Angry Planet - Learning to Love the Stagnant Order

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Is your Empire feeling less than fresh? Does it feel like the modern world’s best days are behind it? Do conquest and global power politics not hit as good as they used to? Welcome to the Age of Stagnation, a time when the fruits of the Industrial Revolution can be enjoyed but not replicated.It’s making us all a little crazy, especially world leaders. With us today on the show is Michael Beckley, a political science professor at Tufts University and his career includes stretches at the Pentagon, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the RAND Corporation. To hear Beckley tell it, stagnation might not be such a bad thing. If we can avoid repeating the worst mistakes of the 20th century and let go of a “number go up” mind set, then maybe we can all learn to enjoy a long age of stabilization.The diminishing returns of the Industrial RevolutionWinners and losers in the Age of AscentMoore’s Law sputters outStabilization isn’t so bad. “We’re some of the luckiest people who’ve ever lived.”Shenanigans and shithouseryAI isn’t “ready” yetWhy conquest doesn’t work anymoreChina as a paper tiger in the age of stabilizationAmerica’s unique advantages“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” - Mike TysonThe Stagnant OrderI Tried the Robot That’s Coming to Live With You. It’s Still Part Human.Michael BeckleySupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello out there in Radio Land. It's another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am your host, Matthew Galt. Hey, listeners, is your empire feeling less than fresh? So it feel like it's best days. are behind it. And as things stagnate, you dream of a return to a golden age that never really happened. I think a lot of us are feeling that way. And here to talk about it and about his new article in foreign affairs is Michael Beckley. Sir, how are you doing today? Did I say your name right? I said the name right. Yeah. You did, Matthew. And it's really great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Can you introduce yourself to the audience? Sure. I'm a professor at Tufts in the political science department. And I mostly do U.S. China relations.

and really the rise and fall of great powers over time and how to measure power what it even actually is. And I've spent some time in and out of government, but mostly I'm just a career academic. So speaking of measuring powers and charting their decline and fall, it feels like we're in a big old decline here in the United States. And it was kind of heartening in a weird way to read this piece, the stagnant order, because it just seems like decline is kind of what's going on all over, right? Yeah, I think we are actually in a period of almost macro-historical change. The industrial revolution worked its magic, living standards, increased populations expanded, productivity, economic growth. But at a certain point,

you start to hit diminishing returns. And while our new technologies are wonderful in many ways, I use AI almost every day, I've become increasingly convinced that. that they're just not as revolutionary as the shift from a pre-industrial to a post-industrial system. So scholars like Robert Gordon, who is an economist at Northwestern, I think, have shown persuasively that if you were to go back to 1940 and have to live in an American apartment there, it might feel a little outdated, but you still at least have electricity, you've got indoor plumbing, you've got a gas stove, you might even have a telephone. But if you were to go back to 1870 and have to use the outhouse and have to sit around the fire, which is both the

place you cook and how you heat your home, you know, it would feel prehistoric. And there's just all these indicators that suggest the rate of innovation, which was so rapid for much of the last couple hundred years, has really slowed down. Now you also have populations shrinking. And at the same time, it's just getting harder and harder for countries to conquer each other as we're seeing with Russia's getting bogged down in Ukraine as just the latest example. So those tended to be the routes of how countries would surge in power. And now they are slowing down across the board. And I think that explains a lot of the conflict and turmoil you're seeing both within many societies, but also between some of the most powerful countries in the world today.

Let's get into the history here kind of at the beginning to like create this context. What was the age of assent? And who were its winners? Yes, I mean, basically Britain is the start of the Industrial Revolution and kind of has the benefit of being able to do it relatively slowly. But as soon as the British start sailing their warships around and knocking on doors and, you know, for example, in China's case, fighting wars so that they can enter their market, you have this mad scramble, basically, among major powers to try to industrialize as quickly as possible. and some of them succeed. Often it's triggered by their regions conquering each other and forming super states. So, Germany, you know, Prussia basically hammers what becomes Germany together because they industrialized first within the German states.

Same thing with Chosu and Satsuma in Japan that overthrow the pre-industrial empire there in Japan and form this new industrialized state that's much more leaning towards Western methods. The United States, obviously you have this industrialized north. that eventually crushes the slave-owning agrarian south and then marches west. And so you have all these new super states emerging and industrializing incredibly quickly. And you see them shoot from a very tiny percentage of the global economy to the dominant powers in the world. And then that translates into military power. And so over the course of the 19th and 20th century, four-fifths of the globe comes to be essentially controlled by a handful of these rising, what we call great powers

today. And I think, and we traditionally think of this as like just the endless rise and fall of great powers, you know, Athens and Sparta, etc. But I've come to believe that actually the last 250 years of history are unique because basically prior to that, economic growth rates were literally like 0.017% a year, you know, and population would maybe double once in a thousand years. By the time you get to the 19th century, populations are doubling every generation or two. And the economic growth rate is 10 to 20 to 30 times faster than it was in the pre-industrial period. That just leads to a much more set of upheavals, basically, in the international system. So long-term then, maybe, like, you use the word stagnation.

