FWIW: The only criticism I have of him is that his methodology does not and prob

FWIW: The only criticism I have of him is that his methodology does not and probably cannot (without work) compensate for the degree of and quality of information available to people in government today, meaning that governments have more ‘staying power’ than they did in the historical data.
I haven’t talked to him about this (I haven’t talked to him in a few years – he’s too popular now). But I suspect he would understand and agree.
So while determinism is what it is, the predictability of any cliff event (china for example) is even more unpredictable regardless of our knowledge of history.