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

by Peter Zeihan

Between the collapse of the global Order and the inversion of global demographics, the old rules clearly don’t work, and it will take us decades to figure out what might.

Japan had in spades the most critical asset: time. Economic transformation doesn’t happen overnight. From the point that the old Japanese economic model broke in the 1989 stock and property market crashes, Japan had three decades to transition to what has become its new normal.

The coronavirus pandemic didn’t simply rob us of lives. It robbed us of what we needed more than anything else to prepare for the coming demographic devastation. It robbed us of the one thing no one on Earth can make more of. It robbed us of time.

THE AMERICAN MORE, PART 1: GEOGRAPHY

The United States has more high-quality, temperate-zone, arable farmland than any other country and its entire agricultural supply chain is contained within North America. This makes the United States the world’s largest agricultural producer and exporter. Food security is a complete nonissue.

America has more land suitable for habitation—reasonable climate, relatively flat, good water access, lack of pests, etc.—than any country in the world.

Moving things around on water costs roughly one-twelfth that of moving them around on land.

Courtesy of the shale revolution, not only is the United States the world’s largest oil producer, enabling it to be net oil-independent,

The United States is the first-world country closest to the equator, granting it more solar power potential than any other country,

Cheaper inputs—whether in the form of land or energy—helped trigger a massive reindustrialization process in America as early as 2010. That’s given the United States a head start on the broad-scale industrial reshufflings that will dominate the global breakdowns of the 2020s.

the Americans have worked with the Canadians and Mexicans to form an integrated manufacturing space and trade zone.

The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans make the United States all but immune to extra-hemispheric invasion.

Bottom line: in a world without more, the United States not only still has plenty, it has the capacity to keep it. But even better than that, to this point the Americans largely have managed to escape much of the global development and demographic trap.

The GI Bill helped them get educations. The Eisenhower Interstate Act of 1956 enabled the national road systems that enabled the former soldiers to settle anywhere. New programs for home loans enabled the young veterans to purchase or build their first homes and in doing so, combined with the new Interstate Highway System, launched what we now know as the suburbs.

A core rationale for the new programs was to use government spending to alternatively mop up all that labor, or ship the now-former soldiers off to university for a few years to defer the pain. Many debated (and still debate) the pros and cons of so permanently expanding the government’s footprint, but it is undeniable that with all these pieces in place, America experienced the greatest baby boom of its history. Between war’s end and 1965, more than 70 million births occurred in a country that before the war had under 135 million souls.

Calendar years 2022 and 2023 are when the majority of the world’s Boomers will have turned sixty-five and so shifted into retirement. This generates a double hit to labor markets. The Baby Boomers are the largest-ever generation, so their absence is hugely impactful in numerical terms. They are also the oldest economically active generation, meaning that their numbers comprise the bulk of all available skilled labor.

There were so many Baby Boomers that when they entered the market they outcompeted each other for wages, suppressing labor costs. This forced many Boomers to decide that two-income households were the only way to scrape by. That not only depressed labor costs more, but introduced considerable stress into interpersonal relationships, resulting in the Baby Boomers’ high divorce rate. Gen X has attempted to avoid this outcome, to a degree. Gen X is far more likely to have single-income households compared to their elders, as they value their time at least as much as their money.

So, yes, American Boomers aging into mass retirement will break the bank. But between their smaller relative size as compared to global norms and their offspring’s increasing contribution to the government’s bottom line, their financial hammer blows are nothing compared to the meteor swarm of challenges that will utterly destroy the governing systems of countries as diverse as China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Iran. Meanwhile, American Millennials’ very existence means the United States will at least in part recover from its financial crunch in the 2030s, and probably its labor crunch in the 2040s. But for the rest of the world, it will never get better than it was in the 2010s.

France, in a conscious, sustained effort to outpopulate West Germany, became one of the world’s most family-friendly nations. Sweden’s version of social democracy entails cradle-to-grave family support. New Zealand brims with elbow room, and in a (faint) shadow of Australian and American policy in eras past, deliberately reduced options for its own indigenous population in order to increase options for whites. But these three countries, plus the United States, are the exceptions that define the rule.

