Peter Zeihan

They're slower.

They can't maneuver.

They need too much fuel before you consider things about the hardware that they might launch.

Exactly.

Just purely out of desperation, shape the environment on their way out the door.

I can't rule it out.

But generally, countries don't die that way.

There has to be something that they think that they can achieve.

The reason that I don't dismiss it completely...

is that Chairman Xi has basically gotten rid of all of his advisors.

His last real one was seven years ago now.

And when you eat nothing but the propaganda all day, you know, it kind of messes with your head.

I mean, this is a guy who has written 30,000 pages of ideological treatises in the last 10 years.

That doesn't leave a lot of time to govern.

And it may be that his mind is just mush now and that, yes, he pulls the trigger.

It's not a very satisfying explanation, but that's really the only way I see it happening.

That's one of the reasons why I really like countries like the United States or Germany or Australia or Brazil, because the states have as much power as the national authorities.

And so you get a lot of policy experimentations on everything from labor policy to tax policy to culture policy throughout the entire system.

And we make some bad decisions.

No argument.