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

by Peter Zeihan

If anything, the world wars proved that geography still mattered.

Venezuelan oil production dropped so much, the country even lacks sufficient fuel to sow crops, contributing to the worst famine in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

A precious few countries have managed a high degree of development while simultaneously avoiding a collapse in birth rates. It is . . . a painfully short list: the United States, France, Argentina, Sweden, and New Zealand.

By most measures—most notably in education, wealth, and health—globalization has been great, but it was never going to last. What you and your parents (and in some cases, grandparents) assumed as the normal, good, and right way of living—that is, the past seven decades or so—is a historic anomaly for the human condition both in strategic and demographic terms. The period of 1980–2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment in time. A moment that has ended. A moment that will certainly not come again in our lifetimes. And that isn’t even the bad news.

At their core, all economic models are systems of distribution: deciding who gets what, when, and how.

none of this is a natural outcome of the “normal” world; rather, it is instead an artificial outcome of the American-created security and trade Order. Without global peace, the world gets smaller. Or, put more accurately, the one big world breaks up into several smaller worlds (and oftentimes, mutually antagonistic worlds).

COVID is the most infectious disease to break into the general population since measles, and COVID’s fatality rate is five times higher.

In a world “safe” for all, the world’s “successful” geographies could no longer lord over and/or exploit the rest. A somewhat unintended side effect of this was to demote geography from its fairly deterministic role in gauging the success or failure of a country, to something that became little more than background noise.

China hates Japan, Japan (perhaps now subconsciously) wants to colonize Korea and parts of China, Taiwan wants a nuclear deterrent, and the South Koreans trust no bitch.

Under globalization, the Americans had no choice but to patrol the Gulf in force, and involve themselves in the painful minutiae of the region’s politics. Oil powered global trade, global trade powered the American alliance, and the American alliance powered American security. Without the Gulf being relatively peaceable—and by historical standards, the Gulf since 1950 has been relatively peaceable—America’s global strategy would have been dead on arrival.

In perhaps the preeminent demonstration of the undisputed fact that the U.S. military feels that overkill is underrated, the combined navies of the wider world have less than one-tenth the power projection capacity of the U.S. Navy.

A global inability to impose norms on the region will guarantee a decades-long global depression

We think of modern Europe as a region of culture, democracy, and peace. As having escaped history. But that escape is largely due to the Americans’ restructuring of all things European. What lies under the historical veneer of calm is the most war-torn and strategically unstable patch of land on the planet.

I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive.

the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020.

Regardless of what goes wrong, long-haul transport is an instant casualty, because long-haul transport doesn’t simply require absolute peace in this or that region; it requires absolute peace in all regions.

Everything about modern China—from its industrial structure to its food sourcing to its income streams—is a direct outcome of the American-led Order. Remove the Americans and China loses energy access, income from manufactures sales, the ability to import the raw materials to make those manufactures in the first place, and the ability to either import or grow its own food.

we’re not looking down the maw of a return to 1950s-style government services—at that point there was relative balance between young workers, mature workers, and retirees. For much of the world, we’re looking down the maw of 1850s-style government services before most governments even offered services, but without the attendant economic growth that would allow populations a chance to take care of themselves.

oddity of oddities, America’s ongoing inequality issues might actually provide some help.

In the first wave of post-Soviet exports, the Russians focused not simply on what they knew, but on what their infrastructure would allow: piped exports to their former satellites, one of which was now a constituent part of a reunited Germany.

I’m absolutely a believer in the technology when it’s matched to the correct geography. There isn’t a lot of that “correct” geography.

Zones for which today’s greentech makes both environmental and economic sense comprise less than one-fifth of the land area of the populated continents, most of which is far removed from our major population centers. Think Patagonia for wind, or the Outback for solar. The unfortunate fact is that greentech in its current form simply isn’t useful for most people in most places—either to reduce carbon emissions or to provide a substitute for energy inputs in a more chaotic, post-Order world.

But by far the biggest challenge is the very existence of cities themselves. All are by definition densely populated, while greentech by definition is not dense.

In my not so humble opinion, we need to tackle first things first: we need to green the grid before we expand it. And unfortunately, the pace of that effort is painfully slow:

the practical aspects of a potential switchover are beyond Herculean, both in terms of technical challenges and cost,

It’s no wonder fully 95 percent of humanity sources its electricity from power plants less than fifty miles away.

That said, there is a complementary technology out there that might—emphasis on the word “might”—be able to square these circles: batteries.

Germany already today uses lignite as its primary power input fuel because greentech is so woefully unapplicable to the German geography, and yet the Germans—for environmental reasons—have shut down most of their other power-generation options.*

As a planet, we are perfectly capable of suffering broad-scale economic collapse and vastly increasing our carbon emissions at the same time.

This will be a struggle for everything that is required to maintain a modern system. As such, every tool will be on the table. Some will attempt this-for-that trades. Others will be more . . . energetic in their efforts. Does my obsession with state piracy make more sense now? Does piracy in general make more sense? To think we are all going to just sit in our little bubbles and make do and not venture out to at least try to get what we don’t have is to take a very creative read of human history. We’re entering a world that Jack Sparrow would find very familiar. This is not a game for the weak.

mass digitization could not have happened without mass industrialization. It is industrialization that has enabled us to identify, locate, mine, refine, and purify the materials that drive modern society. Many parts of the world are on the verge of deindustrializing, which, among other things, means their access to the industrial materials is not long for this world. Perhaps more than anything else it is this looming inadequacy and incompleteness of access that will rive the world apart.

threatens to reduce the human population writ large over the next few decades by as much in relative terms as the Black Death effect. The impact upon working-age populations will be even bigger. No matter what specifics the future holds, we will all need to get by with fewer workers.