I didn’t plan a series. I planned one book about cognitive decline and then kept finding that the thing I was writing about was a symptom of something larger.
The cognitive decline was producing citizens who couldn’t govern themselves. The civic collapse was a rational response to captured institutions. The technology story turned out to be a geopolitical one about who builds the tools and who doesn’t.
So this is what comes next, and it’s the book where the four of them meet.
Cognitive decline feeds political dysfunction. Political dysfunction feeds military overreach. Military overreach feeds great power competition. That competition collides with the structural forces reshaping the planet, and all of it points back at the technologies that could solve any of it. That’s the chain. Each previous book was one link and none of them knew what they were part of while I was writing them.
I’m prouder of this book than anything else in the series, because it’s the one that finally made the others make sense. It also unsettled me more. Watching four arguments I’d made separately snap into one chain is exhilarating for about a day, and then you have to face what the chain says about where we’re headed.
What expertise does the author of Stuck in the Middle claim?
Nothing, and the book says so on the first page. I’m not a foreign policy expert. Not a military analyst, not an economist, not a climate scientist, not a demographer. I’m a writer who reads too much, asks questions that make people uncomfortable, and refuses to accept that complicated things can’t be explained to ordinary people. Every expert I’ve met can explain their field to another expert. Rather fewer can explain it to anybody else.
The job here is translation, connection, and the willingness to ask what happens when four separate expert fields are describing parts of the same problem and none of them are talking to each other. I find that silence infuriating. The specialists each see their piece clearly, and the public pays because putting the pieces together is nobody’s job.
The book on this: Stuck in the Middle connects four earlier books into one argument about the structural forces shaping the next thirty years, from military capacity and demographics to the tools that could solve any of it.
Why is Stuck in the Middle written at a ninth-grade reading level?
On purpose, and not because the ideas are simple.
The audience deserves clarity. If you can’t explain something clearly you probably don’t understand it yourself, and a great deal of writing in this territory uses complexity as a substitute for comprehension. I’m tired of writing that hides behind its own difficulty. When an expert makes a subject impossible to follow, the reader walks away thinking they’re too dumb to understand it, and the fault belongs entirely to the writer. I understand this material and I’ve done what I can to make sure a reader does too by the time they finish. That’s a design decision that costs the author something, because difficult prose reads as authoritative and plain prose has to be right instead.
How does Stuck in the Middle use the current war?
As a lens for something bigger than the war itself.
The war broke out while I was writing and reached a ceasefire before I finished, with the facts on the ground shifting daily throughout. Casualty figures, oil prices and political developments will all be out of date by the time anybody reads this. The structural analysis won’t be. The forces are bigger than the events, and this is a book about the forces.
Whatever shape that conflict has taken by the time it reaches a reader, frozen or reignited or already a footnote, the arguments survive. The missile mathematics is real whether the adversary is Iran or somebody nobody has named yet. The condition of the industrial base doesn’t depend on which war exposes it.
A reader in 2030 should treat the first two parts as a stress test applied to the American military establishment, one that produces the same conclusions regardless of which conflict triggers it.
What’s the argument of Stuck in the Middle?
That the disease is structural and the war is only the symptom that made it visible. The book’s claim is that the United States built the most powerful military in history and then hollowed out the industrial base that sustains it. Built the world’s greatest innovation engine and then defunded the research feeding it. Built a global alliance system and then withdrew from it slowly enough that nobody quite noticed.
From there it works outward. Whether there are enough weapons and whether they can be replaced at the rate they’re used. What wars without stated objectives do to the countries fighting them. The bill nobody wants to pay and the waterways somebody else controls. Then the structural forces underneath all of it. Falling birth rates, infrastructure, energy and food, a changing map, and the next pandemic.
What’s the missile math in Stuck in the Middle?
A production rate question, not a strategy question, and it’s the simplest argument in the book.
A production rate question, not a strategy question, and it’s the simplest argument in the book.Share on X
A factory in Troy, Alabama builds Javelin anti-tank missiles.
