The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

The world of the past few decades has been the best it will ever be in our lifetime. Instead of cheap and better and faster, we’re rapidly transitioning into a world that’s pricier and worse and slower. Because the world—our world—is breaking apart.

Anything that made muscle power less necessary helped build a coffin for institutionalized slavery.

Similarly, electricity didn’t just expand worker productivity, it generated light, which manufactured time. In pushing back the night, people had more hours to (learn to) read, expanding literacy to the masses. It granted women the possibility of a life not utterly committed to garden-, house-, and child-care. No electricity, no women’s rights movements.

The American story is the story of the perfect Geography of Success. That geography determines not only American power, but also America’s role in the world.

The American-Canadian border today is the least-patrolled and longest undefended border in the world.

The Americans were only starting to hit their stride when the industrial wave crashed upon American shores at the end of the 1800s. America’s vast size kept land costs low. Its river network kept capital costs low. An open immigration system kept labor costs low. The low cost of preindustrial inputs changed the economics of industrialization in America, even as the lack of local geopolitical competition meant there was never a national security impulse to accelerate industrialization.

When much of the economic rationale for having children evaporates, people do what comes naturally: they have fewer of them.

In fact, nearly all the population gains in the developed world since 1965—overall a greater than 50 percent increase—are from longer life spans.

In essence, the Japanese read the writing on the wall in the 1980s. They saw how their American security guarantor resented product dumping and started a multi-decade effort to instead manufacture goods within their target markets. In particular, this concept of “build where you sell” has become Toyota’s new corporate mantra.

The central defining trait in all this work is safe, cheap transport. Inhibit that and the rest of . . . everything simply falls apart.

Perhaps the most jarring issue all countries and companies must adapt to is the Americans not simply giving up their role as the global guarantor of order, but transforming into active agents of disorder.

What most do not realize is that while bad economic management obviously culminates in currency collapses, so too does good economic management.

Since the Cold War’s end, nearly all peoples have gotten richer, but more important for the world of finance, the time-compressed nature of the modernization process means all peoples have gotten older.

Zones for which today’s greentech makes both environmental and economic sense comprise less than one-fifth of the land area of the populated continents, most of which is far removed from our major population centers.

It’s no wonder fully 95 percent of humanity sources its electricity from power plants less than fifty miles away.

The supply chain agony of 2021 was primarily about whiplashing demand. Deglobalization will instead beat us about the head and shoulders with instability in supply.

The Koreans are the people who lacked a sufficiently large drydock to build a supertanker, so they built the ship in halves and then built the drydock around the halves to finish the project.

But above all, wheat just isn’t particularly finicky. As many farmers half-joke, “wheat is a weed.”

There simply is neither an existing technology nor an imminent technological revolution that can replace oil and natural gas in the agricultural sector.

We are completely capable as a species of devolving into a fractured, dark, poor, hungry world while still increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

*Fun fact: the Trump administration’s efforts to build a meaningful border wall first required the establishment of a web of roads for the wall’s construction and maintenance. That new infrastructure made drug smuggling and illegal immigration easier, not more difficult.

Incidentally, we’ve seen this delayed and staged upgrading time and time again in the United States, whether it be for roads or rail lines or power lines or telephones or cell phones or broadband. Such staged development might seem to make the United States somewhat less advanced than countries like Germany or Japan or the Netherlands or Korea, where such processes occur at a breakneck pace, but it also means the American modernization process is (far) cheaper and less of a strain on the country’s financial capacity. It isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Once industrial techs enabled the German population to expand, Germans quickly discovered they had nowhere to expand into, part and parcel of why Hitler was so obsessed with munching on the horizon.

You can have organic foods or environmentally friendly foods. You cannot have both.