How Demographics Impact Security in the Indo-Pacific
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Welcome to the Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Andrew Schwartz at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This week, Mike and Jude meet with Andrew Oros, Professor of Political Science and International Studies and the Director of the International Studies Program at Washington College. They discuss demographic shifts in Asia and how those changes affect the geostrategic balance in the region.

Welcome back to the Asia Chessboard. Jude Blanchett and I are joined today by Professor Andrew Oros, who's working on a major research project on demographics and the aging of Asia and what it means for prosperity and especially security and alliances. And we'll get into that. But great to have you, Andrew, a longtime Japan scholar. And we'll talk about your book, but we always begin asking, how did a kid from L.A. I guess it's not a surprise you're from L.A. How did a kid from L.A. get into Japan and Asia?

Well, yes, LA is a big part of it. Thanks, by the way, for having me on the podcast. Happy to be here. In the 1980s, you know, Japan was huge. Lots of concern about the future of Japan, about the future of US-Japan alliance. And I was a high school student, decided to study Japanese in high school and then continued it on into college.

I think I want to give a shout out, though, to the Lions Club, a big service organization that sponsored my first trip to Japan in high school as a summer exchange. And that really whet my appetite to go for study abroad in Japan in

in college. So I spent two years in Japan in college. And that's where I also realized that it was more than Japan I was interested in. It was all of international relations. And so then I decided to study international politics as well as East Asian languages.

So LA in the 1980s, we're talking Michael Crichton novels, The Rising Sun. You were obviously fascinated in Japan, but did you fear Japan or how did you approach your trip? I think part of what really grasped me with Japan was when I went there as a 15-year-old, I had all of these images based on being a high school student in the 1980s, The Rising Sun, and had this idea that Japan was this super high-tech place and it was like all concrete and glass buildings and

And I had the good luck to stay with a host family in Kobe in Japan and this beautiful nature and just realizing staying with a family, how much that family was a lot like my family in an LA suburb and realizing there were a lot of common concerns and common issues between us. And that I think really, really,

really hooked me on understanding how complex international politics is, that we have all of these impressions of the other. But when we take the time to understand, often our differences are not as much as we'd expect. Well put, and thanks to the Lions Club. I went to Japan after reading Shogun, so my shock was even greater because it turns out there weren't samurai wandering around. Although I did do martial arts, so I got a bit of vicarious experience from the great novel Shogun, which of course is a TV series now. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty

pretty compelling. I'm looking forward to the second season. Yeah, right. We're not a popular culture podcast. We're a geeky Asia security and strategy podcast. So let's get right into it. Demographics. I've been talking about this project since you first started pulling it together and it's very exciting and very important. But I may have told you the story when I was in school at SICE in the late 80s.

And a very prominent Asia hand named Marshall Green asked to meet me. He'd had all the top jobs in the State Department on Asia, Ambassador to Indonesia, Assistant Secretary, I think, and advised Nixon and Kissinger, fought with him a bit. So Marshall Green asked to see me. He wanted to see sort of the new generation of Asia hands coming out of the academy. And he took me to the Cosmos Club and he said, over the course of your career, the most important issue you will work on is going to be demographics.

It was the late 80s. And I thought, well. And then he said, because we have a problem, Mike. There are too many babies being born in Asia. And it's going to be a disaster by the time you reach the pinnacle of your career. We do have a problem in Asia. It's not too many babies. It's the opposite, it turns out. But can you tell us why, at a macro level, the demographic trends, the low birth rate is a geopolitical issue in Asia? Yeah.

Yes, it's a good starting point. Although I'll point out that even though I think you got a great education and advice at SAIS, even in the 1980s, Japan did not have a replacement birth rate and neither did China. So if people were really looking towards the future, it should have been clear that the populations were going to age and shrink. It's just that it's taken this much time because thankfully,

In Japan and China and elsewhere in East Asia, life expectancies have increased just a tremendous amount, right? So the effect of having a lower birth rate has been delayed by decades. I do take your broader point that demographics are certainly not destiny, right? And

Countries make decisions based on their understanding of demographics and their own priorities, which will shape how successful countries are, right? So many countries that have very large populations have not utilized them effectively and they're mirrored in poverty or they have very weak militaries. And other countries that have small populations are

even as my book argues, rapidly aging or even super age populations have very effective militaries. So the relationship between the demographics and success and military prowess is not so clear. And that's why it's taken me about five years to sort of sort it out from the beginning of a Wilson Center fellowship to the book coming out next summer.