It's the word that's in here. What if it's a stabilization instead? Maybe things are just leveling off, and we're entering into a different period where, you know, the industrial revolution is over, as you said, maybe technological progress. is not going to happen at the speed of light, and things are just going to kind of level off for a while until something else happens. I think that's the, I think that's actually the most likely scenario and hopefully what is going to happen, because in some ways, we're some of the luckiest people that have ever lived, because we get to enjoy the huge surge in living standards

and the doubling of life expectancy that occurred because of the industrial revolution. We didn't have to live a Charles Dickens style existence working in those horrible factories early in that, and we also got to skip most, if not all, of the geopolitical catastrophes that occurred in the 20th century, because the 20th century was both the most rapid growth we've ever seen, but obviously the worst wars, the most fatalities, all these revolutions. And I think a lot of that also has to do with the industrial revolution, things like communism and fascism, these ideologies that want to remake humanity from the ground up, catch on as people are trying to grapple with the complete overturning of traditional forms of society.

and this sense that the world is just surging ahead in terms of progress. I kind of like a world where things maybe aren't changing quite as rapidly. New technologies are still wonderful in so many ways and are going to continue to improve living standards. We are the most educated and healthy set of humans around the globe that have ever existed. And so even if our populations are overall declining, even if our technology is not triggering the kind of productivity booms we saw in the past, I could see a brighter future.

there's also this idea of a geriatric piece that as the average age, you know, prior to World War I, the average age and these major powers was in the early 20s, like 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds. Now it's above the age of 40 in every single one of the major powers, and it's going to be above 50 in just a couple of decades. And so some people think we're just going to be too gray and tired and wise to go storming off into the kind of horrific wars that we saw in the 20th century. So I don't know how true that will end up being,

but at least gives me some hope. My worry, though, is that the transition from what we've been used to, you know, three to four to, in China's case, you know, 10% growth rates every year, we have to accustom ourselves potentially to much lower rates of growth, got large debt, stagnant or declining populations. And I worry that that transition could lead to a number of conflicts in the short term because you have a country like Russia, which I think is not willing to just settle, to fall into second-rank status,

and is trying to reconstitute part of its former empire. I worry that China may do something similar, say, over Taiwan. And you also just have, because our fiscal situation looks horrible in many developed countries and the economics are not great. You have a lot of polarized politics and inequality and a lot of political dysfunction. And so, you know, there's a number of choppy waters we kind of have to navigate to get to that brighter future, although I agree with you, a sluggish order is not necessarily a bad one. Well, and it's also funny that you bring up kind of aging into peace because, you know, Putin and Xi and Trump are not young men.

And certainly one of them, I think, is a little bit more violent than the rest, Putin. But they don't feel like they don't feel like they are aging into peace. They don't feel like age has tempered them. Is there something about, like, getting a leadership position that maybe predisposes one to being a little bit more violent, even in their old age? I think so. And this is, I've actually written a couple articles on that exact question, because I've seen a pattern that aging, especially aging dictators generally don't mellow out and become wiser as they age. In fact, they start thinking about their legacy. they've also just gotten used to being told yes for many years, if not decades, and I think that's

just psychologically discombobulating for people. I mean, it's bad for pop stars, it's bad for sports stars, and it seems to be really bad for dictators and political scientists have found that these aging dictators are more than twice as likely to start catastrophic wars as other types of leaders because they're in their echo chambers. And, you know, you look at Putin, you know, he spent the COVID lockdown sitting next to statues. of Catherine the grade and Peter the grade, and I just, part of me wonders if he's sitting there pondering his legacy and doesn't want to go down in history as the guy that was sort of a just presiding over steady Russian decline. I frankly worry very much in terms of Xi Jinping in

China for similar reasons. In democratic societies, at least there's elections, you know, hopefully that can correct some of that. But I think you're right to point out that while older societies may be less warlike. They got Medicare to pay for, Social Security, and just kind of want to tend their vineyards. It may be almost the opposite effect if there's concentrated power at the top and you have a leader that is really swinging for the history books as they get closer to their old age. I mean, you know, Brezhnev, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, you know, these guys did not chill out as they got older. They started getting more erratic and, you know, putting more medals on their chest and then ordering more people to, um, you know,

engage in various forms of, uh, shenanigans abroad. So I think that's some, it's a great point that you make, Matthew. And I'm glad that you, uh, you raised it. Uh, shenanigans abroad is a great title for something. I was going to, I was going to use a much worse word, but I don't know the restrictions on the podcast. Oh, no, well, now I have, there, there are no restrictions. So now I have to hear it. Shit-housery is where I was going to go. But, um, you know, you get what I'm saying. That's good, too. I like that too. Um, okay, how do, is there a specific moment in the recent past when these tailwinds that were kind of bearing us along for, for so long, turn into headwinds?

Yeah. So I think, um, the, if you look at advanced economies, I mean, the rate of growth there and has been declining, uh, for three, almost four decades now. And it's down to about one percent a year. Like, you're doing great, basically. If you're an advanced country and you're growing at one percent. a year and productivity growth, which is what you really need to create more wealth and value. I mean, that basically means generating more output for every unit of input, like you're getting more efficient over time. That's actually been zero or negative in most advanced economies for a couple of decades now. And you also see it reflected in scientific trends. So the number of researchers has increased 40-fold since the 1930s. But research productivity, so the amount of wealth and innovation that's come out of that has declined by about the same figure and on current rates is set to fall in half every 13 years going forward. So these things have been building up

over time and part of it is just like hitting diminishing returns at a certain point. You know, you've kind of paved all the roads. You got the trains. You got the airports. And so you're just kind of at the mercy of waiting for the technological frontier to keep going up. But in many areas, you know, like I just flew on a plane and it goes the same speed. actually go slightly slower than they did 40 years ago because they're trying to save fuel. You know, the cars we drive in, they're fancier computers, but we're basically going at the same kind of speed. You know, life expectancy. That is basically, you know, the longest person that ever lived died in 1997, I believe. So there's just all these indicators that suggest the rate

of progress is not as fast. And then I think the key thing that's now shifting is the demographics are starting to go into free fall in a lot of countries. So two-thirds of the countries in the world now have fertility rates below replacement. So they are now shrinking and some by catastrophic amounts. I mean, I'm looking at workforces that are going to collapse by 25% or more in many of these major economies just over the next couple of decades. So when you're just losing so many people, you know, at the end of the day, people are still the most valuable economic asset. The World Bank found that 60 to 80% of the wealth in a highly developed economy is from human capital, from the ideas, from the labor, from the productivity of the people living there. Our

