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

by Peter Zeihan

Historically speaking, we live in an embarrassment of riches and peace. All of these evolutions and more are tightly interwoven. Inseparable. But there is a simple fact that is often overlooked. They are artificial. We have been living in a perfect moment. And it is passing.

Sometimes it feels as though American policy is pasted together from the random thoughts of the four-year-old product of a biker rally tryst between Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

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 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 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.

The Americans—and the Americans alone—have the capacity to interact with any power on either ocean on their own terms, whether those terms be economic or military.