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.

In many ways this book is the most quintessentially “me” project I’ve done. My work lands me squarely at the intersection of geopolitics and demography. Geopolitics is the study of place, exploring how everything about us is an outcome of where we are. Demography is the study of population structures. Teens act different from thirty-somethings versus fifty-somethings versus seventy-somethings. I weave together these two disparate themes to forecast the future.

This book is all that and more. So much more. I’m once again using my trusty tools of geopolitics and demography to forecast the future of global economic structures, or, to be more accurate, their soon-to-be lack thereof. To showcase the shape of the world just past the horizon.

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.

The Americans’ postwar Order triggered a change in condition. 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.

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.

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.

First comes something I call the “Geography of Success.” Place matters. Hugely. The Egyptian cities are where they are because they had the perfect mix of water and desert buffer for the preindustrial age. Somewhat similarly, the Spanish and Portuguese rose to dominance not simply because of their early mastery of deepwater technologies, but because their location on a peninsula somewhat freed them from the general melee of the European continent.

Second, and you may have figured this out for yourself already, Geographies of Success are not immutable. As technologies evolve, the lists of winners and losers shift with them. Advances in harnessing water and wind eroded what made Egypt special into history, providing room for a new slate of major powers. The Industrial Revolution reduced Spain to a backwater, while heralding the beginning of the English Imperium. 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.

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. That probably triggered your BS detector. How can I assert that the United States will waltz through something this tumultuous? What with its ever-rising economic inequality, ever-fraying social fabric, and ever-more bitter and self-destructive political scene?

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.

The center point of this book is not simply about the depth and breadth of changes in store for every aspect of every economic sector that makes our world our world. It is not simply about history once again lurching forward. It is not simply about how our world ends. The real focus is to map out what everything looks like on the other side of this change in condition. What are the new parameters of the possible? In a world deglobalized, what are the new Geographies of Success? What comes next?

Human poo proved to be one of the best fertilizer and growth mediums not just in the pre-civilized world, but right up until the mass introduction of chemical fertilizers in the mid-nineteenth century—and in some parts of the world, even today. Managing poo introduced us to some of our first class-based distinctions. After all, no one really wanted to gather and inventory and distribute and . . . apply the stuff. It is part of why India’s Untouchables were/are so . . . untouchable—they did the messy work of collecting and distributing “night soil.”*

Dalit Caste

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.

Ethiopia was particularly favored by hunter/gatherers as it blended savanna, rain forest, and vertical striations into a single neat package. But that was utter crap for (poo) farming.

Getting all the food you needed from one place required a single large-ish chunk of flattish ground—not the sort of spread or variety that could sustain hunter/gatherers. 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.

See Ayn Rand Paper

We needed places where nature provided good, sturdy natural fences so that the neighbors couldn’t just walk in and help themselves to our labor-fruits. We needed a different Geography of Success. THE WATER REVOLUTION The only places on Earth that sport all three criteria are rivers that flow through low-latitude and low-altitude deserts. Some parts of this are obvious.

Rivers helped us flush this problem. Waterwheels enabled us to transfer a bit of a river’s kinetic energy to a milling apparatus. So long as the water flowed, the wheel would turn, one big rock would grind against another, and we just needed to dump our grain into the grinding bowl. A bit later, presto! Flour.

But with the farm-to-table process becoming somewhat less labor intensive, we started generating food surpluses for the first time. That too freed up a bit of labor, and we had inadvertently come up with something for them to do: manage the food surpluses. Bam! Now we have pottery and numbers. Now we need some way to store our urns and keep track of the math. Bam! Now we have basic engineering and writing. Now we need a way to distribute our stored food. Bam! Roads. All our stuff needed to be kept, managed, and guarded in a centralized location, while all our skills needed to be passed on to future generations. Bam! Urbanization and education.

At each stage, we pulled a bit of labor out of agriculture and into new industries that managed, leveraged, or improved the very agriculture the labor had originally come from. The steadily increasing levels of labor specialization and urbanization first gave us towns, then city-states, then kingdoms, and eventually empires.