robots so far are still quite clumsy in most kind of chaotic situations. And so you still need a human in the loop. And so as a result, with a declining population and just a slower rate of technological productivity, it's just hard to keep growing the economy. And that then puts us in these difficult fiscal situations where you've seen the amount of debt go from 200% of global GDP 15 years ago to 250% today overall globally and over 300% if you take public and private debt together in some of these advanced economies. So it's, you know, this is why the editors chose to call it the stagnant order in this article that we're talking about. Tell me about, let's talk about AI for a little bit then, because that seems to be the big bet in America, at least, right now,

is that that's going to be the tech that continues the industrial revolution. You know, the Department of Energy calls it the next Manhattan project. It is a very, very large industry. InVIDIA, like I think just surpassed $5 trillion in value. This is not enough, you say. Yeah, so I've grown increasingly skeptical, although I certainly don't rule out that we could have some new wave of innovation, basically spurred by AI. Some economists, I mean, frankly, a lot of people. people from the industry who are researching, but also, of course, have an incentive are estimating

some think that you could have 30% economic growth once AI starts kicking in. There's been surveys of economists, big ones, in fact, and the average, most of them say it'll probably add 1% to growth every year, which is not nothing. I mean, that's substantial, but it's not the kind of utopian visions that some of the folks in the industry are doing. And I think some of the current bottlenecks that people have pointed out is, you know, AI is, you know, fantastic in the digital realm. And I use it every single day. But a lot of our bottlenecks in the economy are in the physical and social space. So you look at a hospital and yes, it's great to have these digital scans and you've got tablets going around. But at the end of the day, you still need

nurses doing all kinds of things and taking care of patients. And so it's hard to fully substitute there. Or in, you know, some people point out that AI can pass the bar exam. But lawyers obviously do a lot more than just parse briefs and pass the bar exam. They have to persuade judges and deal with chaotic situations, even something like, I remember 10 years ago, I thought by now self-driving cars would be much more prevalent than they are. And they're still realizing that in chaotic situations, because the reasoning is probabilistic at the end of the day, there are increasingly minor but still error rates that you just cannot accept in kind of life or death situations. If someone's looking for tumors in my body and there's like an error rate

of 1%. I still want doctors to take a look for a second opinion. kind of thing. And so it's hard to fully substitute and really boost productivity in that way. And so as a result, even though AI seems to have been advancing, it's not showing up in the overall productivity statistics yet. Now, we may just have to wait. Like, for example, electricity was invented several, many decades before it completely revolutionized economies as the economy rerouted itself around it. And so maybe we just have to wait for that. So the argument I make in the piece is not that AI will never bring major benefits, but it's that on current trends, it doesn't look like we're going to be able to completely

revolutionize our economies in the way that the industrial revolution was truly a revolution anytime soon. And so it's not going to really provide any short-term relief for the sluggish growth, the negative productivity, and the surging debt that we see in most major economies. AI may be able to pass the bar, but when you ask it to write a brief, it makes up citations. Yes, this is a huge problem. Again, that probabilistic reasoning, you know,

and sentence complete, fancy sentence completion, you know, is also extremely risky. And it's one thing if my students do it in class and they just make stuff up and then I punish them, they're very low grade. But it's another thing if it's, you know,

a self-driving car trying to mistaking a stop sign for, you know, a green light or something like that. So there's, you just have, there's just a lot of situations where it doesn't substitute. And then the translation mechanism from the digital space to the physical world also is clunky. I mean, robotics, it's just really hard to make a robot that is as nimble as a human

because you have to add all these motors, which then need batteries, which then make it a lot heavier, and the whole physics starts to collapse. And so I always enjoy watching these robot competitions where the robots are stumbling around and falling over each other. I mean, it's just some of the easiest things that, like, a toddler can do are, still very difficult for robots to do. Maybe that will change, but so far I haven't seen strong evidence that suggests we're on the cusp of fully dexterous robots. Did you see the Wall Street Journal? Apple picking? Yeah, the $20,000 robot that requires a person to beam in and

use an Xbox controller to control it, so it's not actually a robot. Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, and this is like the best case in there is you get a lot of human machine teaming, which I think is frankly the future. And it's going to be great. I mean, it's going to help us in so many ways. But economists have said, you should ask folks, would you rather go without chat GPT or indoor plumbing? Or would you rather go without your internet apps or electricity?

And so they make these comparisons between things that we take for granted, the internal combustion engine, but are really doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of taking us, from what was a medieval existence, basically, prior to the Industrial Revolution to the modern age we enjoy today. And I just don't see a lot of evidence that AI and robotics are going to send us into a whole new stratosphere anytime soon.

If we can continue this tangent for just a little bit longer, what do you use it for? I use it mostly for editing. So, like, if I need to, and usually for not so much for the articles I write, but I have to send, I have administrative positions and stuff. So I need to write a lot of polite, formal-sounding emails. And that obviously takes a lot of time and effort.

