KA recommended this 2022 book, and I was very much interested in the thesis of its author, Peter Zeihan, i.e., that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and that the US will come out on top.
I stopped reading it, however, as Zeihan’s pile of grandiose claims grew on shakier and shakier foundations. The issue, I think, is that Zeihan’s exuberant prose runs ahead of the logical possibilities, until you’re shouting at him to stop with the cute stuff and get serious.
So, what’s he doing? First, he’s taking “geography-demography determinism” a bit too seriously, in a way that Jared Diamond did in Guns Germs and Steel, but without Diamond’s advantage: telling a story about long passed events. Zeihan’s prognostications about the near (5-50 years?) future are far more vulnerable to critique.
Second, Zeihan’s lack of academic experience and surplus of consulting on “geo-political strategy” has left him with excess certainty and a shortage of careful analysis. I stopped many times with “but what if that’s not true.”
Third, Zeihan knows a lot about the US (where he’s based) but not enough about the rest of the world, which means his claims of American triumphalism are more default than logical. I won’t speak for Europe’s future, but the rest of the world has a lot of good things going for it.
Fourth, Zeihan predicts that the World will go either of two ways: American Imperial control or Fascist corporatism. Here he is just way over-simplifying in the face of (a) the Lilliputans ensnaring Goliath (Zeihan acknowledges America’s many failures at invasion/imperialism) and (b) economic efficiency/competition putting paid to fascist inefficiency. Sure, I can see someone like Trump trying to do fascist imperialism (Greenland, all his crypto scams) — I just can’t see him succeeding.
Fifth, he assume everyone will still want to move to the US (preventing a demographic collapse), but there are weaknesses in that trend all over the place, due to Trump’s isolationism and racism.
Now, the main ideas in his book are that economies decline as their populations age, and that geographical resources and defenses are important when it comes to conflict. So far, so good. But the first assertion implies that GDP is the only measure of economic success (Japan’s “stagnation” is not really that bad for citizens). And the second assertion misses the many many ways that countries can collaborate (the EU) or fall apart (the US civil war). But those are his over-simplified predictions. What about the rest of the book?
I agree more with these observations:
- The world did very well post WWII under America’s “benign rule” favoring free trade and democracy. (Its Cold War shenanigans don’t get much space.)
- Global expansion must stop, due to a lack of resources (biodiversity most urgently) and growing climate chaos.
- America has tremendous resources and “potential” and it can (will?) ignore the world as things get worse. (Zeihan fails to mention how “American exceptionalism” can lead to (a) civil war and (b) shunning by other countries, both of which can destroy these advantages — as China and South Africa found, respectively.)
- America subsidized global free trade. When (if) it leaves the stage, then trade volumes — and prosperity — will fall. I think this claim is true in direction but not in magnitude, as the people have always sought trade (even before “America” existed). Trade will just cost more.
So those are my thoughts. Read these excepts from his book and see if you also see some overconfidence in his writing:
Bottom line: the world we know is eminently fragile. And that’s when it is working to design. Today’s economic landscape isn’t so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch. Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our “normal” is going to end, and end soon
European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive
To believe that globalization will continue without an overarching enforcer and referee [the US], you must believe three things: First, that all powers in a given region will agree to do what the most potent regional power demands. That the Japanese and Taiwanese will accede to Chinese efforts to redefine the structural, economic, political, and military arrangements of East Asia. That the French, Poles, Danes, Dutch, and Hungarians (among others) will actively transfer wealth and control to Germany as the Germans age into obsolescence
I think he’s just run ahead of himself, which means that his book is more annoying than enlightening, which is why I stopped reading it after about 25 percent. THREE STARS.