Yeah, I guess you had an empirical requirement to actually age yourself so that you understood the implications. What are the general trends, though? I mean, the birth rates, the replacement rate, and the replacement rate is generally demographers say, what, 2.1 children? It's a little bit less than 2.1 in advanced industrial countries. Yeah, and that's in order to have enough people going into the workforce to support

the retiring population, basically? Is that it? The fertility rate and the replacement rate, it doesn't have to do with the workforce. It has to do with the total population. So basically, if you think of a couple, two people need to produce two people to have a replacement birth rate. And it's a little bit more than two. It's like 2.05 or 2.1, because unfortunately, you have some childhood mortality, infant mortality. So in the end, you need two people to replace two people. But you need that in order to have the

economic output from the 2.1 to sustain an aging society that's retiring and not producing economic output, as I understood. Is that not the right way to think about it? That's a different measure. So that is a dependency ratio. So that's something else that demographers look at to understand how many working age people are supporting how many retired people. But that's a totally different number than the total fertility rate.

I think I'm going to ask the same question Mike did, but I'll ask it in a slightly different way. I'm a national elected leader. Why is demographic and population trends important to me? What are the sort of functional constraints I face if I see a graying population and a shrinking workforce? Or inversely, if

If I'm the United States looking at rivals, why do I care if their population is increasing or decreasing? How does that affect sort of comprehensive national power? Yeah, that's a great question. I sort of see that as two questions, but two good questions. And I like both parts of it because I think one of the challenges is

that countries have in affecting the sort of the arc of their fertility, their replacement rate is to your question of why should a politician care? Increasingly, the politician at the moment doesn't care because the policies that person enacts is something that's going to affect like decades later. So that's a problem I think for governance, especially for democratic governance.

But the other part of your question is, as a leader looks at other countries and looks at their demographic situation, why should they care about that? Well, it could well affect that country's national power. So if it's an allied country, like if you're looking, if you're a US leader and looking at

core allies like Japan or South Korea, I think it would be natural at a first level to be concerned. You hear that these countries are super aged and their populations are shrinking. And so you'd be concerned that your ally is going to lose power. And conversely, you know, there's the discussions these days, uh,

reach the mass media about like so-called peak China, right, or China's demographic problems. And so if you imagine that China's demographics are really going to reduce its future power, well, that's kind of a good thing to know as a leader of a country that considers China a concern.

The replacement rate is what you need to maintain your population level, but it is related to economic growth and prosperity because there's a number below which you risk falling where you can't sustain taxes and the base you need. The point one explanation I appreciate, it's basically because not everyone survives to adulthood.

It's better than the explanation my wife gave me, which is in every family, there's a 0.1 kid and you were probably that 0.1 kid. She kept telling me, let's look at some of the countries that have the worst replacement rate. Korea is pretty low. Macau, China's not doing great. Where are the countries to watch in terms of having a sort of dangerously low level of replacement rate in the population?

Yeah, as you said, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Macau, Taiwan are at the very lowest. South Korea has been the lowest in the entire world over several of the last several years, and Taiwan claimed that prize once.

So they're under 1.0 right now, which is a level that wasn't really imaginable several decades ago, unless there was some really extreme government policy like China's one child policy. If it had been fully enacted, would have had a 1.0 fertility rate, but it wasn't fully enacted. So China's fertility rate was never quite that low. So it's interesting that South Korean people themselves are choosing to have that.

few number of children. By contrast, people often think of Japan as the place that has the really low fertility rate. And it is well below replacement level, but it's around 1.3. So that's considerably higher than South Korea today. I know you're mostly looking at the implications for geopolitics, alliances, and those kinds of outcomes. But what's your theory of why is Korea so low? Is it about women's

empowerment that women are making choices? Is it about something less tangible in society? I mean, what accounts for these lower rates in some countries? Yes. I mean, you're right that it's not the focus of my work, but you can't help but sort of think about that. And it also helps you think about what's the potential that this is going to reverse in the future. So I understand it mostly as two things, as you said, women's empowerment, or we might consider that as gender equality.

