I did not 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 not a cultural problem. It was producing citizens who could not govern themselves. The civic collapse was not laziness. It was a rational response to captured institutions. The technology story turned out to be a geopolitical one about who builds the tools and who does not.
So this is what comes next, and it is 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 is the chain. Each previous book was one link and none of them knew what they were part of while I was writing them.
What qualifies the author to write about geopolitics?
Nothing, and the book says so on the first page.
I am not a foreign policy expert. Not a military analyst, not an economist, not a climate scientist, not a demographer.
I am a writer who reads too much, asks questions that make people uncomfortable, and refuses to accept that complicated things cannot be explained to ordinary people. Every expert I have met can explain their field to another expert. Rather fewer can explain it to anybody else.
That is the actual job here. Not original research. 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.
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 the book written at a ninth-grade reading level?
On purpose, and not because the ideas are simple.
The audience deserves clarity. If you cannot explain something clearly you probably do not understand it yourself, and a great deal of writing in this territory uses complexity as a substitute for comprehension.
I understand this material and I have done what I can to make sure a reader does too by the time they finish. That is a design decision that costs the author something, because difficult prose reads as authoritative and plain prose has to be right instead.
What is the Iran war doing in the book?
Working as a lens, not a subject.
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 will not 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 does not 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 is 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 are 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 is the missile math?
A production rate question, not a strategy question, and it is the simplest argument in the book.
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 travelling 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 do not require anybody’s politics to be alarming.
What is the matador’s cape?
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, not a failure of capability. A bull is not weak. It is looking at the wrong thing.
What does the book propose instead of rifles?
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, not the other way around. When maintaining the military cost more than the commercial system returned, the arrangement ended.
That is the chapter that most surprises readers who expect a defence book, and it is the hinge between the parts about what is failing and the parts about what is available.
Why does the book reframe the demographic problem?
Because the usual framing asks for something that is not 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 urbanisation. People on farms had large families because children were labour, and people in cities do not. That is not reversing.
So the proposed answer is not forcing birth rates back up. It 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 is 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 load-bearing wall. Capacity is people, and people take longer to produce than factories do.
Why is a book full of disasters optimistic?
Because the optimism is the earned kind, not the soft kind.
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, not a set of impossibilities.
Six of the seven parts are about what is wrong. One is about what is available. Nuclear, artificial intelligence as a multiplier, longer working lives, rewritten biology, robotics, an innovation thesis and the high ground.
A book that catalogued the failures and stopped would be easier to write and would have been a waste of everybody’s time.
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