School of War - America’s Coming Population Crash—and China’s, with Nicholas Eberstadt

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, joins School of War to discuss global population decline. What does a shrinking and aging population mean for the United States? What does it mean for China, whose demographic crisis may be even more severe? How could population decline reshape economic growth, military power, and geopolitical competition? And what happens to the international order when the world stops growing? 03:02 Population decline in America 006:15 Deaths exceeding births in the US 07:31 Global birth crash 14:49 Grounds for optimism 17:12 Small family trend 18:17 GDP relationship with population size 19:23  Individual prosperity vs. National strength 21:24 Rise in human life expectancy 24:36  Ben Carson’s prediction 27:11 Ukraine’s military revolution  30:47  American bad habits 33:48 AI and the labor market 37:25 Chinese depopulation crisis 48:50  What would a world war look like today? 51:48 US Alliance relationships Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more at The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. China's population, and its demographic future is in dire straits. And so the conventional wisdom is that if the American and Chinese competition can just be played out for a few more years, we enter a period of permanent advantage.

But today we're going to talk to the brilliant Nick Eberstadt about his thoughts on the American demographic crisis, how our own population may be facing a period of terminal decline, what we need to do about that and what that means for the competition with China. Let's get into it. War is to lock the invasion of If you're only

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So if you're looking for a nuance, thought-provoking take on Israel, one that avoids the oversimplification, and political spin, I think you'll really appreciate the show. Find the packing is really history wherever you listen to your podcast or on YouTube. The world is changing fast. Conflict and instability are spreading across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. If you listen to School of War, you know we try to cut through the noise with sober, honest analysis that helps make sense of it all. On May 19th, we're taking that conversation live.

Join me and historian Neil Ferguson for a special live recording of School of War. at the iconic New York historical. We'll be talking about the war with Iran, great power competition, China, military deterrence, and where all of this is heading. To learn more and get your tickets, visit thefp.com slash events. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show, Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute where he is the Harry Wendt Chair in Political Economy. Nick, Ebertschuk, you would kind of come on the show. I don't know if that was a year, maybe more than a year ago now to talk about the North Korean intervention in the war with Ukraine because you're a man of many interests and areas of expertise in North Korea as one of them.

Today we're going to be talking about something completely different demographics, and thank you so much for coming back. Thanks for inviting me back, Aaron. You just published a very, very interesting report with the American Enterprise Institute and have done some shorter pieces in the press around its deems. And it's called, can a depopulating America still flourish? And I saw that title, and I thought about all the discourse one here is often sort of, in my view, a little too casual about Chinese demographic decline and how in the long round that substantially favors the United States, which to be clear, I'm not rejecting that as a possibility. It's just I think people are a little too comfortable with the thought.

And so a piece that did a deep dive on America's own population or demographic liability struck me as a really important subject for us to discuss. So there's so many ways we could get into this. I might ask you just because I don't know if we should assume, I mean, I don't spend a great deal of time thinking about demographics. So let's assume the audience is sort of where I am. And maybe you could paint us a picture of how we're even having a conversation about American demographic decline in the first place. When I was a kid, I'm old enough just to remember hysteria about too much growth

and too many people. So how did we get from there to the conversation that we're having now and that you're exploring? Well, a lot of strange things happen in the world of demography, Aaron. It's full of surprises because human beings and the human heart is full of surprises. And we're not very good at predicting where those surprises take us, including in demographics. Until about 2008, the United States was not just a country of American. exceptionalism. It was a country of what we might call demographic exceptionalism. Unlike

practically all of the other affluent democracies, the U.S. had a birth level that was high enough, more or less to skate along at the net replacement line, which is to say the amount of child bearing that would be necessary to have more or less population stability in the absence. of compensating immigration. That wasn't true elsewhere, as you know. Then, for whatever reasons, starting around the time of the Great Recession or the inauguration of Barack Obama,

choose which marker you wish to use, the American fertility levels started to fall. And they have gradually, but unmistakably continued to fall for the better part of two decades. The most recent numbers that we have seen for 2025 suggest that if that pattern were to continue into the future, we just take that snapshot, the rising generation of Americans would be about 23% smaller than their parents' generation. That's a lot smaller.

