Not that the author is wrong about birthrates and demographics but - given the finite nature of our world and its resources - it would be much better to impose limits on population growth in the third world by force than to try to match those rates in the industrial world.
Well, I'm not sure how I feel about your first paragraph. I think I see your point, and it's interesting. On the other hand, Europeans have been fighting more or less continuously for a thousand of years, and before the 20th century those wars have never really impaired their ability to be colonists at the same time. So I'm not sure why WWI or WWII would be so different from past European wars.
I'm sure I cannot agree with your second paragraph. I hope I can respectfully disagree without being "disagreeable." The most important resource on this earth is ingenuity, and it's not finite -- it just need liberty so it can flourish. And there's no way we can have any kind of discussion about limiting anyone's reproduction by "force" -- that's never going to happen, nor should it ever happen.
Ahem. Wait just a minute, Lar' - wanna think this one over again? I'd love to hear a plan under which we can force Third Worlders not to fornicate, but that strikes me as just a teensy bit impractical. I'm not sure the motto of the 101st Airborne is likely to be changed to "Helping Poor People Not To Screw Since 2005!" I could, of course, be wrong about that.
There is an inevitability in demographics that is illusory over the long term. I doubt if many would have predicted twenty years ago that the problem with world population would be its decline among certain wealthy nations. I suspect a similar decline may be in store for many of the poor ones as well. No one is really sure where these things originate - it isn't, as predicted, a function of food availability or natural resources such as water or oil running out. It is simply happening.
It happened in Rome during the first four centuries of the last millennium. Fertile migratory peoples simply out-bred, out-marched, and eventually out-fought the enervated Romans and took the place over. The Romans attempted to solve the thing with closed borders and migration policies, freezing of class mobility, and government subsidies for large families. Didn't seem to help a bit.