And the other, I think, is just the cost of raising children in advanced industrial societies, whether they're democracies or not. In Northeast Asia, there tends to be a high premium put on education, and so the

cost of not just raising a child, but raising a child who's well-educated and paying for the cram schools and the best college tuition or private tuition you can afford really makes the cost of raising children very high. I'm going to let Jude really bore in on China. It may be that China's demographic picture is the most geopolitically consequential of all of them, but if I could just do Japan for a minute.

our country of common study. Under Abe, Japan turned that number around a bit and had some successful public policy. What's the state of play in Japan on the public policy solutions to this demographic challenge, but also the policy implications? I do think it's important that any country that is facing a well below replacement birth rate

has to multitask. So that's to your question. The immediate challenges are like what to do with shortfalls in military recruiting or a shrinking workforce. How are you going to adapt that? So that's sort of an immediate problem. But if you focus all of your attention on the immediate problem, then it's going to be a continuing spiral down. So in Japan's case, for example, it's very much on the national consciousness that Japan's population will shrink to about

100 million sometime around 2050. So as a psychological thing, the idea that it's going to go below 100 million is a big political discussion in Japan. And so even though that is over 25 years from now,

Japan has to make important policy investments and policy choices to kind of move that needle. So that is one basket of things that are discussed and whether it's about making daycare more accessible, changing norms in a workplace so that there isn't an expectation that you're staying at work super late, which then keeps you from spending time with children better.

pay equality. There's a whole basket of issues. But as you say, it's not the focus of my work. What my work focuses on is, look, the children born now, here's one way to think about it. The children born right now are the ones who are going to be a prime military recruiting age 20 years from now. If you want to recruit a 20-year-old man or woman to serve in your military,

in 2043, those kids have already been born. So the fertility rate has nothing to do with that. And for me, as someone who focuses on military security, I think 20 years is a pretty big time horizon to be thinking forward to. For me, the fertility rate

Currently, and in the future doesn't really affect my analysis. But for country, it matters a lot thinking decades and decades ahead. And for those, you know, listening who are in the defense planning world, I mean, probably a 20 year time horizon doesn't sound right.

So long, really. I mean, especially in the United States or advanced industrial democracies, it can take that long to develop and build a new weapon system, for example. So countries should be thinking of security both in terms of what sort of designing the weapons for 20 to 30 years from now, and also making sure you have the population you need 20 to 30 years from now.

So I see Japan doing that, the Ministry of Defense. The participation of women in the Defense Force was about 8% a few years ago, and they've made a decision to double that, to more than double it, to bring it up to the US, UK, Australia level of about 18%. They've opened up

Pretty much every military specialization to women except for commandos, I'm told. Weapons design is more focused on automation, uncrewed. They don't say unmanned anymore, uncrewed systems. So it seems like in terms of military capabilities and planning, Japan's doing that. Or are they still going to be in trouble? What do you think?

I agree with you that Japan has done a lot in, I think, especially the last five or six years in recognizing this is a serious military security challenge, as well as a broader kind of social security concern. So in Japan's latest national security strategy,

from December 2022. It's only their second post-war national security strategy, and it has quite a few passages that refer to this demographics issue and quite a few proposed solutions, such as what you're mentioning, Mike. I will just quibble just a little, though, to say that having a plan to double the number of women in the military and actually doubling the number of women in the military is not

the same thing. So I will give Japan real credit. In just the last few years, you've seen a substantial increase in the number of new recruits. And keep in mind, Japan is a bit of an unusual military that people tend to serve a very long time. So it's hard to move the ratio of the total forces.

But in terms of recent recruits, I've heard that women actually are closer to around 20% of recent recruits. So that's even sort of exceeding the NATO-US goal. But in terms of the total number of women in forces, it's, as you say, about 8%, which is about half the US level presently.

Here's another way to look at it. There are more women serving in the U.S. armed forces than there are members of Japan's armed forces. Andrew, I wanted to go back to China for a minute. The Chinese talk about, in addition to black swans, they talk about gray rhinos, which are slow-moving challenges that you can see coming from a long distance away.

Demographics has been one of those gray rhinos. Chinese demographers, policy planners for decades have known that the one China policy was creating a hurricane that was lingering off the shore and

And they weren't quite sure when it was going to make landfall. And, you know, over the last decade, it certainly has. The workforce is shrinking in absolute numbers. And then starting just a few years ago, the population is not just seeing the rate of increased decline, but is actually now in an absolute decline. I know this will be a part of your book. So I guess we're asking for a sneak peek. But how do those demographic trends and the relative stickiness of those over the next couple of decades, how does that affect you personally?