It used to suck up a lot of my time. Now I can just write like a blurb of the things I want to say and then just be like, turn this into something that sounds like polite enough that they're not going to be offended when I send it to them. So I use it a lot for administrative tasks. And then sometimes I just have conversations with it too. I find it's actually pretty good if you're asking about sort of established, well-known historical facts that maybe I don't know, but like lots of other people have written

tons about and it's all over the internet. So like I didn't know a lot about the Sabafid empire. Okay, I'm just going to admit that. I'm not huge on that. So I had some conversations just to get the kind of basics, you know, so that I at least have kind of a chronology and basic understanding my mind. And then that was useful for me as a jumping off point to then delve into the dense scholarly literature, whereas before I would have just had to wade into the stacks read all these dusty books that assume you're basically an expert and be completely overwhelmed and have to spend many, many weeks doing it. Now I came in with at least kind of the basic Mickey Mouse understanding of what happened and then I could fill that out and correct it by going

to the actual scholarly sources. So I find it extremely useful both from kind of like thinking of ideas and just sketching out different historical cases and then from the kind of editing side. What I don't find it useful for, and I've tried because I'm a very lazy person and I would gladly outsource the research and writing that I do to AI. And I've given long prompts. I've tried to break it up into shorter prompts to try to get it to write an article for me. And it just doesn't, it just comes back with like very airy, a bunch of words that like sound grammatically correct, but don't actually like say a lot and just either repeat conventional wisdom or just make stuff up. Like I, you know, they start talking about a Chinese official that I know has been dead

for two years, you know, and they've talked about him as if he's still alive and kicking. So I know that it just makes stuff up. And so I just don't trust it anymore for like real research. But it's very helpful as kind of a sidekick is sort of how I use it. How prevalent is it among your students? It's ubiquitous among my students. Although it's interesting. I think a lot of them are still doing a fair amount of writing on their own. So like, because I can tell that they've at least or year that or they're training the AI to have mistakes and stuff in the way that they write, which I can't imagine they would do, but maybe they are doing that. But I have talked to them

and seen them using it to have all these conversations. And part of me worries about that because I worry, like one of my students was saying, you know, before he replies to a text to his girlfriend sometimes, he'll like have it edit the text. So it's like, I wonder if they're just having their, their AIs talk to each other online and so. of actually doing human interaction. So I do worry there may be some social stunting going on there. In terms of the assignments, though, I mean, we just had a meeting at this at my university

because all the professors are freaking out. And so I just assume all my students will use it unless I somehow restrict them. So I've started using lockdown browsers for exams where they can type on a computer, but they have to log in through this one browser that does not allow them to open anything else up. and I have a proctor basically standing over them,

making sure they're not busting out their phone to look stuff up. I mean, it's horrible. Like, some of these programs actually allow you as a professor if you want to, like, watch the student through the camera on their, on their laptop. I don't want to go anywhere near that. But I think we're just in this age where, I mean, if I were a student, you know, you're taking four or five classes, pressures high. You know, you've got to study for your LSAT or whatever.

Like, of course, it's going to be extremely attempting to try to outsource as much as possible. So I just assume they're all using it and I'm trying to find ways. I'm also going back to oral, like Socratic exams where they have to come in front of me and present. That's actually a lot more fun, but it's obviously just very time consuming from a professor's standpoint. You think that'll all work itself out eventually, though? I think so. I think people are figuring out how to use it and will incorporate it in. And I try to reassure myself by reading contemporaneous analyses.

of past technological advances. People really freaked out about the radio because they're like, oh my God, these people can get on and they can just say whatever they want and it's just beamed into the living rooms of everyone. And then TV came along. It's like, oh, my God,

and now the look and how you look matters more. You don't want to look like Nixon. You've got to look like JFK. So all the beautiful people are going to surge ahead. And then the internet, of course. So every time we have one of these major technological advances, it takes a while for us to digest them, figure out ways to develop the norms

and the regulations and the sort of alternatives to support them. And I've already found, I find it hasn't completely upended the classroom, the combination of the lockdown browser. If you need to use blue books and go back old school, you can, the oral exams. And then when they write papers, I actually let them use AI and everything, because I think they need to learn how, I mean, there are smart ways to use AI and there's not so smart ways. And that's a skill they also need to learn because I think it's the future.

And so for that kind of research in writing, I let them use it, just understanding that it's probably not going to do the research for them, but can be useful as kind of a side kid. What happens to stagnation if AI is a bubble and it pops? And overnight, Nvidia is a $500 million company instead of a $5 trillion company. Yeah, I think that's the the scare scenario that's on everyone's mind. And if I had to bet, I would say it may not be as bad as you've just sketched out, but it does seem like it's very frothy in the stock market. The stock market is not the U.S. economy, but certainly so much of our growth projections are based on AI, at least doing us a solid and kicking in an extra percentage point or two of GDP growth. And if, You know, if the latest model that we're using right now is, it's kind of like the phones where, yeah, you have these incremental improvements, but like, is it really that much better than what you were using before? If that's the future, then, yeah, I mean, I think that for a lot of these economies, and especially for the U.S. economies, because you've just spent so much money investing in it, then I think that just reinforces stagnation, obviously. What about countries like India? They're still developing.

They have a younger populace. Is there not an opportunity for other countries to sell them services and other things to drive growth in both places? Yeah. So there's a lot of opportunity in India has the largest population and that population is still growing. It's projected to keep growing until the 2040s, which is very different than most other major economies. The problem for India, and I was shocked when I really started researching this, was the extremely low level of education in the populace. So the National Academy of Sciences did this massive study, cross-national study, and they found that almost 90% of the young adult population in India lacks basic numeracy or literacy. I mean, it just makes people realize just still how poor India is at the end of the day.

And also, India suffers very much from brain drain more than any other country. You know, it sends more people abroad in high-level positions than any other country. And there was a recent study that looked at the top scores on their big national tests that they use to decide who's going to go to their most elite institutions. And a majority of the people that were among these top test takers were abroad after five years, and many of them end up just living there. And so they contribute to the U.S. workforce, to the U.K.'s workforce, and far less so than they could to India. There's also just big infrastructure problems. So I think there's, you know, I think the rosy scenario would be these partnerships between developing countries, which still have growing labor pools, but are poor in terms of capital.