Cultures may have been able to carve out niches—or kingdoms, or even empires—for themselves along the Missouri or Seine or Yangtze or Ganges or Kwanza—but none of them would have enough insulation from the neighbors to persevere. Other groups—whether civilized or barbarous—would wear these echo cultures down with unrelenting competition. Even the biggest and most badass of all those echo empires—the Romans—“Only” survived for five centuries in the dog-eat-dog world of early history. In contrast, Mesopotamia and Egypt both lasted multiple millennia.

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 themselves in each other’s faces all the time. Wars involved players with better food supplies and increasingly capable technologies, meaning that war didn’t simply become more common, it also became more destructive. For the first time, the existence of a human population was linked to specific pieces of infrastructure. Destroy the windmills and you could starve an opposing population.

Too open a frontier and groups like the Mongols tended to ruin your life. The Chinas and Russias of the world tended to do pretty badly. Too rugged an interior and you could never achieve enough cultural unification to put everyone on the same side. No one wanted to be Persia or Ireland, constantly struggling with internal discord. The goldilocks geographies were those with solid, crunchy outsides and gooey centers: England, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden.

All this new experimentation with windmills, however, meant bit-by-bit improvements in our understanding of air dynamics. 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).

In a “mere” eight centuries humanity’s experience on the sea transformed utterly. The quantity of cargo that a single vessel could ship increased from a few hundred pounds to a few hundred tons—not counting weapons or supplies for the crew. Trips north to south across the Mediterranean—once so dangerous as to be considered borderline suicidal—simply became the first, small hop on multi-month, transoceanic and circumcontinental voyages.

Transcontinental trade via routes like the Silk Roads by necessity generated 10,000 percent markups as a matter of course. That kept trade goods firmly in the categories of lightweight, low bulk, and nonperishable. Deepwater navigation sailed around the entire problem. The new ships could not just sail out of sight of land for months at a time, reducing exposure to threats; their cavernous holds limited their need to stop for supplies. Their fearsome arsenals meant that when they did need to stop, the locals tended to not wander by and see what they could steal. 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.

There were plenty of also-rans—cultures that could harness deepwater techs but who couldn’t necessarily keep up with the Spanish or English. A near-peer group that included everyone from the French to the Swedes to the Italians to the Dutch demonstrated that as revolutionary as deepwater technology was in everything from diet to wealth to warfare, it didn’t necessarily shatter the balance of power if everyone had the new technologies. What it did do is open a yawning gap between those cultures that could pull it off and those who could not master the new technologies. France and England couldn’t conquer one another, but they could—and did—sail to lands far removed and conquer the shit out of people who couldn’t match their technical acumen.

The collapse in per-unit shipping costs also opened up opportunities to ship far less exotic goods such as lumber, textiles, sugar, tea, or . . . wheat. Foodstuffs from a continent away could now supply Imperial Centers.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Despite the ever-building technological reach and depth of the deepwater era, humanity retained many of the limitations that had hobbled advancement since the beginning. As “recently” as 1700, all energy used by humans fell into one of three buckets: muscle, water, or wind. The previous thirteen millennia can be summed up as humanity’s effort to capture the three forces in larger volumes and with better efficiencies, but in the end if the wind didn’t blow or the water didn’t flow or the meat wasn’t fed and rested, nothing was going to get done.

The harnessing of fossil fuels upended it all. The ability to burn first coal (and later oil) to generate steam enabled humans to generate energy when and where and in the quantities desired. Ships no longer needed to sail around the world based on the seasons; they could carry their own power with them. Increasing the strength and precision of energy application by two orders of magnitude redefined industries as broadly arrayed as mining and metallurgy, construction and medicine, education and warfare, manufacturing and agriculture—each generating its own technological suite, which in turn transformed the human experience.

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 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.

Germany proved the most successful at the former, with the Rhine, Elbe, Oder, and Danube decisively proving to be the industrial world’s densest capital-generation zone and elevating the German Empire to the era’s most powerful player. But it was Britain who ruled the waves, and therefore access to the trade routes and customers required to make Germany a global hegemon.