Your assessment of China's power trajectory, you were just mentioning that the soldiers you're going to have 20 years from now are born today. Is China just so large in aggregate scale that even with a sort of shrinking population, it's still going to be able to field a pretty fearsome military force? And I'm now stacking question on a question. The other great project of Xi Jinping and PLA modernization is using more uncrewed autonomous systems,

I don't think necessarily as a plugging the gap of demographics, but certainly that will have a potential blunting effect on some of these demographic trends. So just holistically, how do you see that intersection of China's current and future power projection in its incredibly poor demographic?

picture right now. Yes, that is a large basket of questions, but my book does address them. And I like the contrast to Mike's question about Japan. So the first thing I'll say is that going into this project and reading some of the limited scholarly literature about demographics, I expected that there would be similar

of a similar demographic change, the big takeaway is there's not. That the way the demographics are going to ripple through Japanese security policy is just fundamentally different than the way it's going to ripple through Chinese security policy. And if we had time, we could talk about Korea as another archetype that South Korea, that's really quite different. So we have three very different things.

In China's case, first of all, because it's not as advanced economically as Japan or South Korea on the economic front, so paying for the military, what you have is much less educated and much less healthy workers leaving the workforce and being replaced by much better educated and much healthier workers.

And as a result of this, you're going to see likely a lot of economic growth that will come from that. So even a smaller size workforce can have higher economic output, and then they can pay for the advanced weapons that China wants. So there's the economic

And then in terms of the soldiers, I mean, I think you nailed it earlier. China has, even though it's now the second largest population in the world, it's still over 1.3 billion people. That's plenty of young people to draw a robust military force from.

And the last thing I'll say related to that, and if you want to follow up on China, well, let's go for it. I have a chapter on it. But I would say, if you look back over the last 20 years, and perhaps even more than 20 years, remember that

as China has tried to build a more capable military, it's all along tried to reduce the size of its military. So it's been trying to shrink its military forces in order to have better trained, more technologically advanced military for decades, which has nothing to do with demographics. So that's what makes China quite different than, for example, South Korea, where South Korea conscripts almost all young men and

And the number of young men is about half what it used to be. And so that just means that they're going to have half the number of forces as a result. China technically has conscription, but it only actually forces a very small number of men to serve. Mostly it's a volunteer force, and there's plenty to choose from.

I hadn't really thought of it this way, but of course, China's ground forces is about 50. I mean, it's a million people are in China's ground forces in the army. And I think to your point, leadership outside of the army, including Xi Jinping, have been trying to find ways to trim that number down. And maybe demographic trends give them an excuse to just be fielding fewer gradually into the army over time. The question I wanted to ask next is actually a skeleton key question that might

pertain to some of the other countries we're talking about, and Mike was just mentioning this, but that is the Chinese view of demographic. The way out of this demographic pitfall is technology. They've done relaxation to the one China policy, but far too late to have any pronounced effect on demographic trends over the long term, or over the short term, and probably over the long term. But the area that they're just absolutely doubling down is technology. And I think Xi Jinping's view is

You've got a shrinking workforce, no problem. You sprinkle technology on and every worker is just that much more marginally productive. In the security field, I take your point of their population is so large, this might not be an issue, but still, we're already going to be seeing the structure of our forces shrinking down and we're going to be using much more technology. For society struggling with demographic challenges, especially in their workforce, is technology a

a way around some of the pathologies or negative effects that stem from demographic trends? Definitely. But here too, I'll just point out that what's complex is that, again, the most advanced militaries have been pursuing the most advanced technology for probably forever, right? But certainly like in the post-war period, the U.S. as a leader in armed forces has been leading in advanced technologies. And of the countries that I study, the U.S. has one of the best demographics,

So the drive to use better military technology is clearly not driven by demographics. But if you have a country that's facing challenges with demographics, in particular, there aren't enough people to serve in the military, then doubling down on that technology or investing more in that technology is a great solution. So in China's case, since you're framing it in terms of China, I don't think that the demographics is much

of the percentage of explanation of why China's pursuing advanced technology. It's doing that because it wants to build a pure military to the United States. And the United States has a very advanced military. But in Japan's case, or in South Korea's case, I think that the fact that they're facing a much more urgent shortage of people to serve in the military, there, it's driving them to invest more in especially labor-saving technologies. Your final question on China,

But I think the natural next question for me is, well, you hear this thesis on peak China and in the bill of indictment, it's multi-causal, it's local government debt, it's a lot of things. But one of the big pillars of that argument is demographics. You're better placed than I am to talk about that intersection of comprehensive national power and demographics. But where do you weigh in on that peak China thesis as far as it relates to the demographic piece? Certainly, I do believe that China's

shrinking population and rapid aging. It will reach super age status in the 2030s, where 20% or more of their population is 65 or over. Yes, this is going to be, I think, one of the fundamental challenges China will be facing over the next several decades.

