The issue is that history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. I'm not saying history is useless mind you. But the author is putting the cart before the horse, in

The issue is that history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. I'm not saying history is useless mind you. But the author is putting the cart before the horse, in that they don't form a strong foundation that is based on observable data or events that we suspect is contributing to the collapse. Instead they define a probable cause "Strategic naïvety", okay fine how do we know this is the cause? From The author we don't instead they just jump straight to historic similarities and is only focused on proving the link between present and the past. Instead to demonstrate a more proper way of analyzing plausible collapse, look at China. When we look for China there are various observable data and signs that it isn't doing to great for this demonstration I'll focus on the social aspect, because it's harming the backbone of Chinese might, it's demographic. We can observe various data here like the amount of young people, the amount of babies, immigrants, the welfare of the people, homelessness, social services etc. We can also look at social dynamics such as how many people get together, what about the social hierarchy, how much trust do people have in society, how does socialization generally work? What about it's antisocial cultural norms how severe are they? Etc. Now we can start forming a more proper picture of what the social issue are that are harming demographics, and the inability of the government to even want to consider the issue. Now we can look into history for inspiration or as a alternative timeline into what happen, but not to how things will play out.