The pattern of favored geographies locked in by the rules of the deepwater era held solid in the industrial era. The empires of navigable waterways with far-flung dominions got bigger, tougher, and more lethal as they industrialized. Deepwater navigation made these empires global in reach, while the industrialization of warfare made that reach deadlier with the addition of machine guns, aircraft, and mustard gas.

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.

Conforming to the technologies of the time, the American colonies were all agricultural in nature. None of them were what we would call breadbaskets in the contemporary sense. The New England colonies of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire suffered from thin, rocky soils, often-cloudy weather, and short summers, limiting farming options. Wheat was a hard no. Corn was a meh. The core agricultural economy was a mix of whaling, fishing, forestry, and Fireball.*

Piedmont soils’ primary inputs are the decayed remnants of the Appalachians—clay high in minerals, but not necessarily bursting with organic nutrients. The natural result was roving production, with farmers clearing land, growing crops on it for a few seasons until the nutrient profile was exhausted, and then moving on to a new patch. Staying in one place necessitated hand-applied fertilization, which is backbreaking work in any era. Non-standard employment models such as indentured servitude and slavery took root in the South because of the need to improve soil chemistry as much as anything else.

The patchwork and shifting nature of agriculture in the colonies required some serious logistical ballet. Most local food distribution occurred via coastal maritime traffic; it was the cheapest and most effective means of moving goods among largely coastal colonial population centers. When the revolution arrived in 1775, things got decidedly animated, as the Americans’ colonial overlord controlled the world’s most powerful navy. Many colonial Americans went hungry for six long years. The American Revolution may have been successful in the end, but the economics of the new nation was, in a word, questionable. Expansion solved most everything.

Midwestern growth also nudged the South into cash crops. Growing indigo, cotton, or tobacco is far more labor intensive than growing wheat or corn. The Midwest didn’t have the labor to pull it off, but courtesy of slavery, the South did. 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.

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. Even that should be more accurately considered as a war with the Canadians’ then-current colonial master—who at the time was the world’s military superpower—than one between the Yanks and Mounties themselves. In the two centuries since the war, American-Canadian hostility has gradually given way to not simply neutrality or friendship, but an evolution into alliance and brotherhood.* The American-Canadian border today is the least-patrolled and longest undefended border in the world.

From Brownsville on the Texas–Mexico border to Miami at Florida’s tip to Chesapeake Bay, the barrier islands alone give the United States more natural port potential than all the world’s other continents combined.

Then there’s the not-so-little issue that, unique among the world’s major powers, only the United States has major populations on the coasts of two oceans. From economic and cultural angles, this enables the Americans to access trade and expansion opportunities in the bulk of the world as a matter of course. But the key word there is “opportunities.” The vast distances between America’s Pacific and Atlantic shores on one hand and the Asian and European continents on the other means that there is no requirement for interaction.

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.

Germany industrialized and urbanized in barely more than a generation. In comparison, the United States didn’t even finish electrifying the countryside until the 1960s. By many measures, the United States still isn’t even close to finished. If one eliminates lands unsuitable for habitation like mountains, tundra, and deserts, the United States remains among the least densely populated countries even today. Of those in a similar population density category, most have recently hollowed out (post-Soviet republics) and so kind of cheated, or, like the United States, are also part of the New World (Canada, Argentina, and Australia).

There was no need to export to maintain local balances, and so no need for the economic warfare for which the British Empire had become well known (and hated). The ability of local community banks to finance local developments prevented the sort of centralized authorities that so devastated the Russians and Chinese, or that so radicalized the Japanese and Germans.

The Americans were only truly hitting their stride when World War II began. After three years of frenetic mobilization they emerged not simply as the most powerful expeditionary power in history—carrying out major integrated military actions in multiple theaters of operation simultaneously—but also as the only belligerent that at war’s end occupied all the defeated powers.

And that wasn’t all. On the roads to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo, the Americans found themselves in control of key economic, population, and logistic nodes on three continents and two ocean basins. Between lend-lease deals and direct amphibious assaults, they now held all meaningful launching pads for attacks between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. Combined with their massive wartime navy, the Americans had quite inadvertently become the determining factor in issues European and Asian, financial and agricultural, industrial and trade based, cultural and military.