To this end, I would like to engage with the core problems Gunitsky is examining in the Russian case, but in the context of what I consider the other major analytical failure of the decade: the failure to anticipate or appreciate the scale of the Chinese nuclear buildup, which was only revealed in full in the summer of 2021. This analytical failure has, as far as I am aware, never received much attention, likely due to the lack of immediate consequences that analytical failure produced. However, due to what I view as continued adherence to dubious analytical approaches, scholars examining China continue to repeat many of the mistakes that led to this failure. The purpose of this post is to explore one key feature of this analytical failure: the failure of scholarly communities to properly appreciate just how bureaucratically siloed other countries – especially authoritarian countries – actually are.