Peter Zeihan

Big fucking deal.

The Chinese are boxed in.

I've never found the South China Sea interesting.

Uh, when public relations is your strategic policy, it's not a very good policy.

Uh, if you want to take it seriously, the Chinese have to conquer Vietnam first, then we'll talk.

Cause if they don't control the coast, there's no point in controlling the water.

I won't rule it out, but there's nothing that they could do that would fix their underlying core problems.

They can't change their geography.

They'd have to conquer the entire first island chain to have a chance to project beyond.

And even then, they're not going to have a two-ocean navy because there's only one ocean.

They're not going to solve their demographic problems with a war.

The only country where you could maybe turn enough people into slaves to round out your demographic structure would be India.

The Himalayas are in the way.

independent of the fact that that would be really hard.

So there's nowhere they can go.

The resources aren't within easy reach.

The demographic situation requires Star Wars-style cloning, and the strategic situation can't be solved with a Navy that is anything less than five times the powerful power of the American Navy, and they're nowhere close.

They have a lot of ships, but whenever you see a tonnage-per-tonnage comparison for a ship, keep in mind that their ships suck and are a lot heavier.

So

A 40,000-ton Chinese carrier and a 40,000-ton American carrier, this one is an order of magnitude more powerful than this one.