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

by Peter Zeihan

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.

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. Even more importantly, the combination of deepwater navigation and industrialization enabled these deepwater empires to visit their new military capacities upon each other in a matter not of months and weeks, but days and hours. And to do so at any location on the planet.

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.

Some of the new techs, like the new assembly lines, required largely unskilled labor. Others, such as petrochemicals, demanded people who really knew what they were doing, because, you know, explosions.

Globalization was always dependent upon the Americans’ commitment to the global Order and that Order hasn’t served Americans’ strategic interests since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Without the Americans riding herd on everyone, it is only a matter of time before something in East Asia or the Middle East or the Russian periphery (like, I don’t know, say, a war) breaks the global system beyond repair . . . assuming that the Americans don’t do it themselves.