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.

My first three books were about nothing less than the fall and rise of nations. About exploring the “big picture” of the world to come.

Since 1945 the world has been the best it has ever been. The best it will ever be.

this world—our world—is doomed. 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.

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.

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.

Third, shifting the parameters of the possible impacts . . . pretty much everything. Our globalized world is, well, global. A globalized world has one economic geography: the geography of the whole. Regardless

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.

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 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.

From the first real industrial conflicts—the Crimean War of 1853–56, the American Civil War of 1861–65, and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866—it didn’t take but two generations for the Industrial Age to generate the most horrific carnage in history, resulting in some 100 million deaths in the two world wars. One of the many reasons why the wars were so catastrophic in human terms was that the technological builds of the Industrial Revolution didn’t simply make the weapons of war more destructive, they made the cultural fabric, technical expertise, economic vitality, and military relevance of society far more dependent upon artificial infrastructure.

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.

Less than ideal setups for farming, combined with geographic nudges in the general direction of urbanization, pushed the hard-scrabble colonists in decidedly nonagricultural directions, leading to value-added products like crafts and textiles . . . something that put them into de facto economic conflict with Britain, who saw that particular part of the imperial economy as something the Imperial Center was supposed to dominate.

Between the Great Lakes and the Greater Mississippi, everyone in those first two big settlement waves landed within 150 miles of the world’s greatest navigable waterway system on some of the world’s best farmland. The math was pretty easy.

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.

Industrialization could and did happen in the United States, but the transformation was slower and less jarring, giving Americans generations to adapt to change.

America’s industrial splash also didn’t have a huge impact globally. Unique among the major powers, the American population was both expanding and wealthy. Industrial output—particularly in the Northeast and the Steel Belt—could be easily absorbed by America’s own population.

The Americans have never had a tradition of governing excellence

The American break with the traditions of international relations went beyond its abandonment of the to-the-winner-go-the-spoils style of post-bellum realignments. It also extended to the nature of human existence itself, resulting in a fundamental rewiring of the human condition.

At war’s end the Americans used Bretton Woods to create the globalized Order and fundamentally change the rules of the game. Instead of subjugating their allies and enemies, they offered peace and protection.

As the 1990s unfolded, the Americans somewhat lazily segued into an amorphous middle area. They would continue to uphold the Order so long as the Europeans and Japanese granted them deference in regional defense planning. Given that the Soviet Union was gone, the Russians were in disarray, and the Islamic world was more or less quiet, the costs to the Europeans seemed low and the benefits high. The biggest issue the NATO alliance faced was the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a rather esoteric event whose spillover didn’t threaten the security of a single NATO country. The hottest event in the Middle East was the occasional pop of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In Asia, China may have been rising with the unwinding of the Mao cult, but to think of China as a serious military power was borderline laughable. In such a benign environment, no one thought much about rocking the proverbial boat.

The post–Cold War era is possible only because of a lingering American commitment to a security paradigm that suspends geopolitical competition and subsidizes the global Order. With the Cold War security environment changed, it is a policy that no longer matches needs. What we all think of as normal is actually the most distorted moment in human history. That makes it incredibly fragile. And it is over.

there is nothing about it that was normal. 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.

But even if the Americans choose to continue holding up the world’s collective civilizational ceiling, there was nothing about the heyday of globalization that is sustainable. The halcyon days of 1980–2015 are over. The collapse in birth rates that began across the developed world in the 1960s and across the developing world in the 1990s now has decades of steam behind it.

A central factor in every growth story that accompanies industrialization is that much of the economic growth comes from a swelling population. What most people miss is that there’s another step in the industrializationcum-urbanization process: lower mortality increases the population to such a degree that it overwhelms any impact from a decline in birth rates . . . but only for a few decades. Eventually gains in longevity max out, leaving a country a greater population, but with few children. Yesterday’s few children leads to today’s few young workers leads to tomorrow’s few mature workers. And now, at long last, tomorrow has arrived.

China, like everyone before, saw its population surge from under 800 million in 1970 to over 1.4 billion in 2021.*

No matter how you crunch the numbers, China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history.

The country’s demographic contraction is now occurring just as quickly as its expansion, with complete demographic collapse certain to occur within a single generation. China is amazing, just not for the reasons most opine. The country will soon have traveled from preindustrial levels of wealth and health to postindustrial demographic collapse in a single human lifetime. With a few years to spare.

In most cases these countries are extractive economies that ship out this or that raw commodity, using the proceeds to supply their population with imported food and/or consumer goods. In many ways they’ve managed to access portions of the industrialization process—most notably lower mortality, more reliable food supplies, increased urbanization, and population booms—without experiencing the bits that make advancement stick: increased educational levels, a modernized state, a value-added economic system, social progress, industrial development, or technological achievement.

