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.

At the end of World War II, the Americans created history’s greatest military alliance to arrest, contain, and beat back the Soviet Union. That we know. That’s no surprise. What is often forgotten, however, is that this alliance was only half the plan. In order to cement their new coalition, the Americans also fostered an environment of global security so that any partner could go anywhere, anytime, interface with anyone, in any economic manner, participate in any supply chain and access any material input—all without needing a military escort. This butter side of the Americans’ guns-and-butter deal created what we today recognize as free trade. Globalization.

Globalization brought development and industrialization to a wide swath of the planet for the first time, generating the mass consumption societies and the blizzard of trade and the juggernaut of technological progress we all find so familiar. And that reshaped global demographics. Mass development and industrialization extended life spans, while simultaneously encouraging urbanization. For decades that meant more and more workers and consumers, the people who give economies some serious go. One outcome among many was the fastest economic growth humanity has ever seen.

By shifting the rules of the game, economics transformed on a global basis. A national basis. A local basis. Every local basis. That change of condition generated the world that we know. The world of advanced transport and finance, of ever-present food and energy, of never-ending improvements and mind-bending speed. But all things must pass. We now face a new change in condition.

Thirty years on from the Cold War’s end, the Americans have gone home. No one else has the military capacity to support global security, and from that, global trade. The American-led Order is giving way to Disorder. Global aging didn’t stop once we reached that perfect moment of growth. Aging continued. It’s still continuing. The global worker and consumer base is aging into mass retirement. In our rush to urbanize, no replacement generation was ever born.

The 2020s will see a collapse of consumption and production and investment and trade almost everywhere. Globalization will shatter into pieces. Some regional. Some national. Some smaller. It will be costly. It will make life slower. And above all, worse. No economic system yet imagined can function in the sort of future we face. This devolution will be jarring, to say the least. It’s taken us decades of peace to suss out this world of ours. To think that we will adapt easily or quickly to such titanic unravelings is to showcase more optimism than I’m capable of generating.

First comes something I call the “Geography of Success.” Place matters. Hugely.

Second, and you may have figured this out for yourself already, Geographies of Success are not immutable. As technologies evolve,

The coming global Disorder and demographic collapse will do more than condemn a multitude of countries to the past; it will herald the rise of others.

Third, shifting the parameters of the possible impacts . . . pretty much everything. Our globalized world is, well, global. A globalized world has one economic geography: the geography of the whole. Regardless of trade or product, nearly every process crosses at least one international border.

Fourth, not only despite the global churn and degradation, but also in many cases because of it, the United States will largely escape the carnage to come.

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.

In the beginning we were wanderers. We didn’t wander because we were trying to find ourselves; we wandered because we were HONGRY. We wandered with the seasons to places with more abundant roots, nuts, and berries. We wandered up and down elevation bands to forage for different plants. We followed the animal migrations because that’s where the steaks were. What passed for shelter was what you could find when you needed it. Typically, we would not stay in the same place for more than a few weeks because we’d forage and hunt the yard to nothing in no time.

The Great Poo Breakthrough—more commonly referred to as humanity’s first true technological suite, sedentary agriculture—also introduced humans to the first rule of geopolitics: location matters, and which locations matter more changes with the technology of the day.

The seasonality of movement of the hunter/gatherer diet was largely incompatible with the constant attention requirements of crops, while the seasonal nature of harvesting crops was largely incompatible with the needs of humans’ desires to eat year-round.

Clearing land, digging irrigation trenches, planting seed, tending crops, and harvesting and threshing grain are the easy parts of early agriculture. The really brutal work is getting two pieces of rock and grinding your harvest—a few grains at a time—into a coarse powder that can then be prepared into easily digestible porridge (without needing heat), or, if you lived with a foodie, baked into bread.

In the seventh century CE, humanity’s milling technologies finally ground through a series of technical barriers and married the milling wheel to a new power source. Instead of using paddle wheels to reach below a structure to tap the power of moving water, we used fins and sails to reach above and tap the power of moving air.

First, civilized life may have become far more common as the straitjacket terms for the Geographies of Success loosened somewhat, but life became far less secure. With cities popping up anywhere the rain fell and the wind blew, cultures found

Second, just as how in the jump to sedentary agriculture the geography of what generated success shifted from varied elevations to low-lying desert river valleys, the shift from water power to wind power favored different sorts of lands. The trick was to have as big an internal frontier as possible with easy distribution. Rivers were still great, of course, but any sort of large, open flatlands would work.