A few years ago it could produce around two thousand four hundred a year and is trying to reach nearly four thousand. The Javelin is a relatively simple weapon by modern standards. A tube with a seeker head, a rocket motor and an explosive charge, at roughly a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars a shot.
Then try something harder. A THAAD interceptor has to fly into the upper atmosphere, detect a warhead traveling at several times the speed of sound, and calculate an intercept in real time.
The chapter is arithmetic instead of opinion. How many of a thing exist, how fast they get used in a real engagement, and how fast a factory can replace them. Those three numbers don’t require anybody’s politics to be alarming.
This chapter frightens me most. Nobody has to share my politics to see that a country can’t fight for long with weapons it can’t replace, and the people who pay for that gap are the ones sent into a fight after the shelves have gone empty.
What’s the matador’s cape in Stuck in the Middle?
The image the book uses for twenty years of American strategic attention.
In a bullfight the matador swings a wide cape during the opening passes while his body stands to the side. The bull sees the cape, not the man, commits everything to it at full speed with complete conviction, and hits nothing. Then it charges the cape again, because the cape is all it can see.
The book’s argument is that the United States has been the bull. Whether a reader accepts that framing or rejects it, the analogy is doing real work, because it describes a failure of attention. A bull is looking at the wrong thing.
What replaces military dominance as a national strategy?
Railroads, and the model is the nineteenth-century British Empire. Britain controlled a quarter of the world’s land surface, and the book’s reading is that it did so primarily through commercial dominance backed by infrastructure instead of through conquest. Railroads in India, ports in East Africa, telegraph lines across oceans, and a banking system that denominated global trade in its own currency.
The military existed to protect the commercial system. When maintaining the military cost more than the commercial system returned, the arrangement ended. Readers who expect a defense book find that chapter the most surprising, and it’s the hinge between the parts about what’s failing and the parts about what’s available.
Why does Stuck in the Middle reframe falling birth rates?
Because the usual framing asks for something that isn’t going to happen.
The book accepts that demographic collapse is real and argues the framing needs changing. Falling birth rates are partly a function of urbanization. People on farms had large families because children were labor, and people in cities don’t. That isn’t reversing. So the proposed answer is redesigning economic and military systems to work with smaller populations, with automation bridging the medium term and legal immigration as the other real lever, which the book notes gets drowned out in the noise around the issue.
That’s characteristic of how the book handles most of its problems. Accept the constraint, then ask what can be built inside it.
What stands in the way of every solution?
People who can build them.
Every fix in the book needs somebody. Nuclear reactors need engineers who understand reactor physics, health physicists who can design the safety systems, welders certified to nuclear standards, and electricians wiring control systems to tolerances with no margin. AI needs mathematicians, data engineers and the specialists who train and maintain models. Longevity research needs molecular biologists, geneticists and the technicians who keep experiments running.
A chapter on deskilling in a geopolitics book looks like a detour and is the foundation. Capacity is people, and people take longer to produce than factories do.
This is the argument I care about most, and I think it’s the one policymakers ignore hardest. A factory can be funded in a year. A certified nuclear welder takes far longer to produce, and every year spent treating the trades as a consolation prize is a bill that comes due later.
Why is a book full of disasters optimistic?
Because the optimism is the earned kind. I’ve got no use for the soft kind, the version that promises everything will be fine without saying how.
Not everything will work out. That version costs nothing to say and helps nobody. The hard version is that the tools exist, the problems are solvable, and what stands between the current position and a better one is a set of choices.
Six of the seven parts are about what’s wrong. One is about what’s available. Nuclear, artificial intelligence as a multiplier, longer working lives, rewritten biology, robotics, an innovation thesis and the high ground.
A book that cataloged the failures and stopped would have been easier to write, and I think it would have been cowardly. Plenty of authors make a living selling dread, and their readers close the book more frightened and no more capable than when they opened it. I wanted anyone who reads this one to finish knowing which choices would fix things, and angry that nobody’s making them.
