The version of Peter Zeihan’s Accidental Superpower that I (metaphorically) picked up was subtitled Ten Years On:
The trends of deglobalization, depopulation, and American disinterest that were once on the horizon are now embedded firmly in the here and now.
[…]
There’s no way you kick out a 350-page book that is three-quarters forecast and you get it all dead-on. The biggest bitch is always timing. Inevitable is not a synonym for imminent.
[…]
It is undeniable that China has not cracked (yet) and the European Union is still with us (for now).
[…]
Two years after Accidental I published The Absent Superpower, a book that brought America’s shale revolution into focus both in terms of its transformation of the American industrial experience and its impact upon the broader global geopolitic. As part of Absent I predicted that the 2020s would serve as the backdrop of three major international wars. The first of these, the Ukraine War, is now in full swing. Two to go.
Why Americans talk about China cracking? it makes no sense.
Lucklucky,
It’s a combination of China’s demographic problems, which are pretty severe, and wishful thinking deriving from American anxiety surrounding our decline and China’s rise.
A homogenous America using the American System fulfills Lincoln’s prophecy from his 1838 Lyceum Address with ease, “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”
But a multi-cult, unassimilated hodge-podge of mystery meat people with not even a religion to unite them is a doomed project such that even our inherent advantages of size, resources, geographic safety and an inherited economic and alliance system that was the envy of the world can’t overcome the deficiency. In truth, China and Russia shouldn’t be even close to potential rivals if the USA had been managed even with a modicum of competency, but the utter idiocy of the country has led to the greatest squandering of inherent advantages in world history.
It’s basically cope.
Boeing’s airliners are literally falling apart in midair. That’s what you call a “leading indicator”.
“Why [do] Americans talk about China cracking?”
When a weak, petty tyrant is at the top of a corrupt organization, the organization declines slowly, but the tyrant stays relatively high in the local social structure. The tyrant does not care about the organization or any community: the tyrant cares about relative social status. So the oligarchs who run America do not care that they are running America into the ground; they just want to be the biggest bullies on the playground. So long as China is less of a world-dominating superpower than the USA, then the oligarchs can be proud of squatting atop the USA.
But when non-oligarch Americans sneer at the PRC, as Phileas Frogg said, it’s basically cope.