But I'm not a demographic determinist. I think there's so many reasons to think that China will be able to manage this transition. I think that alone is not convincing to me, especially at the top level analysis. I think many people have this.

what is in fact a mistaken idea that a smaller workforce will mean less output. Basically, no specialist believes that. I mean, if you look at World Bank studies, IMF studies, CIA studies, and you look at what's the projected economic growth in South Korea, in Japan, in China, everyone expects substantial growth in these places. At the top level,

It's just not a problem. In fact, if you think about what some people consider a big problem in the United States and in Europe is the concern that there isn't enough work for working age people. So we talk about things like universal basic income. We talk about shifting to a 30 hour work week, right? Because we know that technology is going to replace labor. In that sense, a place like Japan may actually just by luck hit the sweet spot of

of their labor force shrinking at just the right amount so that the output will be similar. There won't be a kind of societal collapse as Prime Minister Kishida warned in a Diet opening speech last year. But back to China in particular, I think you mentioned like the debt overhang, for example, or unlike Japan,

China doesn't have an advanced social safety net yet, and it doesn't have perhaps as effective of governance at the provincial level and the link to the national level. So I think these are substantial concerns, not having enough of a social safety net, having debt overhang. Yeah, I think these are real challenges.

But my book is about how is demographics going to affect military security up until 2050, not beyond. And to that point, I'm pretty confident that China is going to have the money to buy the weapons and they're going to have the people to use those weapons. So I see China as a formidable military force. Unless the Black Swan, the Communist Party loses power and there's a civil war, these things could happen. But I'm not thinking that's the most likely outcome.

One more for me, and then I'll turn it over to Mike, Andrew. But I wanted to ask you about, and again, I suspect this is in the book, but I first read this in an article that you wrote for the National Bureau of Asian Research, which is on this concept of dual graying.

Two concepts I hadn't thought to put together. So maybe I can ask you, so this is the concurrence of graying societies in the Indo-Pacific with the rise of sort of gray zone challenges. I wonder if you could first just lay out the argument of why these concepts are more interrelated than we think. And then if you could talk a bit about how that is affecting the security environment in the Indo-Pacific.

Yes, I'd be happy to. I think that what underscores this or undergirds this idea of dual graying, why these two things are related, is that the nature of warfare is changing and the way that we fight wars is changing. And so as a result, we have to think about how important is it to have very fit young men and a few very fit young women in our current societal construction to fight those future wars.

And as we think about the proliferating concerns, the so-called gray zone concerns, the fighting that's happening between war and peace, that's what's gray, right? And so the fact that any major country is fighting a cyber war right now, but we're choosing not to call it a war. We're choosing not to say we've been attacked because we don't want to fight anything.

some call these days a kinetic war, like what's happening in Ukraine and Russia, like an actual fighting war. So what I argue is that as we see a proliferation of gray zone conflict, what's sort of in a complementary way, having soldiers and

and other military support who are older, who may not be able-bodied, whether they're men or women, whether they're located in the capital or in a rural area, they still can contribute to countering gray zone threats. You can fight a cyber war from rural Japan, and you can pilot

fighter plane from the desert in California. And that makes military forces much more flexible. It also, by the way, creates opportunities to use non-citizens or people from outside your country to help supplement your military forces. And that's why a big part of my book argument is that what we, I think a driver of increasing security partnerships that we're seeing in the region, one driver of that is the demographics.

you will definitely have fewer Japanese people in 2050 than now. And you'll definitely have fewer South Korean people. But you might actually have more people fighting for Japan's security and more people fighting for South Korea's security than you do now. How is that possible? Well, if you pull in Australians and you pull in Italians and you

pulling Brits and you pull in more Americans, you can compensate for this because the nature of the fight, back to your question, is different, right? If you need people on the front lines in the trenches, and you do still need that. We see that with Russia, Ukraine, right? There are actual trenches and there's kinetic war. So we need to prepare for that. But increasingly, the threats we're most concerned about are in this gray zone. It's interesting. The Army and Marine Corps are actually falling short of recruiting targets in

In part because post-COVID, 17, 18-year-old American kids are out of shape, but maybe because they're building the force structure that they had. They're not building the force structure of the gray zone cyber tech fights of the future. This is not an endorsement for 17, 18-year-old kids not working out, by the way. We're not going to win if we're relying just on an army of couch potatoes. We talked a lot about East Asia, Andrew, but your book also covers South Asia, India as well. It's kind of a different story, right? Yeah.

