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I do not think this set of preferences is compatible with tolerating a religious movement which aspires to world domination and glorifies achieving that end through holy war. You may not be interested in what fundamentalists do in their own countries, but the fundamentalists in far-off countries are interested in you. Or, at any rate, will grow interested in you once they've secured their power-base at home.
Now, of course, in practical terms I'm no kind of Middle-East hawk. In the aggregate, interventionism in the Middle-East has proven counterproductive when it comes to curbing the threat of muslim extremism - infamously so. But in the truly long term, "let them sort themselves out" can only be a temporary solution - it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West. Barring that assumption, if we're letting them be for now, it can only be for one of two broad reasons:
with #2 further subdividing into a comparatively peaceful "we'll figure out how to do secularization in a way that sticks" option and a maximally pessimistic "we'll crush them and salt the earth if it comes down to it" option.
Plus an AGI-truther "we'll hit the Singularity before we need to worry about any of this" addendum, I guess.But it cannot be because we should just reconcile ourselves to the existence of fundamentalist islamic theocracies for the truly long term, as an acceptable state of affairs for the planet Earth. That's just shaking hands with that nice Mr Hitler in 1938.
(Setting all this aside, I do have a basic moral objection to the existence of muslim theocracies qua muslim theocracies. But I think that's really neither here nor there. "Just close the borders to immigrants from muslim theocracies" remains a bad plan even if you value the welfare of Middle-Eastern women, homosexuals, Jews, Christians, etc. at exactly 0.)
They don't and can't, US/NATO nuclear forces could reduce political Islam to ash within half an hour. The US and NATO could operate airpower imperialism and permanently extract resources from MENA at will were it not for other powers like Russia or China who'd interfere. The Arabs are bad at fighting, worse at making weapons, only Turkey and Iran are vaguely decent and they're still massively outmatched. Pakistan's nukes could be destroyed on the ground, not like they have the range to hit the West anyway. Indonesia hasn't done anything of importance in all of history. Sub-Saharan Africa is even easier to dominate. Terrorists are very easy to fight. Just whisk the whole population off to labour camps, repress them until they accept that their culture is just some funny dances and that their god is nothing before the power of the Chinese Communist Party.
But in actual fact, the Islamist/MENA rabble get subsidized London apartments, their rape gangs papered over for fear of racism, tv shows glorifying them, 'religion of peace' memes, obnoxious public prayers, Islamophobia training to raise their status, basically the privileges of a noble class. They get the gains of military superiority without any proof-of-work. Airpower imperialism is not even considered because that wouldn't help us 'turn Afghanistan into a democracy' or 'free the Iraqis'.
The danger is not from without but from within, from a political system that is even more grossly weak and pathetic than the militaries of the Middle East. The Somalis in Minnesota got away with their clumsy, incompetent scamming for so long because they are on a completely different level in political ability. They recognize there's a conflict over wealth distribution, they have a concept of 'us' and 'them', they recognize their own interests are advanced by crying 'racism' and so they loot and extract. The Israelis do the same thing, they play retarded Westerners for fools, extracting military and diplomatic/political aid.
Islam is not going to get world domination through military means, that kind of political strength is the only thing they have. And the mindset of 'how can we help these guys' is why the West is losing, why we lost to a bunch of quasi-literate goat-herders in Afghanistan. If we conceptualize these people as malfunctioning Western people whose welfare we try to maximize as we try to reprogram them, then of course they can and will easily beat us. If we conceptualize them as real actors working under real incentives who might unironically try to exploit us, people to trade with, help (when it helps us) or hurt, depending on the situation, then we can't possibly lose. 'Brainwash harder but in a touchy-feely liberal way' isn't going to work without the superintelligence addendum. It's morally inferior too, waging wars to mindbreak and culturebreak a population of over a billion is extremely aggressive Borg behaviour compared to mere wealth-extraction.
I don't disagree with your analysis in terms of the current state of affairs, I'm just saying, this isn't a law of physics. Give them another hundred years, then what? Two hundred? Five hundred? It's not as though they have to independently invent nuclear weapons or anything, just stockpile. It just seems inescapably foolish to me to say "it's not ever going to be a problem to have a population of a billion who fervently believe it is their duty to wipe out the West from the planet for the glory of God even if they destroy themselves in the process". Maybe we'd better ignore them for the time being, but something's got to give eventually.
