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

by Peter Zeihan

even at the height of hollowed-out globalization, the United States remains responsible for roughly half of all chips by value despite producing only about one-ninth of chips by number.

The first post-globalization decade is going to be rough for smartphone users. Right now nearly the entire supply chain system is either in Europe or Asia. The European system is probably fine. Most European cell manufactures are in Scandinavia and their regional supply systems are unlikely to face too many challenges. But the Asian system? Phbbbt. Korea is the biggest player, and Korea’s ongoing existence not only as a manufacturing or tech power but as a functional country is dependent upon the Koreans making their peace with the Japanese. A significant wrong step and the entire Android operating system will lose most of its hardware.

It may sound sexy to build semiconductors domestically, but if you want to employ a couple million people, it’s electronics you’re after.

Airbus is a multistate conglomerate of aerospace firms from Spain, France, Germany, and . . . the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom is responsible for little things like wings and engines. In a post-Brexit world, the future of Airbus was already sketchy. Fast-forward to the aftermath of the pending U.S.-British trade deal and British aerospace will be folded into the Boeing family. Even worse, some of the biggest purchasers of Airbus aircraft have been the Persian Gulf long-haul carriers of Etihad, Emirates, and Qatar Air. All their flights originate or terminate in the Persian Gulf. With the Americans abandoning the Persian Gulf region to its own fate, there is no way in hell that civilian aviation will continue to operate in the area. If Airbus has a future, it will be in reinventing itself as a military supplier for a Europe that can no longer rely upon American strategic overwatch.

Machinery is where things get sketchy, and not simply because no one really puts machinery into a specific category for data collection. Germany is hands-down the world’s best because the German cultural penchant for anal-retentive precision is precisely what makes for good machinery. Unfortunately for the world, culture cannot be transferred. No matter how much cash is splurged on it. Just ask the Chinese, whose efforts to pirate German designs and mimic German output have consistently met with failure. This leads us to three outcomes. First, the United States will be okay. Mostly. While Americans aren’t as good at this sort of thing as Germans, Houstonians come reasonably close. Second, the Chinese industrial position is utterly screwed. Even if nothing else goes wrong, the Chinese are utterly dependent upon German machinery to maintain their entire industrial behemoth. Third, the world writ large will experience a technological slowdown. Without the Germans doggedly pushing the envelope for what good machinery looks like, expect technical advancement in the space—which is required to manufacture everything else—to stall.

Anything that raises the marginal cost of transport increases friction throughout the system. Simply a 1 percent increase in the cost of a subsidiary part largely obliterates the economics of an existing supply chain. Most locations will count themselves fortunate if their transport costs increase by only one hundred percent.

Changes in transport, finance, energy, and access to industrial inputs will make it poorer and more fractured, and will dial back much of the progress we’ve come to associate with the modern era. And even that assumes everyone can continue to source their needs, and in doing so survive as modern nations at all.

This section is the most important by far. If you can’t get a widget, sure, you might not be able to manufacture a car. If the gas station runs out of fuel, sure, your life is going to be thrown into a tailspin. But if there isn’t enough to eat, you die. Your neighbors die. Everyone in your town dies. Your country dies. Far more governments have fallen due to food failures than war or disease or political infighting combined. And it almost seems like a sick joke, but food is perishable. The one thing we absolutely must have is the one thing that can rot away in a matter of months, even if we are careful.

Nor can everyone play. One of the most difficult-to-move bulk products is water. Opposite sides of individual water molecules have strong negative and positive electrical charges, which make the molecules cling to everything, even each other.* Pumped water must overcome this friction, and that can only be done by constantly expending energy. It is the single largest reason why some half of the Earth’s nonfrozen land surface is unsuitable for agriculture, and why meaningful cultivation of nearly half of the lands we do farm first required the pumping technologies of the Industrial Age. Deindustrialization doesn’t simply mean an end to industry; it means an end to large-scale food production and the return of large-scale famine.

