Yes from what I have listened to of the podcast Perkins is telling it how it is. Empire is expensive- you use military muscle to 'leverage' trade and resource access. You use banks and monetary hegemony to facilitate ongoing domination below the threat of military aggression. China learned this in the Opium Wars and took more than a century to assimilate the experience and come back fighting- now they are in a good position to understand the dynamics of other countries who were equally if not even more brutally subjugated by western imperialism- Africa, S.E.Asia, Latin America. China is building infrastructure and economic capacity globally - they can build Lithium processing plant at 1/4 the cost the west can- and this capacity is replicated across the board of commodities and manufacturing. China was stood over and subjugated by Britain but has come back with a politburo of engineers who are implementing a second industrial revolution on Chinas terms. Now China has won the trade war in commodities and manufactured goods (except the highest tech levels but even there they are gaining ground) and so China must now carry the burden of empire- how they will do this remains to be seen but they have made no secret of seeking an alternative to being held under US institutional and protocol frameworks. They are now enabling trade payments for Iran and Russia demonstrating an alternative near full service import export option alternative to US/Western Imperialism. The USSR once offered a similar alternative although it was never as competitive as China now offers. Will China become entangled in the military obligations and implications of empire in the same way USA has? In S.E. Asia it appears they are already in control of Myanmar military Cambodia and Laos. In Myanmar they are requesting assistance from Thailand to stamp out ethic resistance groups who retain territory on the border areas. China is building bullet trains through Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Thailand which will eventually go via Malaysia to Singapore- reverse engineering the rail network seized and built by Japan in WW2 which sought to cut off British supplies the to the western leaning Chinese government who had retreated the Chongqing. I would like to think China, having experienced being subjugated could be a more benign empire but is such a thing even possible? It is in our dna to organise and compete for resources. To gain domination comes at a cost as every empire in decline seems to realise but only too late- perhaps China may be different? To be optimistic ~ it may not be too late for The West and China to work together in a competitive but constructive manner- similar to the model the Bitcoin protocol demonstrates! If Bitcoin was accepted on both sides as a neutral monetary protocol enabling trade and freeing participants of coercion and hegemony, the military side of things might also be at least reduced? Britain used the cannon to then position its banks in Hong Kong. China is now in the early stages of reverse engineering the global banking - trade payments network via Hong Kong. I hope they do not simply repeat the model we imposed upon them but build something more equitable and sustainable.