That's a big built-in shrinkage, all other things being equal. And since we were never really much above replacement, we're often a little bit below replacement, this means that for two generations, Smaller rising generations have been more or less fused into the U.S. population structure unless there's immigration. Now, the Congressional Budget Office, which does pretty good work in a number of different areas and sometimes has fewer rose-colored glasses than other units in the U.S. government, is now imagining. that in just four years, around 2030, deaths may exceed births in the United States.

We have a crossover with more deaths than births, and after that, the U.S. becoming basically forever, as far as a demographer's eyes can see, at least, a net mortality society. after that crossover, the only thing preventing population decline or long-term depopulation in the United States would be immigration, which is a slightly fickle quantity, as we know. So there's a lot there I want to pull the thread on before we sort of move into what on earth should be done about all this, which really is what your report gets into. You made a reference earlier to the human heart and its mysteries, and I hesitate to ask you to speculate on the human heart. But, of course, what we're seeing in the United States, it's happening everywhere in the developed world.

It's even happening in places like China, which in certain respects is developed in other respects is developing. Why is this happening? Well, as you pointed out, Aaron, all around the world we're seeing a birth crash. It's a global birth crash. We don't have perfect numbers, right? But to the extent that we work with what we have and try to get a sense of their limits, something like three quarters of the people in the world are currently living in countries which have below replacement childbearing patterns.

And since the rich countries are only a very small fraction, of the world's population, you'll appreciate that that means that the majority of people in lower-income countries, call them developing whatever you wish, what term you wish, are already at childbearing levels that are below the placement. And all I can tell you, you know, in the elevator version is that the fancy academic theories about modernization and income and education and contraception and other sort of materialist indicators, you know, kind of gets thrown out the window when you notice that two of the world's poorest countries, Myanmar and Nepal, very limited income, education, urbanization, status of women, you know, go through the list.

are at or below the replacement level of child hearings. This is voluntary. So what is it that motivates human beings to choose many fewer children than their parents did in the past? I have argued that the person who figures this out should get a Nobel, but not in economics. I should get a Nobel in literature, because that's where you have to go to understand what's going on.

They used to say there are 8 million stories in the Naked City. Well, there are 8 billion stories in the naked planet. Great movie. Everyone should watch that movie. Well, to engage in the elevator level of literary analysis, you know, my own observation of people is as often as not they do things that they think they have an interest in doing. And presumably when we were all farmers, for reasons that we all learned when we were studying what it was like to live in those days, you had an interest in having a bunch of kids.

And presumably when we were in a more industrialized society, kids were still, I'm less certain of this assertion, but I'll just make it anyway. There was still some economic benefit to children because they could earn once they got a little bit older, they could earn wages. And so if I were to go investigating, I would investigate about why it is

that parents just don't see an interest in having children. And, of course, they have the technology in a lot of places to stop themselves from having children. The argument has been made that if you were an economic maximizer, if you were really, really, oh, trulio, homo-economicus, the world would have been mainly childless since about, you know, you tell me, 1920, 1950. So there's some consumption benefit as well as expenditure on kids, I suppose, if we're trying to tram this into University of Chicago land. But what kind of two things are kind of fascinating to me about this birth crash. The first is like back shortly after, you know, the Civil War when I was in, college. All of all the rage back then was sociobiology. I don't know if people even know

that term now. But the I do not. I'll confess. E.O. Wilson and other people were arguing apparently conclusively that we're hardwired like other animals and we've got this kind of like drive in our DNA for reproducing our kind and our gene pool. You know, it's kind of like evolutionary biology, Darwin, you know, so forth. And we're programmed to have this kind of nurture imperative. Well, I don't know how that's going so well. If 40% of Japanese women are on track to end up without any biological children, they may need to go in for kind of like a retinkering on that thing.

but much more interesting, I think, in terms of possibilities, since I think we really have to kind of like go back to the drawing board with that sociobiology thing. Much more interesting is the sort of the Renee Gerard memetics sort of stuff, a social imitation. My boss, Mary Eberstadt, has written much more deeply about this, and so I'm not going to make a fool of myself, giving, you know, bad elevator versions of her stuff.