You know, they need investment, they need infrastructure, they need technology. and rich countries like, you know, a Germany or the U.S. or, you know, Japan that have capital and big stocks of wealth, but they have either stagnant or declining populations and you could do cross-border flows and cross-border projects. But obviously, as we're seeing,

things like immigration are fraught. It actually is really hard to assimilate large foreign populations, big surges of a foreign population at home without disrupting the social fabric. And also trade and, other forms of investment, you know, some people think we're in a de-globalizing world. And so it'll just be much more difficult to forge those, even though I think theoretically the potential is there, because populations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are booming right now.

Sub-Saharan Africa is going to add a billion people between now and 2050. That raises some hope that you could have this kind of comparative advantage from different parts of the world. But I worry that the more likely outcome is that a lot of these sub-Saharan African countries will struggle to provide jobs and opportunity for their booming youth populations. And just like we talked about the geriatric piece, political scientists have also found that when you get big youth bulges, and especially when you get a bunch of dudes, you know, who don't have great job prospects, they tend to get up to no good. And you're already seen, you know, one in three African countries right now is embroiled in

some kind of conflict. You're seeing jihadism in particular spread. I mean, Mali is being completely taken over by Al-Qaeda. basically the whole Sahel is becoming a hotbed for Islamist extremism. And then you get the migration flows because people are fleeing from the chaos. And that I worry that that will then also polarize politics further in other areas. So we saw what happened when Syria collapsed in a civil war and a million refugees tried to go to Europe and how that really polarized politics there. So there's the theoretical potential of a division of labor, but I worry that the more likely

the outcome is a raft of state failure in a lot of these countries with booming youth populations, but without the employment prospects or the human capital to really turn it into strength. And then that becomes the world's problem. Yes. I think this is the problem of our age, and that's part of the motivation for this piece, because in my field, a lot of our theories and our models are based on the last 250 years, where it's the rising powers model, you know, the Thucydides' crap, the rise of these new powers and how they're going to challenge the existing powers and you get World War I, World War II, the Cold War, there's still elements of that.

I'm not throwing out, you know, you should still read Hobbs and Machiavelli and all these realist thinkers, but I actually think that that is a sign of a world where populations are exploding and where the rate of economic growth can surge extremely rapidly and where the countries that leap out ahead economically can translate that into military power and go on a raft of imperialism and colonialism like we saw in the 19th and first part of the 20th century. Now we're in a world of, it's been chopped up in the nation states. A lot of these technologies have run their course. Populations are shrinking and conquest for various reasons is both less profitable because you can't really conquer a Google. You know, it'll just disappear in the

same way you could seize the oil fields. And at the same time, you know, with drones and smart mines, precision guided munitions, even the Houthis, you know, a rag-tag militia can blow stuff up with precision. And so that just makes it harder to mass forces and go on a Hitler-style rampage across entire continents. And so as a result, you have less churn among the great powers, but that then opens up all these other security risks. You know, the irredentism of Russia and China is they don't want to collapse to second-rank status, the state failure in the developing world. And then what I worry will be a triggered, continued rise in sort of anti-democratic and anti-liberal practices in Western Europe, in the United States, perhaps in the first island

chain in East Asia, that will kind of erode the unity and cohesion of what we used to call the free world. I think that's very much under threat because of all these economic and demographic pressures. Will you talk a little bit more? I know you've kind of gotten into it already, but I'm just interested to hear more of your thoughts on why conquest doesn't work anymore. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, so I think the Russia-Ukraine example, and of course we should never assume that, you know, that military power ever takes a constant form. It's this constant measure and counter-measure and counter-counter-measure race and sometimes the offense has the advantage and sometimes the defense has the advantage. But I do think there is something to two arguments. One is the precision revolution, just that it's just a lot easier to get your hands on censor. and explosive devices that can blow up massed forces. And so it just makes it much more difficult to take and hold territory in sort of a pre-smart weapon environment.

And second, just the nature of economies today, that it's less about the stuff, and it's increasingly more about ideas and innovation. And so it just makes it harder to accumulate wealth. There were studies that suggested the Nazis were able to build up their war machine even more as they went along because they would just imbibe the checks and all of their industrial capacity and then keep moving forward. You know, now like if China tries to conquer Taiwan and hopes to take TSM, that semiconductor fab, you know, intact, that thing requires like the flattest surfaces on Earth and this pristine environment and it needs to be connected to all of these complex supply chains abroad. All of that is going to get obliterated if there's a war, you know. And so it's just, you know, if you take it, you can't have it sort of thing.

Now, the problem is at the same time, it may help smaller defenders like a Ukraine or a Taiwan kind of fend, you know, be a porcupine and fend off a bigger bear. I do worry that these new technologies also give aggressive powers ways to infiltrate and penetrate and inflict apocalyptic damage on, say, the U.S. homeland in a way that Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, just simply couldn't do. So we know China, as I'm sure you've read, has ceded America's critical infrastructure with malware. And so they could potentially poison our water, turn off our lights,

take down our telecommunications systems relatively quickly without having to invade the American homeland. Obviously, with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, that's another way that you can, North Korea, it's like on page 13, any other era we'd be reading about this

on the front page news, but because there's a huge war in Europe and the Middle East is in chaos, and China is getting aggressive. We don't really hear much about North Korea, but North Korea may very well have a nuclear-tipped ICBM that can hit the American homeland in the next couple of years. I mean, that I think changes the game,

because now when we're negotiating, we seriously have to worry we're risking San Francisco in these negotiations. So there's just so many ways for, and then obviously the political meddling, you know, being able to infiltrate. We saw how Russia and China have increasingly done that. So there's just new tools available for strategic, coercion, even though at the same time, there may be new tools for defenders to kind of

