Even if all of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims were politically and militarily united - a event less likely than their mass conversion to the Jedi faith - and they were all committed to a cold or even a hot war against America, the US would survive.
This is not just Doomsday talk. It is extremely stupid Doomsday talk. But there is a lot of it around at the moment.
Take the famed Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical device concocted by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1947 to signal how close we are to the end of the world. Midnight was the apocalypse, all-out nuclear war.
Last week the Bulletin moved the minute hand of the clock to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the closest it has been since the depths of the "Second Cold War" in 1984.
I was already a journalist in 1984, and I had already talked to commanders and operators of the nuclear forces on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And I was 10 times more frightened then than I am now.
What's going on here is simply inflation. Terrorism is strategically a mere nuisance and, in terms of your personal threat level, it is statistically irrelevant. An American, for example, is 10 times likelier to drown in the bath than to die in a terrorist attack.
Yet terrorism gets as much media attention today as the threat of a global nuclear war got back in the Cold War. To paraphrase Parkinson's Law, threats expand to fill the (media) space available.
The scientists who calibrate the Doomsday Clock are serious and sincere people, but they are not immune to the inflationary trend.
The clock was set at seven minutes to midnight during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 (which came close to triggering global nuclear war and killing hundreds of millions of people). Now, they say, it's only two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. Really? Are you sure?
Nonsense. The world is a bit more dangerous than it was just after the end of the Cold War in 1991, when the clock was set back to 17 minutes to midnight, but no year in the past 25 has been as dangerous as any of the years before 1991.
But the people who run the clock have greatly expanded the range of threats they worry about since the risk of a nuclear war declined. They include climate change now, and the resurgence of old-fashioned nationalism from America and Britain to India and Japan, and pretty well everything else.
There is no fate worse than being ignored.
That's how we got to this point -two minutes to midnight. From after the end of the Cold War, they pushed it forward every time anything worrisome happened - and only once pushed it back, by one minute, for only two years.
So when Donald Trump came to power two weeks ago, frightening people with his reckless talk and impulsive actions, the clock was already at three minutes to midnight, and they could only push it forward by 30 seconds.
That's about right in terms of the extra threat Trump represents, but it's completely wrong in terms of where the global threat level is now.
Trump is a loose cannon, but he's not the Apocalypse, and most other world leaders are still grown-ups. Let's say 10 minutes to midnight.
●Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist who is published in 45 countries
