 43 trillion yen (US$272 billion) in defense spending through 2027, mainly in the form of procurement of US F35s and other expensive foreign hardware. But Japan calculated its procurement costs at an exchange rate of 108 yen to the dollar, compared with around 160 yen currently. That implies a drastic cut in actual procurement.

Germany’s budget negotiations last week, meanwhile, eliminated most of the planned increase in the German defense budget. “I got much less than I signed up for,” complained defense minister Boris Pistorius, “and that really aggravates me.” Germany’s armed forces have shrunk since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 1989, the country had 12 combat-ready divisions. Today it can’t field one.

China shrank its military as fertility fell. Including reservists and paramilitary police, its armed forces total 4 million, versus 3.4 million active duty, reservists and civilian employees for the US, which has a quarter of China’s population.

But China has reduced the size of its land-based army by half while bulking up its missile capacity, navy and air force. Never again will China launch mass infantry attacks as during the Korean War. It has too few sons and cannot afford to expend them. It prefers the kind of war that’s conducted at a computer terminal in a bunker.

In this case, the Chinese are right. All the cajoling in the world won’t persuade the Europeans to sacrifice their depleted young manhood in land wars. America’s NATO allies will promise to spend more and recruit more soldiers, and their plans will dissolve before the ink is dry.

For that matter, the notion that Russia wants to recreate the Soviet Empire runs contrary to arithmetic. Stalin sent 29.5 million soldiers to the Eastern Front; Putin barely can manage a force of half a million. That may be enough to claw back Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, and a few other parcels of land, but not enough to occupy Western Ukraine, let alone march on Poland.

Japan already has an old-age dependency ratio of 50. That is, there are 50 elderly for every 100 working-age Japanese. Europe will get there by 2035, China by 2055, and the United States by 2075.

Japan has attempted to ease its way into a collective dotage by investing its savings overseas, building a net international asset position of $3.5 trillion (America has a net international position of negative $18 trillion).

China, with more planning and foresight, seeks to harness the labor of hundreds of millions of young workers in the Global South by building infrastructure and exporting its technology. The United States has no plan at all.

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Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. Follow him on X at @davidpgoldman