set up these high-tech minefields that make large-scale conquest more difficult. Now, again, that could change. Some analysts worry that actually these technologies will eventually allow these, what they call the kick-down-the-door kind of operation. You can use a drone swarm and a bunch of precision-guided missiles to just obliterate the defender's defenses. Then you can send your troops in and then create a high-taxie. minefield around the target so that no one can do any counter attacks and you know you've you've

basically ensconced yourself so people worry like in a taiwan contingency if china's just able to kick down the door get in and then set up these anti-access area denial capabilities that they could do a fate accompli i i think that's going to be extremely difficult to pull off but it's not out of the question and certainly the history of military technology suggests it goes in these kind of cycles of sometimes the offense through blitzkrieg or whatever has the advantage and then sometimes you get the trench warfare. But I think right now we're in a more of a trench warfare kind of situation. Well, you know, Ukraine was able to get drones into behind Russian front lines and launch them and blow up a lot of a lot of harder targets. Israel was able to build

its own pager factory, create its own logistics line, and get pagers in the hands of how many people. So like these things do happen. They are possible. Wild, but possible. And that is the kind of the world we're living in now, where that seems to be the best kind of offense. I think so. And a lot of analysts were really surprised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine because they thought, you know, Putin doesn't need to invade. He can just, you know, suddenly the water in Kiev is poisoned. You know, I don't know how that happened. But, you know, hey, by the way. So in other words, like ways to, you know, fight and I think we are in an age where there is the distinction between war and peace is completely

blurred now and we're in this constant state of tension and conflict and looking to jab and poke each other in various ways and so you could be right maybe that is the future and maybe Russia's invasion of Ukraine kind of shows what not to do don't do the standards stumble into another country on four different axes and just hope you win through material preponderance Instead, you've got to use all of these new gray zone tactics. I think we need a better phrase for it, but for lack of a better term, you know, the Israeli pager kind of thing rather than the full-scale invasion. So we're in interesting times for sure. And it's interesting because they maintained that, that like border region where they were doing that for years before the full-scale invasion.

It's not like they don't know how to do it. They've done it before. But again, kind of what we were talking about at the beginning is he's an older gentleman. War, I think, probably looks a certain way to him and has worked before. And maybe he doesn't realize how much the times have changed. I think if you're just used to getting told yes all the time, you start to sort of believe you have these superhuman capabilities and you think it's going to be a cakewalk. That seems to be what happened.

And maybe the information he was getting as well was not great. in mind, I mean, many, especially European, I think U.S. intelligence did much better on this front, but even American intelligence, too, also suggested, you know, we can go back and watch the newscasts. Everyone was like, Kiev's probably going to fall in three days. That was the kind of standard mantra. And it very well could have. You know, maybe I think it's also a risk to read too much into what could be a highly contingent situation, you know, without the valor and the courage of the Ukrainians, without Zelensky, you know, having that Churchill moment and sticking around and being so brave to do so, we're in a very different world right now. So I think that's a great

point to raise that we got to have a little heat check here too and realize how much contingency there was in the world order. Let's focus on China now for a little bit. What are its unique challenges? You know, I've got a bunch of lefty friends, big fans of the Belt and Road initiatives, China rising, et cetera, et cetera. You, not so much. I think China looks unstoppable on the asset side of the ledger. So they are surging ahead in certain manufacturing capabilities, as your listeners will no doubt know,

everything from EVs to batteries, drones, ships, rare earths. We hear about this stuff all the time. It also is massively expanding its electricity capacity, which is potentially huge in a world. If you think AI is important, then that becomes extremely important, obviously, the ability to generate that kind of electricity. Obviously, with an authoritarian government,

they can pick strategic industries and just shovel funds to them. But I think the problem for China is that the liability side of the ledger is looking increasingly worse. Because there's no free lunch at the end of the day. The reason China was able to spend 10 times the level of subsidies as the average OECD country on manufacturing as a share of its GDP

is because they can basically suppress the living standards of the Chinese people. So disposable incomes in China are less than $6,000. You have a huge chunk of the population living on $5 or less a day, and that's because the Chinese people just don't have that many options with what to do with their money. They pretty much have to put it into a state-owned bank where they're paid of extremely low interest rates. They're often below the rate of inflation. So the regime has a big war chest, basically no interest, low interest loans from the people

so they can pump it into these areas. But, you know, it leads to production at all costs. And it's also creating this excess capacity or what the Chinese are calling involution, where first they did it in the real estate sector, where I'm sure your listeners have seen articles about the ghost cities and just all these apartments that aren't being lived in

and some that are being lived in, and some that are being bulldozed before they're even done because it's just clear no one's ever going to move into them with a falling population. And now it seems like the regime has turned that bazooka into these strategic manufacturing industries, which leads to a lot of output. It can lead to dominance in those industries,

but at enormous cost, and that's why the productivity level in China has been negative for more than a decade. That's why the debt, if you count all the hidden liabilities, public and private, has surged a well above 300% of, of GDP. And it's also why I think the Chinese, you know, China has lavished funds on infrastructure, but it really has neglected its people. So just like India has those huge human

capital deficiencies, researchers at Stanford have found that there's basically nearly half the country, especially people from rural regions, have a middle school education or less. So this is the lowest level among middle income countries in terms of the basic lack of people with even a basic high school education because the fundamental problem for China is you have all these rural regions where the population is still growing and they're not allowed to just move

to the rich coastal provinces because they're registration, they are registered to those rural areas. So what happens is mom and dad go and work in some factory, you know, in Shenzhen, they see their kids once a year, they send money back. The kids are being raised by grandma

and, you know, God bless her, but like she's not doing all this stuff to like stimulate the kid or whatever. and these kids also, they have a lack of medical care, so a lot of them have worms in their stomach, and they're just not getting the education. And then high school costs money, so a lot of them just drop out after middle school.