But the basic argument is that what goes on around you, you know, kind of matters to what you end up doing yourself. And if the, if societies head into below replacement fertility for whatever reasons for a decade or a generation, or now we're seeing places where there are two or three generations into below replacement fertility, the social memory plastic for returning to above replacement fertility isn't going to be there. And that may mean that it's not just a thermostat that we reset when we feel like it. It may be a little bit more difficult. Obviously not impossible because we're very adaptable animals, but a little bit more difficult than some might think.

So let's move into what is to be done, Nick. And I was struck by the tone of your report as much as the argument, because the tone was not, this is obviously a disaster if we hope to survive as a nation. If we want to compete with China, et cetera, we have to reverse this trend. I don't know if it goes, it's fair to say that you take the trend as given, but you're fairly close to taking it as given. And then you're sort of exploring how disastrous actually is it. And you end up taking a fairly optimistic line. And you open with a bit of a case for optimism before you get into all the things that would need to be changed.

It's surprising to me, most because, again, I saw your headline. I thought, oh, gosh, I thought we were supposed to beat China because their population's going to collapse and ours isn't. And so, you know, it's all good in 20 or 30 years. Turns out if our population is in decline as well, it might not be as clean of a strategic story. But before we get into all this stuff that might need to be changed about our society for us to survive what could be a harrowing,

ride. What are your grounds for optimism? Why are you not simply standing, you know, astride this shouting stop? My main reason for optimism is that you and I are talking to each other by an electronic medium that didn't exist 10 years ago in a way that people hadn't arranged socially and economically 15 years ago and we're and this is just the kind of like the latest

obvious crushing instantiation of the generalization that we're the most adaptable animal on the planet, the most ingenious animal on the planet and the most remarkable problem solving animal on the planet. So

40 years ago when I was doing my demography thing. You know, there were all of these people in kind of my general area who were alarmed about the population explosion. And, I mean, I never was one of them. And the reason for that is because I kind of could do arithmetic. And if you looked at the numbers, the reason the population was growing very rapidly.

back then, more rapidly than, you know, in terms of scale and pace than ever before in history, really. It's because life expectancy was exploding. Life expectancy for human beings more than doubled between 1900 and 2000. That was the entirety, that was the entire reason for the increase in human numbers. And if you're going to have a health explosion, you know, if that's what you think of is a population problem. I'll take it any day of the week, right? You may not capitalize upon it the way that you ought to or could, but it's yours to lose. And we are still riding that wave. We as a species have already figured out how to crack the code for manufacturing mass abundance. What's new is this trend of volitional small families, very small families or voluntary childlessness.

And since I'm not a commissar, I don't think that I really know how many babies other people should have, right? The key fact is with ongoing health improvements, ongoing improvements in education and skills, seemingly endless routinization of knowledge production, the potential for having a richer and richer, a more, ever more affluent human population, even if our numbers are shrinking and our profile is getting grayer is there. It means we have to do a lot of things differently from the way we do them now, but that gets back to kind of like being the most adaptable animal. Well, say more about this and about how prosperity is potentially still on the horizon and how that actually will function. Because my first reaction to the sort of pre-examination,

predictions that you are at least entertaining for purposes of the report in terms of the future trajectory of America's population, I had a casual not particularly well thought through because I have no economic training to speak of that GDP growth must be closely tied to the size of your country, which to me the most important measure of the size of your country is how many people you have in it. So if you have fewer people in your country, because let's say immigration, you know, doesn't solve this. problem in the long run. Well, of course, your economy is going to shrink. And that is a terrifying thing to contemplate, both from a social, political aspect, but also from a security aspect.

