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

by Peter Zeihan

powers, the American population was both expanding

in control of key economic, population, and logistic

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.

Uzbekistan will not resist Russia reasserting control over

My bottom line here is a total cop-out: the future of the . . . -flations* will be different in every region, every country, every sector, every product, and will change wildly, based on a wide variety of factors that can barely be influenced, much less predicted. I would hate to be a bond trader.

Lithium occupies the third spot on the periodic table, which, among other things, means it has but three electrons. Two of those electrons are locked up in an orbital zone called the inner atomic shell, a fancy way of saying they are happy in their home and aren’t going anywhere. That leaves one electron with the ability to scoot about within lithium metal, jumping from atom to atom as the mood strikes. Scooting electrons about is a slightly nontechnical way of saying “electricity.”

making a lithium battery without cobalt is the greentech equivalent of pissing in the wind.

corrosion (particularly at high temperatures), dental work (given time, teeth and human saliva can destroy nearly anything), and any product that needs to be able to selectively encourage or discourage the flow of electricity, most notably semiconductors of all types. Some three-quarters of the world’s platinum-group metals (PGMs) are sourced from a single country—South Africa—where nearly everything comes from a single rock formation, the Bushveld Igneous Complex. Imagine if a six-year-old made a twenty-layer cake and then somehow was able to inject frosting up from the bottom, alternatively adding internal frosting layers as well as frosting . . . explosions. Now do it all with magma. That’s the Bushveld. It’s a weird-ass geological hiccup that to our collective knowledge hasn’t been replicated anywhere else on Earth, but its odd combination of consistency and variation has made it arguably the most valuable mineral deposit humanity has ever discovered. The Bushveld practically leaks chromium, iron ore, tin, and vanadium, but the South Africans brush right by all these world-class deposits to go after the good stuff: the platinum-group ores that here—and only here—exist in an unadulterated state, unmixed with other, lesser ores. Lesser ores like freakin’ titanium. Everywhere else PGMs are found, they are a by-product of other ores, most commonly copper and nickel. After South Africa, Russia is by far the world’s largest producer, with nearly one-fifth of global PGMs comi...

The past several decades haven’t been an American Century. They’ve been an American sacrifice.

significant wrong step and the entire Android operating system will lose most of its hardware.

And so history unfolded: the rise of empires for the next 2,500 years revolved around the securing of lands that could feed expansion. Spain for the Romans, Ukraine for the Russians, Poland for the Germans, South Africa for the British, Egypt for pretty much everyone at some point.