THE AMERICAN MORE, PART 3: CULTURE

As a settler state, the United States tends to be far more confident in its political identity as well as friendly to immigration than other countries. To the point that the United States is one of only a very few countries that even publicly publishes data on how many of its citizens were born in another country. Everywhere else, even the process of collecting (much less reporting) such data falls somewhere between politically destabilizing and treasonous.

Most countries are nation-states: their governments exist to serve the interests of a specific ethnicity (the nation) in a specific territory (the state). France for the French, Japan for the Japanese, China for the Chinese, and so on. In nation-states the central government tends to be the first and last word as to policy, because it knows whose interests it exists to serve. The technical term for such governments is unitary.

Mexican in-migration has held down the average age of Americans, kept semi-and unskilled labor costs under control, and filled out the broader demographic—especially in regions like the Deep South, which without Mexican inflows would suffer a demographic structure similar to that of rapidly aging Italy.

For all the economic and financial and demographic advantages of in-migration, cultures can only absorb so many so quickly and in the 2010s and early 2020s sometimes it feels as if America has hit its limit. It is more than simply a gut feeling.

In-migration to the United States hit a relative historical low in the 1970s—the decade in which America’s Boomers came of age. For Boomers—an overwhelmingly white demographic—their primary experience with interracial politics was the civil rights movement, a movement that involved people who were already here at a time when the Boomers were young and politically liberal.

In-migration then rose steadily until reaching a near-historical high (again, in relative terms) in the 2010s, at which point the Boomers were nearing retirement and in doing so becoming politically . . . stodgy. In each and every decade as the Boomers aged, the largest single immigrant group was always Mexican. In the minds of many Boomers, Mexicans have long been not simply the “other,” but the “other” that has arrived in ever-larger numbers. A big reason why so many Boomers have been so supportive of nativist politicians such as Donald Trump is that their feelings of shock at the pace of change in American society is not a collective hallucination. It is firmly backed up by reality.

This is one piece of the kaleidoscope of why American politics has turned so sharply insular in the 2010s and early 2020s. But regardless of what you think about Boomers or Mexi...

First, the Mexicans are already in the United States. Whether you’re concerned with what American culture feels like or what the labor market looks like, the great Mexican wave has not only come, it is over. Net migration of Mexicans to the United States peaked in the early 20...

Second, even among the most nativist strains of American political thinking, room has been found for Mexicans. In just two years, none other than Donald Trump went from openly condemning Mexican migrants as rapists and “bad hombres” to embracing Mexico in trade and security deals that took bilateral relations to their friendliest and most productive in the history of both republics.

China’s population path turned terminal two decades ago. Based on whose statistics you’re using, the average Chinese citizen aged past the average American citizen sometime between 2017 and 2020. 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

Most of the world (China included) imports the vast majority of its energy as well as the inputs used to grow its food. Most of the world (China included) is dependent upon trade to keep its population not simply wealthy and healthy, but alive. Remove that and global (and Chinese) mortality levels will rise even as baked-in demographic trends mean birth rates will continue to fall.

The average grocery store today has about forty thousand individual items, up from about two hundred at the dawn of the twentieth century. The humble grocery is a technological miracle that enables me to source nearly anything I need from anywhere, anytime I feel the need to experiment with some new wild-ass crazy cuisine combo.

The ingredients of today’s industrial and consumer goods are only available because they can be moved from—literally—halfway around the world at low costs and high speeds and in perfect security. Phones, fertilizers, oil, cherries, propylene, single-malt whiskey . . . you name it, it is in motion. All. The. Time. Transportation is the ultimate enabler.

Transport technologies, on the other hand, profoundly alter our relationship with our geography. Today you can jump continents in a few hours. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it was almost never this way.

For most people, your life, your town, and your livelihood were circumscribed by how far you were willing to walk in a day with a crushing load on your back. That kept towns small. Before industrial techs remade the world, “urban” areas required nearly a half an acre of farmland per resident to prevent starvation—over seven times the land we use today, plus another one hundred times as much area in forestland to produce charcoal to cook and see the population through the winter. It made cities stay small. Grow too big and either a) food must come from too far away (in other words, you starve), or b) you cut down your forests to grow more food locally and the cutting-edge technology of the day—fire—is denied you (you starve while also freezing to death).