I mean, that's a massive impact on the balance of power if your economy shrinks. But you are not, you don't immediately leap to the scenario of doom. And you said a bit just now, why, but just give us a bit more to understand about why you're not so full of doom. Well, and right now I'm talking about individual prosperity and individual wealth. I'm not talking about national power. National power clearly has to be linked in some sense to headcount, right? I mean, it has to be linked somehow to it. But do remember, and this gets back to the prosperity part,

that when you look at the range of per capita productivity in the world today, the lowest performer and the highest performer are separated by about a factor of 100. If you compare Burundi to, let's say, Switzerland or Singapore, the difference in per capita output is about a factor of 100. And so that means if you're just looking at the head count, you're going to have a misleading idea about how Burundi's national power is going to be versus Switzerland or Singapore. But the other thing, which I think comes out of that, is the. immense importance of per capita productivity as the facilitator for the keys to the kingdom

of prosperity and wealth and economic well-being. I'm leaving the whole question of metaphysics, ethos, spirit meaning aside. We're just talking about kind of like productivity and, you know, kind of dollars and sense stuff. We have routinized this ability to produce knowledge through new research, new findings, and to increase productivity further by innovation and applications of new findings. But it's not just the discoveries that are important here. Remember, I mentioned that per capita, levels of life expectancy at birth more than doubled just between 1900 and the year 2000.

Today, the world's average level of life expectancy is about 73 years. And I mean, that's including all of Africa and Bangladesh, you name it, it's including everybody. That's like five years higher than the U.S. life expectancy was in 1950. So there's a huge transformation there. And what I see has very good news, if you look at the best performer over time, what country had the highest life expectancy in 1840? Well, I think it was probably Netherlands. Netherlands isn't it anymore.

It's probably like Japan now, in the between with Sweden or Australia or New Zealand or somebody. But if you go through and you look at the best performers from 1840 to the present, not the average for commandee, but the battle, It's a straight line up. It's almost a straight line up. Three months a year for almost two centuries. So it's not just penicillum. It's not just indoor plumbing. It's not just electricity.

We have figured out some sort of way to routinize the improvement of the perimeters, you know, the outward boundaries of national health. And 100 years ago, the best of the best. demographers, looking at these questions, said it was very clear that human beings, national populations, couldn't ever have a life expectancy of more than 75. So when the life expectancy broke 75s, other experts said, well, it can never get above 80. And after it got above 80, other experts said, well, it can never get above 85. Then after it got above 85, they're now ones who are saying, well, it can't get above 90.

Do you want a bet it can't get above 90? I don't want to bet it can't get above 90. Maybe this won't go on forever, but if you have to look at the past two centuries, I don't think you can be quite as sure about that as you might otherwise be if you didn't know that background. And then, of course, there's all of the knowledge and skills that human beings are absorbing, imparting, and putting to productive use. And what we've seen since the, since poor, mistimed Malthus did his own population treatise, which was a fair description of what had happened up until 1798, since 1798, what's been

revolutionizing the world has been economic development based upon human potential. not based upon what's in the earth or what's in the forest or what you can dig up, but based upon human ingenuity and knowledge intensity. And that isn't going to stop if we have a smaller population.

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drapey denim wide leg. You know, I remember being at a conference. This is 20 years ago when I was was a student. And Ben Carson spoke at this conference. And this is not the Ben Carson that, you know, of his political career. None of that had happened yet. This was Titanic medical doctor, towering reputation, beloved by everyone, neurosurgeon, beloved by America, Ben Carson. And I remember him saying, essentially, that before you know it, people are going to be living

to 120. He sort of tossed that out. in his speech and he says that'll just be the normal thing. And I remember challenging him off the stage afterwards because I was, you know, a punk and saying, well, who wants to live to 120? I mean, it looks kind of rough to me even in people's 90s now, you know, this is a pretty, it's actually in a way, a kind of bleak picture you're painting. And he assured me, he said, no, no, no, you don't understand.