Different picture. That part of the ledger is pretty positive for India. How do you see that part of the region? Yes, thanks for asking. Yeah, so my book is built around 16 countries. And one of the feedback points I got early on was, ideally, don't look only at aging, shrinking populations in the Indo-Pacific. Look at some of the important countries for military security that have a different demographic.

So India is one of them. Indonesia, the Philippines are three already large countries that have growing populations. And I think...

I think some of the takeaways related to those countries and how they're going to contribute to Indo-Pacific security challenges and also concerns kind of apply across the board. But I'll speak to India. The first question comes out of the demographics literature and also related to the economics is this term called a demographic dividend.

So the question is, if you're a country that's still growing and you have a large youth population, can you use that youth population effectively? Can you utilize it through policy that actually increases your national power? And what we see worldwide is lots of countries can't. Probably the best example I can think of right now outside of East Asia is on the western side of Asia is Iran, right?

it's getting near the end of the period where it could utilize the demographic dividend, and it hasn't, basically. Egypt would be another example of that outside of Asia. So if India can use its demographic dividend effectively, then...

it could really leapfrog over some of the other countries in the Indo-Pacific. But there are reasons for concern. And I think earlier we talked about women in the military in the case of Japan, but women in the workforce in India is a very big issue. Now, it's a values question about where you would like that to be. But what we see is the more educated women become in India, the less likely they are to participate in the workforce.

And that is not a recipe for increasing national power, although it may comport with your own cultural norms. We really have to do a show, Jude, that looks at women in geopolitics because we're hearing it again and again here as a critical determinant of national power.

Aside from all the other reasons that it matters. The book's going to be called Asia's Aging Security, and it comes out next year from Columbia University Press. Andrew, it would have been very tempting if you weren't such a good scholar to have a title like Aging Security, Why China Won't Fight, or Why Japan Is Finished, or Why India Will Dominate, but you don't. You're really, really careful in a way demographers will respect and social scientists generally to not fall for that trap of making big headline-grabbing predictions. Can I

Can I just say, I have one more month to pick a provocative subtitle and I have a few final choices, but I'm not ready to announce that yet. Something to look forward to. And the book's not out till next year, but as they say, we aren't getting any younger. What, like Admiral Papparo, new commander of INDOPACOM may actually be listening to this. What are some near-term policy implications that you would pull out of the work for somebody like an assistant secretary of state or policy planners at state or INDOPACOM,

Commander's Action Group, what are the sort of DFAT in Australia or MOD in Japan? What are some of the sort of action items they should be thinking about in terms of security policy in the near term? Or is this mostly about a longer term net assessment you've just put on the shelf and think about? I assume there's some near term issues you've raised that US policymakers, for example, should be thinking about.

It's not a long-term thing. It's very much a near-term thing. Well, a few things are, I mentioned earlier about increasing security partnerships, right? So diversifying the group of people that we're going to rely on in the future and considering the demographics as part of that, obviously not a determining factor, but...

That's one area. Another is not to fall into a trap of thinking that demography is destiny, especially in the negative sense. I try to avoid the term demographic decline or population decline. I don't like that word. I use population shrinkage, right? The population may shrink, but it may actually be more robust or more active. So Japan and South Korea are among the US's most important allies in the world. And I would hate it if people would think, oh, well,

We can't really count on them in the future because their populations are shrinking. So I worry about that kind of demographic determinism. So that's a second sort of policy point. Don't fall into that trap. And conversely, as we were talking with Jude, don't think that China's out just because its demographics are going to be more challenging in the future. So that would be a second point. And a third would be, as we're thinking about technology and implementing new technology,

to keep in mind that the labor-saving aspects of a new technology may be a little more important than we realized before, especially for some of our allies. So the U.S. has about the best demographics of any major power right now, except perhaps India. And that, by the way, is largely because of immigration. So that could change.

We have a presidential election coming up, and we have a lot of national politics where immigration is a big factor. So our demographics could change. But right now, we're in pretty good shape. But as we're thinking about weapons that we're going to share with our allies, ones that require fewer people is going to make our allies more effective for us.

So those would be three areas. Well, congrats on all the impressive work and really looking forward to the book and the subtitle. You have a couple months to figure that out. Maybe we'll have you back when the book comes out to see how the policy choices have changed in the interim. But thanks for joining us, Andrew. Really good stuff. Thanks for listening and for the great questions to both of you. For more on strategy and the Asia program's work, visit the CSIS website at csis.org and click on the Asia program page.

And for more on the U.S. Studies Center in Sydney, please visit ussc.edu.au.