Rome’s roads stretched from Glasgow to Marrakech to Baghdad to Odessa, and were roughly equivalent in total length to the roads of modern-day . . . Maine. The Roman road network took six centuries—one billion labor-days—to construct, to say nothing of maintenance.

Concrete and asphalt, chemical preservatives and refrigeration are only a few of those pesky industrial-era technologies that didn’t come around until the 1800s. Efficient, regular overland transport for bulk goods, even over relatively short distances, was not just difficult but also economically impossible for just about all of human history.

Even breadbaskets could not reliably feed themselves. Between 1500 and 1778, France suffered several national famines (and dozens of regional famines). Yes, that France—the country that has been Europe’s largest and most reliable food producer stretching back a millennium, the country that has three SEPARATE agricultural regions, the country that had, bar none, the best internal transport system of the preindustrial world.

While a camel could move a quarter ton and ox-drawn carts around a ton, even the earliest bulk ships could move several hundred tons at a fraction of the price per ton. The Romans famously imported most of their capital’s food from Egypt. Remember those better-than-world-class Roman roads? In 300 CE it cost more to move grain 70 miles on those roads than it did to sail it some 1,400 miles from Egypt to Rome.

At the close of the preindustrial era, most economies were still either self-contained or subjugated in one way or another, with the cities that enjoyed navigable rivers or safe coasts largely dominating. For while the economics and mechanics of overseas travel had improved remarkably over the centuries, overland travel had only seen occasional improvements.

Getting man to the moon was cool and all, but humanity’s greatest trick to date is building machines to get grain from more than fifty miles inland to the water. And to do so while still making a profit!

In Europe, the shift from carriage to rail reduced the cost of internal transport by a factor of eight, enabling the rapid massing of nouns of all kinds at economically sustainable prices, whether the nouns in question be foodstuffs, coal, iron ore, or soldiers.

First, the steam engine was invented well before steel became available in large quantities. The early steamships were still made of wood. Steam engines ran on coal. Coal burns at over 3,000 degrees. It doesn’t take a doctorate in chemistry to understand the complication.

Much of the early Industrial Age logistical needs of the British Empire revolved around the establishment and protection of far-flung coaling stations like Aden and Perim on the Bab el-Mandeb, Hong Kong and Singapore in Southeast Asia, Fanning Island and Fiji in the central Pacific, Australia and New Zealand in the southwest Pacific, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Halifax in Canada, Bermuda in the central Atlantic, and Gibraltar and Malta in the Mediterranean. The Brits were pretty fly on the waves, but building an empire still takes time and effort. Technological requirements shaped the empire as much as the other way around.

By 1940, oil-powered internal combustion engines started replacing coal-powered steam, increasing ranges, decreasing fuel-cargo requirements, and breaking the link between merchant marines and imperial-managed coal stations. Just as coal-fueled steam power trickled from the railways to the sea-lanes, now oil-powered internal combustion trickled back. Each advance helped make both transoceanic and inland transportation more regular and predictable. Costs plummeted, cargoes soared, reliability improved, and goods were moving on a scale hitherto undreamt of.

Global trade before the modern era was a trickling dribble, barely a rounding error by the standards of the early twenty-first century. The East India Company traded about 50 tons of tea a year at the start of the nineteenth century and 15,000 toward the end of it. Today that same 15,000 tons is loaded or unloaded somewhere in the world every forty-five seconds or so.

First, industrial techs became ever easier to apply. Forging steel is more difficult than fashioning it into rail lines, which is more difficult than laying the rail lines, which is more difficult than operating a train, which is more difficult than filling a railcar.

Second, industrial techs have become ever more difficult to maintain. The ability to diversify supply systems over any distance means it is economically advantageous to break up manufacturing into dozens, even thousands of individual steps.

The workforce that purifies silicon dioxide does not and cannot create silicon wafers, does not and cannot build motherboards, and does not and cannot code.

This combination of reach and specialization takes us to a very clear, and foreboding, conclusion: no longer do the goods consumed in a place by a people reflect the goods produced in a place by a people. The geographies of consumption and production are unmoored.