It'll be a completely different experience to be 100 or 110 than it is today. And he was utterly confident in making that assertion. It always stuck with me. Look at what we've seen so far. I mean, Dr. Carson is talking about a distant future that isn't anywhere near where we are at the moment. But what have we experienced in, you know, living memory? The chances of living an additional year for a person who's 80 in Japan today, the same as the chances were for a 65-year-old in Japan back in the 1960s.

So it's not all that we're just reducing infant mortality and child mortality. Most of the increase in longevity and life expectancy is coming by flattening the death curve for people who are middle age or older ages. And you can worry then is all of this time going to be spent in wheelchairs and nursing homes. But the evidence doesn't show that we're there yet. It shows that there's an increase in active, healthy lifespans almost everywhere. It isn't everywhere, but almost everywhere. And we know from that that it could be everywhere with a little bit of tinkering.

One last thought before we move into, if not the case for pessimism, then at least your urgent call to action about what needs to be done to navigate all this. But to draw, it's maybe too easy. It's certainly a crude comparison, but a lot of what you've walked us through in the last 20 minutes or so, it sort of reminds me of the battlefield in Ukraine and the role of technology and maximizing the individual combat power of people, of soldiers. but then in the aggregate, maximizing the combat, you know, the hard power of a nation, you have Ukraine, which has its own demographic issues, but certainly in a comparative, competitive sense compared to Russia has a massive, massive population disadvantage. And this war began, I think, with everyone, me included, still conceiving of wars of survival as involving mass mobilization. That's how you fought a war of survival. Even the United States

in World War II, which there was probably a lively debate at various points around the start of that war about whether it was truly a war of survival for the United States. We still mobilized, I believe, 95 infantry divisions, and that was still kind of holding back. We didn't actually throw everything into the field. But 95 seemed like the good table stakes for us to get involved in that fight. And that's a lot. And Ukraine, obviously, if it comes down to a man-to-man comparison with the Russians, it just can't win that way. And what you've seen from 2022 through to 2026 is this. automation of the battlefield, this use of all of the 21st century bells and whistles of data and AI, but also the sort of consumer electronics revolution coming home to roost on the battlefield,

or coming to the battlefield. And it's striking that they've survived, that they've survived and appeared, I mean, depends on who you talk to and what metrics you're using, appear to have a very, very long runway with which to work here because of their embrace of technology to increase combat power. The Ukrainians inspire us. I think they also somewhat shame us. It's really heartening to see the innovation and the determination in has applied against the Russian invasion. And it should always be a cautionary against us that there's more in economics. There's also more in strategy and geopolitics than just headcount. A lot, lot, lot for it. Well, let's move then to your program.

So you call for essentially reform. You could call it institutional reform that may be my phrase, not yours, but across policy, strategy, behavior, and expectations. These are all things that need to change in the United States. And then you identify a variety of categories, you know, labor force, public health, individual economic behavior, public economic behavior. There's a few more. You conclude with immigration.

I don't know which of those want to, I don't really have time to go into them all. But it's not, you're not, your report is not exactly saying it's all going to be fine. Don't worry about it. Your report is that the world is going to look entirely. different. We may not be able to change the ways in which it's going to be, in which the ways in which the demographics are going to be different, but we need to think carefully about changing our institutions. What would you like people to think about first and foremost in terms of institutional change? First and foremost, I'd like them to reflect a little bit about the bad

habits that we as a nation have gotten comfortable with over the course of the 21st century. I argue in this paper that we might actually have been better prepared for population decline and population aging a generation ago than we are today given these new bad habits. What do I mean by bad habits? Flight from work in the labor force. Stagnant or faltering improvements in health and staggeringly expensive medical care system. Despite our unparalleled ability to create wealth, to generate wealth as a society and fantastic entrepreneurship, very large portions of the population without, you know, much money to their name at all,

including especially the renter class in the United States, very structurally unsound public finance. And, you know, maybe I'm just overly sensitive to this, but I think our business climate might use a little room for, improvement as well. I go into the details of my concerns here, just so that people can see how these are laid out. The only one of these that you might really say is sort of hair on fire is the comfort and indifference that we have to running gigantic budget deficits and amassing ever more public debt, even in good times.

