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

by Peter Zeihan

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.