Islamic states with western spec equipment still underperform- eg gulf states with f-16’s.
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They clearly chose demographic warfare for all purposes that matter, though. As long as the West doesn't retake the initiative on that front, they have no need of military development and whether or not they're able to stand up to western force of arms is practically irrelevant.
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You hit on something that's at the core of failed western thought and has ruinous implications for foreign policy.
America (and by and large, chunks of Western Europe) have this fundamental understanding of the universe where obviously they're the best, and considers that downstream of their political system, ideology, and culture.
They can't conceive of a world where that isn't the case and considered that a won argument because the liberal democratic tradition won so hard. Why don't you like American hamburgers? The French now prefer it to the jambon-beurre, that must be because the hamburger is superior.
It codes as incredibly, moronically arrogant to people outside that culture, and of course, they don't realize this at all, because for them it's like arguing about the sky being blue or water being wet. The idea that people would freely and willingly choose religious warfare in 2025 isn't something they can even conceive of, let alone the idea that this still fuels conflict worldwide.
I was reading a history book talking about Episcopalian death squads running around killing Presbyterians in Britain, in the 17th century. About half the book is a game of musical chairs where various sects are persecuting eachother, none of them even that distinctive besides the Puritans who just hated fun... totally different mindset to today.
Likewise, just the other day, I was reading on twitter about how Sunnis were bullying Shia and Sikhs in British 'multi-faith prayer rooms', hiding their prayer books and similar. How they'd treat others were they in charge is pretty clear, they're pretty pushy even as a minority. You don't want to be Shia in Saudi Arabia. There are some actual differences in nationality for this, so it's more explicable.
I think it'd be funny to tell social liberals sanctimoniously 'read more and educate yourselves about history!' but it wouldn't work.
And now you have:
Cultures are not set in stone; they can change over time.
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Point taken. I must admit I cannot imagine fundamentalist Islam advancing to technological and economic parity with the West without becoming something quite different, so that doesn’t concern me hugely right now.
(Caveats: yes, there was a very advanced Muslim society pre-Renaissance, but they were cosmopolitan and borrowed heavily from Greek and Roman writings, as opposed to being insular and traditionalist.)
In general I think that advocating (even slow, non-violent) regime change for anyone who might one day be a threat is both deeply impractical and exactly the kind of behaviour that makes people perceive America and the West as relentlessly hostile! I’m no dove, but ‘we’ll figure out how to exterminate you some day’ does not strike me as a good basis for foreign policy.
I am also increasingly dubious about the use of Munich as an intuition pump for foreign policy. Yes, one time a country signed a peace treaty with somebody they were capable of beating militarily, and the other party didn’t hold to it. There must surely have been loads of other times when a peace treaty was signed and the other party stuck to it, or got distracted making war elsewhere, or busied himself with internal affairs. Likewise, there were lots of times when two countries didn’t sign a peace treaty because they each thought they could win, and one found to their horror that they were mistaken. The lesson from Munich cannot be ‘even if a warlike nation offers peace, you must set your sights on destroying them. Only once everyone who dislikes you is dead can there be peace’. Humanity is a warlike race and we will never be short of potential Hitlers; some distrust and hoarding of one’s own strength is appropriate but meeting each with a campaign of elimination will cause far more bloodshed than it solves.
A radical Islamist technological society would be… Saudi Arabia circa 2010. Yes, a lot of their tech was imported, but if they can figure out oil they can probably figure out most branches on the tech tree(Saudi actually does much of the oil extraction themselves). They don’t need to be good at inventing tech, just using it.
Of course they still underperformed militarily but that’s not because they didn’t have jet fighters.
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Many historians now argue, credibly to me, that Germany was well ahead in rearmament and appeasement was necessary to catch up. The Allies were simply not ready to capitalize on Germany having to overrun Czechoslovakia at the same time as Poland, and the British Imperial garrisons in particular were in a state of tremendous disarray that was only fixed very slowly.
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