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.

The 2020s are not the first time the United States has gone through a complete restructuring of its political system. This is round seven for those of you with minds of historical bents. Americans survived and thrived before because their geography is insulated from, while their demographic profile is starkly younger than, the bulk of the world. They will survive and thrive now and into the future for similar reasons. America’s strengths allow her debates to be petty, while those debates barely affect her strengths.

Our first good choices for sedentary agriculture-based civilizations were the Lower Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile, the mid-Indus (today’s Pakistan), and to a lesser degree, the Upper Yellow (that’s today’s north-central China), and . . . that’s about it.

The goldilocks geographies were those with solid, crunchy outsides and gooey centers: England, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden.

The development of dyes didn’t just spawn a chemicals industry, it directly led to fertilizers that increased agricultural output by a factor of four.

Steel—stronger, lighter, less brittle, and more corrosion-resistant than iron—provided every industry that used metal with a quantum leap in capacity, whether that industry be transport or manufacturing or war. Anything that made muscle power less necessary helped build a coffin for institutionalized slavery.

The biggest restriction of this new industrial era was no longer muscle, water, or wind—or even energy in general—but instead capital. Everything about this new era—whether it be railroads or highways or assembly lines or skyscrapers or battleships—was, well, new. It replaced the infrastructure of the previous millennia with something lighter, stronger, faster, better . . . and that had to be built up from scratch. That required money, and lots of it. The demands of industrialized infrastructure necessitated new methods of mobilizing capital: capitalism, communism, and fascism all emerged.

The post–Cold War era is possible only because of a lingering American commitment to a security paradigm that suspends geopolitical competition and subsidizes the global Order. With the Cold War security environment changed, it is a policy that no longer matches needs. What we all think of as normal is actually the most distorted moment in human history. That makes it incredibly fragile. And it is over.

Back-of-the-envelope math done by folks who live in the intersection of demographics and statistics (which looks a lot like calculus to me) suggests that places with fair-to-crappy demographics, like Spain, the United Kingdom, or Australia, will suffer a drag on their annual growth of about 2 percent of GDP annually. The truly terminal demographies of Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, and China are looking at at least 4 percent, while the youngish populations of America and France will only suffer about a 1 percent reduction. Add that up for just a single decade and it is difficult to imagine how the “inevitable rise” of places like Germany and China can even survive, much less function, much less dominate.

With the world’s consumption-led economies taking responsibility for more and more of their own production and becoming more and more insular, there simply won’t be many economic opportunities for working-age adults living in export-led systems, much less postgrowth systems. Even if such weakening countries survive, their workers will have a choice between steadily higher tax rates to support their aging populations, or leaving. Expect a lot of the world’s remaining labor—especially its high-skilled labor—to soon be knocking on America’s door. With every such relocation, America’s position vis-à-vis everyone else improves.

China’s labor force and overall population peaked in the 2010s. In the best-case scenario, the Chinese population in the year 2070 will be less than half of what it was in 2020. More recent data that’s leaked out of the Chinese census authority suggests that date may need to be pulled forward to 2050. China’s collapse has already begun.

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.