It's the kind of the, there isn't so much, there really isn't a constituency in either political party now that seems to believe we ought to balance our budgets. And you can go on doing that until you can't. And you don't know when that, you don't know when the music is going to run out. But it's probably better to try to fix this before the music runs out because doing it the other way, it's going to be a whole lot less fun. Well, maybe then the not so esoteric read of your report is actually, it's extraordinarily alarming. I don't think our country, really any democracy, is going to be particularly good at dealing with virtually anything you just identified before a crisis comes to a head, at which point, you know, for example, an enormous fiscal crisis.

It may be too late. Not that it's your place to solve that problem for us. It seems baked into the nature of democracy itself. The other thing I guess I put on your plate to respond to is this intersects with this question of AI in the labor market about which, as you know, there is much discussion. You've, you've had some thoughtful contributions yourself. And just to just to set the table, I mean, there's an optimistic take on what AI is going to do for the economy and for the labor force because it will enhance productivity and things are going to kind of work out. By the way,

in warfare, I think you kind of see that. My argument about Ukraine involves the role of AI. and doing things that actually would be good for humans not to have to do, or even can't do. But then you have the pessimistic argument, which is, okay, maybe we're thrilled that the Industrial Revolution, as it proceeded, you know, we've been, society has been progressively freed of more and more physical labor as the years have gone on, which is sort of privileged those who can succeed in a knowledge economy. But if AI then takes all the jobs in the knowledge economy, what the heck is left? You just in your list of possible problems identified, you know, the sort of large renter class and people who in an extraordinarily wealthy nation don't have access to a lot of resources. What's your take on how AI is going to intersect with your list of concerns? I'm not going to pretend that I understand anything about AI because I really don't. And that's a really easy way to make a fool of oneself.

I can try to describe historical analogies, which may or may not be useful. In thinking about analogies, you have to keep the constant churn of creative destruction in mind with new innovations over time. The general point here, I think, would be that it's very easy to make it. an inventory of things that might be destroyed, it's very hard for us to imagine what might be created. But a lot, a lot might be created. Now, again, I'm not the school of warfare guy, so I'm not going to be able to answer the question that I'm implying.

And this may not even be the time for it. But when I read about agents and bots that have learned how to deceive what will we call them, their creators, their masters, and when I read about experiments out in Berkeley and Santa Cruz where bots refuse to delete other bots and lie about it to their creators, I wonder how many steps we're taking towards Skynet. And maybe I won't be around to see what the answer to that question is. But that is a strategic question of a very different nature from the question about job creation and labor force productivity multiplication. So let's turn to the balance of power into some comparative demographic considerations. in China is the obvious other country we should be talking about.

Maybe we've spent so much time talking about the United States and its opportunities and challenges. Give us a brief overview of what's the same, but maybe what's different in terms of the challenges that the Chinese are facing. Well, I think there was a great demographer named Whalen Jennings, and he said, if you don't like the way I look,

you should see the other guy. And that's probably a good observation to bear in mind as we think about the demographic profile and comparative strategic demography between U.S. and China. China's per capita output is certainly not more than one-third of the U.S. Maybe more like a quarter of the U.S. To use other metrics, it might be more modest than that. And China already is in a full-throvel depopulation, began five years ago and is accelerating.

And the reason is accelerating is because the floor fell out from under the bottom of the Chinese birth rate at precisely the moment when the commissaurus decided that they wanted to tweak their flock to have more pig. or whatever the nice analogy there would be. China's birth total last year as best we can make out from their numbers is lower than it has been maybe for three centuries. A lot of babies. I mean, almost 8 million babies is a whole lot of babies, but you've got to remember that that's a country of 1.4 billion roughly people. I'm sorry.