Third, these new wind-dependent cultures didn’t necessarily last any longer—in fact, most of them were just pan flashes—but there were so many more of them that the absolute supply of skilled labor that humanity could generate exploded, kicking the pace of technological advancement into a higher gear.

Single-masted, single-square sailing vessels gave way to multi-masted vessels with a dizzying array of unique sail shapes designed for different water and wind conditions. The improved locomotion, maneuverability, and stability capacities sparked innovation in everything from ship construction methods (out with pegs, in with nails) to navigation techniques (out with staring at the sun, in with the compass) to weaponization (out with bows and arrows, in with gun ports and cannons).

The lack of middlemen reduced the cost of luxury goods by an excess of 90 percent—and that was before the powers backing the new deepwater traders started dispatching troops to directly take over the sources of the spices and silks and porcelain that the world found so valuable.

The new Geographies of Success weren’t places that excelled at building ships or training sailors, but instead were those that weren’t overworried about land invasions and had the strategic space to think over the horizon. The first deepwater cultures sat on peninsulas—Portugal and Spain to be specific. When armies can only approach you from one direction, it is easier to focus your efforts on floating a navy. But countries based on islands are even more defensible. In time, the English surpassed the Iberians.

The world’s dominant political unit rapidly evolved from sequestered agricultural communities to globe-spanning, trade-based deepwater empires.

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 “simple” economics of moving goods from places of high supply to high demand became infinitely more complex, with industrialized locations providing massive volumes of fundamentally unique products adjacent to other industrialized locations providing similarly massive volumes of similarly fundamentally unique products. There were only two limitations on expansion: the ability to fund the industrial buildout, and the ability to transport the products of that buildout to paying customers.

From the first real industrial conflicts—the Crimean War of 1853–56, the American Civil War of 1861–65, and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866—it didn’t take but two generations for the Industrial Age to generate the most horrific carnage in history, resulting in some 100 million deaths in the two world wars. One of the many reasons why the wars were so catastrophic in human terms was that the technological builds of the Industrial Revolution didn’t simply make the weapons of war more destructive, they made the cultural fabric, technical expertise, economic vitality, and military relevance of society far more dependent upon artificial infrastructure.

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.

With the twin exceptions of shortages related to British blockades during the War of 1812 and Confederate governmental collapse in the Civil War aftermath, famine is something continental Americans have zero experience with as an independent country. Food production is simply too reliable, too omnipresent, and America’s internal transport system too efficient and effective for famine to be a meaningful concern.

This de-agriculturalization process freed up labor to throw at other projects. Projects like industrialization.

Each region of the country specialized in outputs based on its local economic geography, with water transport enabling cheap and omnipresent intrastate trade, generating economies of scale heretofore unheard-of in the human experience.

All the land in the new Midwest was high quality, so there were no massive gaps between settled areas like there were in the Appalachians. This relatively dense settlement pattern, combined with the region’s high productivity and low transport costs, naturally led to the formation of the heartland’s small-town culture. Small banks popped up throughout the Mississippi system to manage the capital generated from product sales to the East Coast and Europe. Financial depth soon became a defining American characteristic. This not only enabled steady expansions in midwestern agriculture in terms of territory and productivity, but it also provided Middle America with the capital required to bootstrap early regional development in terms of infrastructure and education.

The easy movement of people and goods throughout the river network forced Americans to interact with one another regularly, contributing to the unification of American cultu...

America’s territory is the very definition of “safe.” To the north, deep, rugged forests and giant lakes separate most American and Canadian population centers. Only once, in the War of 1812, have the Americans fought their northern neighbors.

America’s southern frontier is actually more secure against conventional military attack. The fact that illegal immigration across America’s southern border is an issue in American politics underlines just how hostile that border is to formal state power. Rugged, high-altitude barrens like the American-Mexican border region are among the most difficult topographies in which to maintain meaningful populations, provide government services, or even to build basic infrastructure.

Most of the world’s ocean coasts are somewhat problematic. Flat coastlines and extreme tidal variations expose would-be port locations to such unrelenting oceanic battering that truly epic port cities are a relative rarity. Except, that is, in the United States. The middle third of the North American continent’s Atlantic coast isn’t simply blessed by an egregious number of indentations that make siting port cities child’s play; most of those port locations are then positioned behind peninsulas or barrier islands that shield America’s coasts even more.

