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

by Peter Zeihan

Sometimes it feels as though American policy is pasted together from the random thoughts of the four-year-old product of a biker rally tryst between Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Human civilization still had plenty of bumps and scrapes ahead of it—setbacks and horrors like the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, twerking, the 2020 American presidential debate—but this post-collapse intermixing pushed the technical envelope sufficiently forward that humanity never again suffered a mass collapse event.

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

The last American president to even pretend to care about fiscal prudence was Bill Clinton, a dude not known for . . . prudence. On his watch, the U.S. government did indeed balance the federal budget. Then along came George W. Bush, who ran some of the largest budget deficits since World War II. His successor, Barack Obama, doubled those deficits. The next guy, Donald Trump, doubled them again. At the time of this writing, in early 2022, the next dude in line, Joe Biden, has bet his political life on multiple spending plans that if enacted would double those deficits again.

So, have the Americans played a bit fast and loose with their monetary policy? Perhaps. Will that have consequences down the line? Probably. Will those consequences be comfortable? Probably not. But it is the Europeans and Japanese who have gone off the deep end, while the Chinese have swum out to sea during a hurricane and dived headfirst into the Texas-sized whirlpool that serves as Godzilla’s front door. Scale matters.

As a voting bloc, retirees don’t so much fear change as endlessly bitch about it, resulting in cultures both reactionary and brittle. One outcome is governments that increasingly cater to populist demands, walling themselves off from others economically and taking more aggressive stances on military matters. Did you wince at your parents’ and grandparents’ voting patterns before? Just imagine the sorts of loons they’ll support should their pension income fail.

The environment that allowed capitalism to exist is part of the “more” we’ve all become used to, and it is highly questionable whether capitalism can exist without ongoing economic growth. My point isn’t that capitalism is dead, but instead that even the Americans, the youngest and richest advanced population in the world—the people with the most “more” of all—are already eyeball-deep into the transition from a capitalist, globalized system to . . . whatever comes next.

When the Cold War ended, the Americans had the opportunity to do nearly anything. Instead, both on the Left and the Right, we started a lazy descent into narcissistic populism. The presidential election record that brought us Clinton and W Bush and Obama and Trump and Biden isn’t an aberration, but instead a pattern of active disinterest in the wider world. It is our new norm. This book is about where that norm leads.

The Europeans, in the most peaceful and wealthy period in their history, have proven incapable of coming together for a common cheese policy, a common banking policy, a common foreign policy, or a common refugee policy—much less a common strategic policy. Without globalization, nearly three generations of achievement will boil away.

China and Russia have already fallen back on instinct, heedless of the lessons of their own long sagas. In the post–Cold War era, the pair benefited the most by far from American engagement, as the Order prevented the powers that had impoverished, shattered, and conquered them through the centuries from fully exerting themselves, while simultaneously creating the circumstances for the greatest economic stability they have ever known. Instead of seeking rapprochement with the Americans to preserve their magical moment, they instead worked diligently—almost pathologically—to disrupt what remained of global structures. Future history will be as merciless to them as their dark and dangerous pasts.

Most of the developed world faces imminent, simultaneous consumption, production, and financial collapses. The advanced developing world—China included—is, if anything, worse off. There, urbanization and industrialization happened much more quickly, so birth rates crumpled all the faster. Their even-faster aging dictates an even-faster collapse.

our particular point in history—the unwinding of globalization—is little more than a momentary transition period. An interregnum, as it were. Such historical periods are (in)famous for their instability as the old gives way to the new. The interregnum between the British-German competition and the Cold War included the world wars and the Great Depression. The interregnum between the French-German competition and the British-German competition included Napoleon. When old structures fall, or “merely” persevere in the face of extreme challenge, stuff breaks. Lots of stuff.