Did you say three centuries, Nith? 1750 maybe, 1730? My God. My God. It's kind of like that. And if the numbers we're using are roughly accurate, not perfectly accurate, but roughly accurate, China's on crack at current childbearing patterns, which may not stay there. But if they, just as an illustrative, on current child.

bearing patterns, China's on track to see about 44 future daughters for every hundred women of childbearing age, and maybe something like 18 future granddaughters. So at some point, you see a really radical tilt underway. And already China's conventionally defined working age population is shrinking at an accelerating rate because they haven't decided to play the subtraction game with the senior citizens yet, but stay tuned. This means their overall population is aging at a fantastic pace by 2050, one in 10 in China, maybe 80 or older.

And remember, this is a country that doesn't have a national pension system worth talking about yet. It doesn't have a social welfare state worth talking about yet. Keep all of that in mind. There's something else which has been going on, which I think nobody's following. It may turn out to be the most interesting and important of them all. And this is the withering way of the Chinese family. And what happens when you have only children who are begetting only children?

You end up with a new family type that doesn't have siblings, doesn't have uncles and aunts, doesn't have cousins, doesn't have, in other words, the extended family that was the social safety nap for 2,500 years, or at least since the unified, you know, dynastic system began, you know, back in Chin Dynasty, to protect people during bad times and to provide a, you know, kind of like a springboard for opportunity during good times. Remember I said that human beings are adaptable and human beings are adaptable in China too, but it's going to take a lot of adapting to figure out how you come up with a verisimilitude for siblings and cousins and uncles and aunts from, you know, the people in their, you know,

kind of computer science club or, you know, communist block party. So there are big questions there that the Chinese leadership has to, deal with and the answer at the moment I think is that they're going to science their way out of it and maybe they will and maybe they won't. Say more, science their way out of it. I'm more or less, I mean it's a multi-prong approach. Part of it is more training and skills for the shrinking rising cohorts and some of China's, you know, academic talent is absolutely fantastic.

Some of it is research and development, including AI but not limited to AI. So by, I mean, a kind of what the Soviets would have called the scientific technological revolution, but a scientific technological revolution with Chinese characteristics. I think this is part of the idea for how, why this may not turn. out as badly as outsiders might think. If you have to look at the Chinese leadership's track record on population issues, it's been spectacularly, brilliantly bad from the inception of the one-child policy to our discussion here today, absolutely tone deaf and genius at coming up at creating unintentional consequences

for the intended objectives that they've tried to achieve. So then is it fair to say that you at least think that the conventional wisdom that China, Xi Jinping's China is in a sort of window of strategic opportunity right now, that conflict in the coming few years, say, decades. will find China and the United States matched at the most advantageous balance of power possible for China because starting shortly thereafter, the Chinese situation starts to grow very grim indeed. Is that a plausible hypothesis to you? I don't know how much national power China has in relation to the United States today.

And I suspect that the Chinese leadership doesn't either. And this may be one of the reasons that we see to us a certain surprising hesitance in different areas. What I can say is I don't know what pharmaceuticals you would have to be taking to think that you'd want to have their profile instead of ours, but I'm not taking them. Unfortunately, they can cut off a lot of our pharmaceuticals in the course of a crisis. So that's just one way in which to think about the complexities of national power here. I guess in a way, I'm glad you said the term, national power, the phrase, because in a way, that's sort of been my main interest, this whole conversation, even though it's taken me 40 or so minutes to get here, is what is the relationship between these large macro trends that you are charting population, headcount being, of course, the most obvious of them. And the ability to project power in order to deter or if necessary, defeat your enemies.

And even the deter thing that adds a whole other layer of psychological complexity to it. And there's no way I could answer that question. I wonder if you're familiar with anybody who's ever tried to tackle it in a serious way. Because again, back to my sort of loose reflections on the Ukrainian battlefield and how it relates to everything you're working on. I still, you know, I find myself with this mindset of how nations are powerful that seems to me to be increasingly obsolete and to be really downstream of Napoleon. You know, the conventional historical story, which serious military historians who are listening to the show will tell me that I'm missing all the nuance here is that, you know, the professionalized armies of the 18th century give way to these mass levies pioneered by Napoleon in the revolutionary or certainly the imperial period. but beginning in the revolutionary period. And that then leads to the total war of the 20th century.

