With Great Demographics Comes Great PowerJuly/August 2019 155
educated, and highly productive populations. Yet the ¥ and Japan
have both registered sub-replacement fertility rates since the 1970s,
and their fertility rates began to drop far below the replacement level
in the 1980s. In both the ¥ and Japan, deaths now outnumber births.
Their working-age populations are in long-term decline, and their
overall populations are aging at rates that would have sounded like sci-
ence Ãction not so long ago. The main demographic dierence be-
tween the ¥ and Japan is that Europe has embraced immigration and
Japan has not.
Both approaches have their drawbacks. For ¥ members, immigra-
tion has postponed the shrinking o their work forces and slowed the
aging o their populations. Yet the ¥’s record o integrating newcom-
ers, particularly Muslims from poorer
countries, is uneven at best, and cultural
conÁicts over immigration are roiling
politics across the continent. Japan has
avoided these convulsions, but at the
cost o rapid and irreversible population
decline. As in China, this is leading to
an implosion o the traditional Japanese
family. Japanese demographers project that a woman born in Japan in
1990 has close to a 40 percent chance oÊ having no children oÊ her own
and a 50 percent chance o never having grandchildren. Japan is not just
graying: it is becoming a country o elderly social isolates, with rising
needs and decreasing family support.
Population decline does not preclude improvements in living stan-
dards, but it is a drag on relative economic and military power. Accord-
ing to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States’ working-age
population is set to grow by about ten percent between 2015 and 2040.
Over the same period, Germany’s and South Korea’s working-age pop-
ulations are expected to shrink by 20 percent, and Japan’s, by 22 percent.
The number o young men aged 15 to 24, the group from which military
manpower is typically drawn, is projected to increase over that period
by three percent in the United States but to fall by 23 percent in Ger-
many, 25 percent in Japan, and almost 40 percent in South Korea.
This decline, combined with the budgetary politics o the modern
welfare state—borrowing money from future generations to pay for
the current beneÃts o older voters—means that most U.S. treaty al-
lies will become less willing and able to provide for their own defense
No rival is likely to
overtake the United States
in terms of raw human
potential anytime soon.