So the researchers at Stanford have shown that there are several hundred million Chinese, young Chinese workers, that basically cannot function in a modern economy. That wasn't a problem when the real estate sector was booming, and you just had lots of construction jobs. But if China wants to shift to what Xi Jinping calls the real economy, these leading strategic emerging industries, you need a highly educated workforce, less than 30% of the population has a high school degree.

When Taiwan and South Korea were at similar stages of development, they had upwards 70% or more of their population had a high school degree, and that helped them make the transition and break out of that so-called middle income trap. So it's this, these festering liabilities are building up, even as China is making huge gains in some of these strategic industries. and then militarily, I mean, their defense budget, their output of weapons and ammo is many times that of the United States right now. And so I think that's the risk, a deteriorating macro economy, but very sharp pointy spears that they can use to do battle, basically both in the global economy and, God forbid, over something like Taiwan or in the South China Sea. America has a lot of debt, too. Yes. Yes, massive to the point that.

interest payments on the debt are rivaling the entire defense budget. And scholars have pointed out that generally doesn't end well, you know, historically. When the interest outpaces the defense budget, you're not going to be a great power for much longer. So where does America fit in to all of this? The place where we are all living, and I'm sure feeling super great about at just this moment, what are its advantages because you name some of them in the article. I thought it was pretty interesting. What are its unique challenges?

And how do we keep from reprising the worst aspects of the 20th century? Yeah, I mean, the United States has a relatively strong hand to play. It could still screw everything up. So there's a lot of contingency here. But one is just the geography and the location. I mean, the continental U.S., I can understand why, founding fathers described it in these biblical terms because it's compact with resources and internal transport infrastructure. And then you have these ocean moats that protect you from

foreign armies, but also enable trade because obviously goods move much more easily over water. And so you're connected by these arteries to the richest parts of Eurasia, Western Europe and East Asia, across these moats, but then the armies can't get across them. So it's a wonderful place to be. And then if you integrate further with Canada and Mexico, I mean, you've got hundreds of millions of people, a diversified regional economy. So the geography is a huge advantage. And then that leads to the demographic advantage, because people still want to move here in large numbers and especially smart, wealthy people. And so there's always this demand for migrants to get into the United States. And this is why the U.S. is the only major power

that's projected to have a growing workforce over the course of this entire century. I mean, China is going to lose more than 250 million workers, taxpayers, consumers, just between now and the middle of the century. That's like taking an entire EU workforce out of the country just in the next few decades, whereas the U.S. workforce is going to grow modestly during that time. So it's a huge swing just in terms of people power between China and the U.S. And then, you know, at the end of the day, you know, the U.S. political system definitely not exactly covering itself in glory at the moment. And it could definitely be the Achilles heel, I think, of the whole system.

That said, because it's a relatively weak state, you have divided government, you have polarized politics, you have a federalized system where the states have a lot of power. I think that's part of the reason why the private sector has still done compared to other major economies much better. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, and I'm half Japanese, you know, Japanese people were 50% richer per capita than Americans were when I was a kid. Now Americans are 140% richer than the Japanese in per capita income, you know, and if any of these Western European states and nations were an American state, they'd be the poorest, even poorer than Mississippi at this point. And I remember it was just in the 2000s that we were roughly equivalent. So I think the combination of a relatively dynamic, business-friendly set of institutions, the growing workforce, and then just the natural geographic advantages, which have been magnified by the Shale Revolution, among many other factors,

U.S. exploiting its natural resource endowment, that gives the U.S. a huge platform that even though in absolute terms it's got slowing growth, you'd much rather be in the United States than any of these other major economies going forward. Worst aspects of the 20th century. How do we avoid reprising them? So I worry, first of all, the U.S., one, because it's internally divided, and two, because the type of foreign threats it faces

are very different than the Soviets. The Soviets walled themselves off. We had the iron curtain. They had 175 divisions looming over U.S. Europe, all these nukes and these allies. And so it kind of forced Americans to band together and basically bribe up this free world alliance that then became what we know of the international order today with all of these allies and these open trade flows among these Western economies. And I worry that the United States is currently pivoting away from that and going in a much

more rogue kind of direction. And at least what we saw historically in the interwar period where the U.S. just kind of pulls out of Eurasia, you know, history comes back basically very quickly to those regions. And so I think first and foremost, it doesn't mean that the U.S. has to be this hegemon that does everything. In fact, I think there needs to be much more burden sharing among U.S. allies. But if the U.S. keeps going down the route where alliances basically become protection rackets where it's like, yeah, if you pay us, maybe we'll protect you, maybe not. And then that basically just evolves into outright unilateralism. I think the world becomes a much more prickly place. And you'll have militarized sea lanes. You

have a bunch of countries trying to develop nuclear weapons. And I think regional rivalries, whether between Japan and China, in Europe, obviously, can come roaring back very quickly. So I think that's first and foremost, the U.S. still has to play some type of basic stabilizing role. It doesn't have to be the full-fledged one, and it certainly shouldn't be some kind of globalist. We have to be global cop and solve every kind of problem around the world. But, you know, backing up NATO and backing up the first island chain in East Asia seems like, it's a critical piece of the of the puzzle because absent that, you know, we're back to the kind of standard great power politics. It just doesn't seem like we've got that in us right

now. It seems like we've got something we've got to work through for at least the next three years. I tend to agree with you. And so I'm sort of girding. I've radically scaled back what I think would be optimal here to say, well, first of all, can we at least integrate more with Canada and Mexico, you know, and at least have a secure home base. Okay, and if we have that, can we not completely abandon NATO, you know, and Japan, you know, are we really going to pull out of Japan? You know, does that really make sense when it's this holding set of alliances and this wealthy country with a very powerful Navy that can work wonders for us in East Asia if we continue to partner together? And if the Ukrainians are willing to fight, you know, are we just

going to cut them off from arms and just hope that Vladimir Putin doesn't have broader ambitions. I mean, I just think there's basic things that we can do. I think if you explain them well enough to the American people, historically, they've said, you know what, this is something that we've got to do. But I completely agree with you right now. We're so internally divided and just historically, you know, there's that Mike Tyson quote where he says, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And I feel like the United States is the opposite. Like, we tend to kind of dilly around and pooch around until we get punched in the face, and then we really mobilize in a big way.