Industrializing isn’t cheap or easy. It requires a wholesale tearing up of what occurred before and replacing wood and stone with more productive—and more expensive—steel and concrete.

Anywhere industrialization occurs it is massively disruptive, as everything about how a country functions is tossed to the side, with entirely new systems then imposed—typically from above. The financial and social costs are typically the greatest disruptions a culture ever experiences.

In Europe, centuries of simple habitation had long ago gobbled up all available land, raising its cost. European workers were engaged in activities over every inch of that land, raising their cost. Any changes to the system demanded capital in large volume, raising its cost. Anything that made even a small change to the availability of land (like a flood or fire) or the supply of labor (like a strike or military skirmish) or the stock of capital (like someone important emigrating or a recession) would throw off the balance, raise costs dramatically for everyone, and trigger massive social upheaval.

No country that has ever industrialized has ever managed the process without crippling social and political mayhem. Industrialization is necessary and unavoidable, but it is hard. Unless you’re American. Understanding the why of that begins with the understanding that the United States truly is a land of plenty: 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.*

The Americans certainly had (and have) regional disparities and their own oligarchic issues, but America’s oligarchs—most infamously their robber barons—had such massive opportunities in the private sector in large part because there were still so many resources to be metabolized, they had little need to enter government for business reasons. Economic stress did not automatically translate into political stress—or vice versa.

Partly it was a culture clash. The United States was the modern world’s first democracy. Democracies are pretty good at defending their own and tearing down dictatorships and fighting for truth and justice and all that. Long-term occupations expressly designed to bleed the locals dry? That’s a harder sell.

Partly it was an organizational mismatch. The United States is a federation—where the states wield as much power as the national government—for good reason. The country’s safe security geography combined with its rich economic geography meant the federal government didn’t need to do much. For the first three generations of U.S. history, all the federal government was perennially responsible for was building a few roads, regulating immigration, and collecting tariffs. The Americans have never had a tradition of governing excellence* because for much of their history they didn’t really need a government. Managing foreign territories twice the size of the United States would have been, like, really hard. And the Americans are, like, really bad at government.

The American break with the traditions of international relations went beyond its abandonment of the to-the-winner-go-the-spoils style of post-bellum realignments. It also extended to the nature of human existence itself, resulting in a fundamental rewiring of the human condition. At war’s end the Americans used Bretton Woods to create the globalized Order and fundamentally change the rules of the game. Instead of subjugating their allies and enemies, they offered peace and protection. They transformed regional geopolitics by putting nearly all the warring empires of the previous age—in many cases countries that had been in a shifting, cutthroat competition with one another for centuries—on the same team. Inter-imperial rivalry gave way to inter-state cooperation. Military competition was banned among the Bretton Woods participants, enabling the former empires (and in many cases, their former colonies) to focus their efforts not on armies or navies or borders, but instead on infrastructure and education and development.

The Bretton Woods system generated the longest and deepest period of economic growth and stability in human history.

Bretton Woods was not a traditional military alliance. In order to combat the Soviets, the Americans had used their dominance of the oceans and superior economic geography to purchase an alliance. The United States enabled global trade and provided a bottomless market for alliance members’ exports. Without a foe, the Bretton Woods alliance lost its reason to be. Why expect the Americans to continue paying for an alliance when the war was over? It would be like continuing to make mortgage payments even after your house is paid for.

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.

One of the defining traits of the post–World War II era is mass urbanization. This urbanization process occurred in diverse ways at distinct rates in various eras. In large part the differentiator is time. Not everything in the Industrial Revolution happened at once.

By far the most dramatic impact has been on birth rates. On the farm, having children was often more an economic decision than it was about love. Children were free labor that were de facto chained to their parents’ economic needs. There was an understanding—rooted in millennia of cultural and economic norms—that children would either take over the farm as their parents aged, or at least not move all that far away. The extended family formed a tribe that consistently supported one another. This cultural-economic dynamic has held true since the dawn of recorded history, even to and through the consolidation of the world into empires and nation-states.

Throughout the British and German experiences, three additional—and completely unrelated—issues intensified the urbanization trends that industrialization launched. First was the rise of the women’s rights movement. At its core, the women’s rights movement didn’t really gain traction until the European revolutions of 1848.