But in an unsafe, fractured world where trade is sharply circumscribed, outright national collapse will by far not be the biggest problem these peoples face. In these countries the very population is vulnerable to changes farther abroad. The industrial technologies that reduce mortality and raise standards of living cannot be uninvented, but if trade collapses, these technologies can be denied.

Collectively, storing every drop and relocating some 25 billion gallons annually enables Fort Collins, Estes Park, Greeley, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Greater Denver to exist. Not to mention the near entirety of the state’s agricultural sector.

Deglobalization doesn’t simply mean a darker, poorer world, it means something far worse. An unraveling.

The world currently has two reasonably disturbing and disturbingly reasonable examples as to what this unraveling might look like: Zimbabwe and Venezuela. In both cases mismanagement par excellence destroyed the ability of both countries to produce their for-export goods—foodstuffs in the case of Zimbabwe, oil and oil products in the case of Venezuela—resulting in funds shortages so extreme, the ability of the countries to import largely collapsed. In Zimbabwe, the end result was more than a decade of negative economic growth, generating outcomes far worse than those of the Great Depression, with the bulk of the population reduced to subsistence farming. Venezuela wasn’t so . . . fortunate. It imported more than two-thirds of its foodstuffs before its economic collapse. 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.

The word you are looking for to describe this outcome isn’t “deglobalize” or even “deindustrializ...

The American-led Order (big O) did more than change the rules of the game; it institutionalized order (little o), which in turn allowed industrialization and urbanization to spread everywhere. That shifted the global demographic from one of lots of children to lots of young and mature workers, generating a sustained consumption and investment boom the likes of which humanity had no previous experience with.

But “optimal” is not the same thing as “natural.” Everything about this moment—from the American rewiring of the security architecture to the historically unprecedented demographic structure—is artificial. And it is failing.

There are a number of ways down for countries looking down the maw of demographic oblivion and globalization’s collapse, but they all share something in common: reduced interaction means reduced access means reduced income means fewer economies of scale means less labor specialization means reduced interaction. Shortage forces people—forces countries—to look after their own needs. The value-added advantages of continuity and labor specialization wither. Everyone becomes less efficient. Less productive. And that means less of everything: not just electronics but electricity, not just automobiles but gasoline, not just fertilizer but food. The parts are less than the sum. And it compounds. Electricity shortages gut manufacturing. Food shortages gut the population. Fewer people means less chance of keeping anything that requires specialized labor working. Say, things like road construction or the electrical grid or food production.

That is what “decivilization” means: a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage, but destroy, the bedrock of what makes the modern world function. Not every location had the right geography to make a go of civilization before the Order. Not e...

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.

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.

More products. More players. Bigger markets. More markets. Easier transport. More interconnectivity. More trade. More capital. More technology. More integration. More financial penetration. More and bigger and bigger and more. A world of more.

Ever since Columbus sailed the ocean blue, human economics have been defined by this concept of more. The world’s evolution within the idea of more, this reasonable expectation of more, is ultimately what destroyed the old economies of the pre-deepwater imperial and feudal systems. New products and markets and players and wealth and interactions and interdependencies and expansions required new methods of managing the new relationships. Humanity developed new economic models, with the most successful and durable ones proving to be fascist corporatism, command-driven communism, socialism, and capitalism. Competition among such systems—among these -isms—has defined the past few centuries of human history.

all economic models are systems of distribution: deciding who gets...

The core idea to all truly socialist structures, however, is that government belongs as an inseparable part of the economic system. The debate is over how central the governmental role should be and how the government should use its power and reach to shape or maintain society. Canada and Germany are probably the best contemporary examples of well-run socialist systems. The Italian, Brazilian, and South African versions of socialism could . . . use some work.*

Contemporary “Communist” China far more closely resembles fascism than socialism, much less communism. The same goes for post–Arab Spring Egypt.

Capitalism and socialism are broadly compatible with democracy and all the political noise and chaos that comes with it. Command-driven communism and fascist corporatism are far more politically . . . quiet.

Geopolitics tells us the post–World War II and especially the post–Cold War economic booms were artificial and transitory. Going back to something more “normal” by definition requires . . . shrinkage. Demographics tells us that the number and collective volume of mass-consumption-driven economies has already peaked. In 2019 the Earth for the first time in history had more

Combine geopolitics and demographics and we know there will be no new mass consumption systems. Even worse, the pie that is the global economy isn’t going to simply shrink; it is being fractured into some very nonintegrated pieces, courtesy of American inaction.