I would like to short circuit that and not have to get punched in the face, like with a Chinese assault on Taiwan or something like that. But I worry that that might be the galvanizing event, that the only thing that could really stir a big mobilization from the United States. Yeah, I just think that as long as food prices continue to rise and people are out of work,

and unemployment continues to rise and people are going to be much more domestically focused in the United States for the foreseeable future. I think if you try to tell them about Japan or Ukraine, they're going to point down the street. Yeah. And I think that's kind of where we are right now. Completely understandable.

I think liberal internationalism first requires a relatively unified domestic base. And I have a lot of sympathy for, I was doing research on a project and especially the urban rural divide in the U.S. that, yes, some rich, you know, like New York City, for example, benefits quite a bit from integrating into a globalized economy, but a lot of these rural areas where, you know, some small town, their whole tax revenue and the whole commerce is based around some factory that gets outsourced. And the fact that, like, literally almost 100% of the job creation in the U.S. over the last

25 years has been in rich urban hubs and almost three quarters of rural areas are depopulating because like the young people move out to look for opportunity and the kind of social decay that you see. I have tremendous sympathy and I think you're completely right until the U.S. has some way to kind of spread around the well to mend some of these domestic fissures, both economic and political, it's going to be very hard to develop the political support for a more engaged foreign policy. And I think that's why when Trump is just like slapping tariffs on friend and foe like, people are like, well, you know, he's fighting a good bargain for us. You know, we don't want to be suckers. And we're going to wring out every ounce of wealth

from our trade partners. And, you know, I'm sure the world will just work itself out just fine. And, you know, Ukraine, I only, like, how many Americans can point to where Ukraine is on a map? You know, they got their day to day to focus on. So it's hard when you try to come and say, hey, but the order that we've lived our whole lives in and that we take for granted can fall apart very quickly. It has historically and could again. And it's kind of like oxygen. Like when you have it, you don't think about it.

But when you don't have it, it becomes all that you think about. I mean, it's just really hard. That's the fundamental problem with national security. When you succeed, nothing happens. And it's only when you fail that suddenly everyone realizes the value of some of the investments. Right. here at the end of the conversation, tell me how you convince people that stagnation and stabilization are okay. I think first rising powers and rapidly growing economies, yes,

it's wonderful because you have a lot of wealth creation. But if you look historically, it's just so disruptive both from a domestic political level and from internationally. I mean, if you just look at the wave of revolution, that took place over the course of the 20th century and the rise of these crazy ideologies that tried to somehow give people a political religion to follow so that they could somehow make sense of this new modern age they were being thrust into.

You know, I don't want to go back to like the 1920s or 1930s where communism is on the march or fascist powers are convincing people to all march together and slaughter their neighbors. And at the same time on the international scene, I mean, these rising powers, they want their place in the sun, and they don't go down easily. Japan and Germany had to have their ambitions beaten out of them, Germany twice before they finally gave up. You know, the French and the British clung to their empires long after they lost the ability to really do so.

And we're seeing with Russia just not being willing to just kind of fold into the existing order. So I think, yes, as wonderful as the incredible improvements to living standards have been, a lot of that death and destruction that came along with it, that we get to skip all of that right now. At least we're not in the crucible of it in the way that, say, my grandparents were who lived through the World War II era. So, you know, it may not be as exciting.

We may not look forward. You know, it's tough when you can't guarantee that say your children will be wealthier and better off than you and your grandchildren will be even better off than them. That basic bargain has broken down, unfortunately. So that's disappointing. But there are some upsides.

And I think at the end of the day, there are ways to improve living standards, even if the rate of growth is relatively low. There's all kinds of benefits you can get. And maybe we get stronger in body and smarter in intellect, even if we're not exactly, you know, killing it in the market going forward. So that's my best attempt to make do with what is admittedly a pretty pessimistic situation. I mean, we do pessimism here on the show.

That's kind of our thing. You're only pleasantly surprised if you're a pessimist. It's true. I'll take stagnating economic order but stronger in mind and body. That works for me. I'm okay with that. Okay, good. Michael, thank you so much for coming onto the show.

Where can people find your work? So I have a website where I just try to post all my stuff. It's just Michaelbeckley.org. So I try to get as many paywall-free versions of the articles and stuff that I'm on. I don't do any social media, so I'm not there. you know, life's too short to spend it arguing with strangers on the internet. But I do, you can, my email addresses, you know, from some of my institutions are up there. So I'm happy to chat with people.

And I'm, you know, I give talks here and there, mostly in the East Coast, but sometimes traveling internationally. So for folks that are interested, please reach out. And I'm sure there's a way that we can get together and keep talking about these really important issues. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Plan and talking to us about all this. Thanks so much, Matthew. I really appreciate it.

That's all for this week. War. War never cage. As all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. If you like the show, go to Angry PlantPod.com. up, get early access to all the mainline episodes, some written work, and it's all commercial free. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. We're doing something a little bit lighter next time, so look forward to that.