Population decline as a national-security question
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Population decline as a national-security question is a line of argument John Kiriakou develops when asked whether elite concern with population control is a serious subject. His answer is that the conversation "ought to be out there", and that the more interesting version of it runs in the opposite direction from the usual one, not too many people, but too few.

China

He relays a report published shortly before the interview arguing that China does not have the 1.1 billion people it claims, and probably has closer to 650 or 700 million. His reading of the motive is economic rather than demographic: the larger figure "makes the case for these strong economic numbers that they're always putting out, which also are probably not true."

Greece

The case he knows best is Greece, and he is careful about the word: what the country went through "was a depression. It wasn't even a recession." Its consequence was emigration by exactly the people an economy needs, "doctors, lawyers, engineers, businessmen", to the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Germany. What is left, on his account, is a country with "almost no middle class or no upper middle class", and therefore an unsustainable economy, "because there's nobody there to create jobs."

Russia

He cites a Washington Post piece from some years earlier projecting that if Russia's population continued shrinking at its then-current rate, "in 150 years, there won't be any Russians. They just won't exist anymore", offering it half as a joke against the State Department, which would lose the country it is organised around, and half seriously.

The question underneath

Kiriakou allows immediately that immigration changes the arithmetic. What he wants named is the possibility itself: "that countries just can no longer remain viable as countries without real population changes."

See also

- China as economic threat
- Greek Intelligence Service
- Permanent wartime economy
