devilspalm16

After reading your previous two books (The Accidental Superpower / The Absent Superpower) and your latest newsletter from The Cutting Room Files, I feel that your analyses in regards to China is a bit too phlegmatic, especially when you look at their soft power influences. Militarily, they're steadily climbing up the ranks; financially, they've been cooking the books for decades now with a credit scheme that makes our American financial insitutions blush; demographically, they've stalled like every other developed country it seems. So, in those contexts, I can see your anathema for China's potential rise on the global stage (especially when countered by Japan, Korea, and India) but I don't think it's entirely out of the realm of possibility to predict a "Chinese century" for the 21st century, especially when you consider just how well integrated the country is in regards to their electronics supply chain, mass transport industries, commercial shipping industries, telecommunications industry, etc. So my question to you is this: have you revised your outlook(s) for China at all in your new book Disunited Nations, or no? If so, what significiant changes has China made to their governing that changed your outlook?

Anyway, thanks for doing the AMA Peter, I've been enjoying reading your books for several years now and you provide a very stark contrast to the usual ideologies in our mainstream newspapers. Keep it up!

P.S. aircraft carriers are a total meme in the 21st century, right? :P

In your books, you talk about how the various generations tend to hand down wealth over time, but recent publications seem to indicate that that baby boomers are holding onto their wealth in even greater extremes than ever before. https://nypost.com/2019/12/05/chart-shows-jaw-dropping-wealth-gap-between-millennials-and-boomers/

Granted, this could all be due to better healthcare and longer lifespans, but it's still stagnating growth potential for millennials like me given so many of us are weighed down with student debt, rising housing prices, and fewer jobs. When do you think the demographic/financial equation will balance out with the generational gaps?

It's in relation to the explosion of the USS Maine, which the press used to hype the Americans to go to war against Spain for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(ACR-1)