And even in the nuclear age, America maintains this draft for many decades. And, you know, nations still think in terms of mass mobilization for major conflicts. And I just wonder if in the 2020s, we really are leaving that behind, that automation on the battlefield means that it's just not the way to think about hard power anymore. And by the way, not a way. moment too late because we're about to start running low on people. To me, as a non-military person, you know, and again, that's another area where I could easily make a fool of myself. So please try to stop me.

I have a podcast, so that's what I do. But please continue. Well, it's amazing to me as a non-military person, how much power the United States can extend around the world with such a tiny fraction of its resources disposed in this area. And it is, I'm sort of like Clemenceau, but for America, for my entire life I've been hearing that America is in decline. America is still in decline, and it looks to me like America will always be in decline. That doesn't mean that America will be the, you know, that America will be the, anything other than the primary power for the foreseeable future.

What I don't have enough imagination to wrap my head around is what a total war would look like nowadays. I mean, I've read the histories about World War II. I've read the histories about World War I. I have a sense of what it meant to mobilize a total economy for a very different time period. My guess is that we don't really have a clue yet about what our resilience or the resilience of our competitors would be like if we were to move towards something like a prolonged total war situation. But again, maybe it's just like Mike Tyson, right?

Everybody's got a strategy until it punched in the face. we don't know until we're punched in the face. Yeah. I think there are smart people who this is what they do. They think about or in many cases actually just work inside the military and the defense establishment who think about this stuff and who have, to me, a pretty plausible story of what war fighting, conventional war fighting will look like if we were to go to war with China today.

And it largely stems, you know, the smartest ones are paying very careful attention to what's happening in Ukraine and in the Middle East for the war. that matter and then thinking through what are the ways in which you know the maritime character of the western pacific would change that what are the ways in which it wouldn't change that and by the way who's to say that all the war happens in the western pacific anyway and they can paint and you know on the show we talk about you know i have a pretty plausible interesting set of options about how that could go but where i'm with you nick is i don't think anybody knows in a way because it's unknowable how that the sort of multiple domains of

conventional warfare then in interact with the question of nuclear escalation, which, thank God, we've never had to think that through in terms of a direct great power conflict. And we all believe, me no less fervently than anyone else, that deterrence remains the best strategy because it would be great if we never had to think that through. But that interaction is not clear, as is, you know, the interactions between some of the different domains, you know, how will space actually work and look in this conflict? Besides, the only thing I'm fairly confident of, I would put good money down. Nick. I don't know if I can do this on Polymarket. I haven't investigated how this online stuff works, but good money down that the first shots of said war will happen in space. But, or at least targeting things in space. So, you know, how it will all fit together, how the new and the old

will coexist. And then, I mean, you pointed us towards these questions of economic mobilization. You know, how does that work in the United States in the 2020s or 2030s? The conventional wisdom is we compare pretty unfavorably to China in that regard. And I don't have any serious evidence to pose against that assertion. It does seem to me like the Chinese industrial base looks a lot more like our industrial base in the 30s and 40s, and ours does not. And that is one of my matters of gravest concern. Well, it should be. I mean, fortunately, we have this legacy that I hope we won't entirely squander.

of alliance relationships that we built for a couple of generations around the world. And if one looks at a sort of an extended alliance manufacturing base, as opposed to just the U.S. manufacturing base, but we do have some alliance-based advantages. Nicholas Eberstadt, the Harry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. the report is called can a depopulating America

still flourish? This was as always a fascinating conversation. I hope you'll come back sometime and thank you so much for making the time today. Force me, Aaron. Force me. It was a blast doing this. Thank you so much.

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