Long ago, in a land far, far away,* humans domesticated their first plant: wheat. With that one achievement, everything else became possible. Pottery. Metals. Writing. Homes. Roads. Computers. Light sabers. Everything.

Frosts late or early, flood or drought: when the weather isn’t cooperative, sometimes wheat is the only thing that grows. As such, wheat has long been the grain of choice for most of humanity. As the years ticked by into millennia, nearly every culture, everywhere, grew wheat in significant volume, with most placing it at the center of the food experience.

And if the wheat tends to itself, then farmers can do other things for 90 percent of the year.

There were other ancient grains—farro, millet, amaranth, teff—but all required either more land or water or labor (or typically all three) than wheat—in order to generate fewer calories.

For non-wheat-based cultures, contact with a group that ate wheat was often the kiss of death. The wheaties had more bodies that could be thrown into a conflict, not simply because more calories meant a bigger population, but also because they could press spears into farmers’ hands for a high proportion of the year. The wheaties had access to more and more reliable calories because farmers could use their “free time” to grow additional crops, leading to even more calories that could support even larger populations. Sheep were particularly popular in the Middle East, with cows being the go-to for Europeans.

I’m from Iowa, a place where it rains regularly, soil moisture is lush, and irrigation is almost unheard-of. Iowa agriculture is productive and robust and regular. Nothing too crazy there.

Product options are nearly limitless, and producers can grow things nearly all year round. Desert is death. Temperate is seasonal. But desert plus irrigation is kablam!

All of the First Three civilizations married the potential of wheat to irrigation to generate the world’s first large-scale food surpluses, necessitating pottery to store the surpluses, roads to collect the surpluses, writing and arithmetic to keep track of the food surpluses, and cities full of nonfarmers to eat the surpluses.

In all cases, however, food availability remained a common restriction, placing an absolute cap on population, urbanization, technological progress, and cultural expansion. And while wheat was a willing partner, the grain still demanded labor for sowing and harvesting (and a whole lot of labor for managed irrigation systems).

And so history unfolded: the rise of empires for the next 2,500 years revolved around the securing of lands that could feed expansion. Spain for the Romans, Ukraine for the Russians, Poland for the Germans, South Africa for the British, Egypt for pretty much everyone at some point.

Three broad developments broke the wheel of wheat-induced conquering. First, the industrial era introduced humanity to synthetic agricultural inputs, most importantly fertilizers, but also pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Lands already used for agriculture doubled their output in short order, but subpar lands that had been passed over throughout history could experience quadrupling (or more) of their preindustrial output levels. Farm fields crept across the Earth. In the new technological era, the Geography of Success changed. Lands that had once lain fallow became breadbaskets. Cool, wet, low-sun northern Germany suddenly became a food producer nearly on par with northern France, while the ability to grow crops in Siberia made life in Russia a tiny bit less miserable.

It took decades for the older powers to come to grips with such profoundly altered power balances. We know this come-to-grips era as the German unification wars of the 1800s and the far greater conflicts that followed soon after.

Nor are industrial inputs merely about fertilizers and fungicides. Electricity and steel are technologies of industrialized agriculture as well. Put them together and you get hydraulics, which enable us to pump water up hills or from aquifers. We can create fresh water via desalination. Industrialization doesn’t simply increase our output per acre; it also allows us to produce foodstuffs on previously barren lands.

Refrigeration too is an industrial-level agricultural technology that’s a not-so-minor miracle.

Mix this all into a geopolitical salad that involves industrial transport options that have become so cheap and so reliable, we regularly ship anything, anywhere in the world on a regular basis. We even ship hay.

The second factor that broke the world of wheat was, shocker, the Order. By making the seas safe for all and banning imperial expansions, the Americans overturned the previous millennia of agriculturally driven conquering. The lands of the First Three all achieved and/or consolidated their independence from their imperial masters. Once-marginal lands the world over experienced explosive growth as imported technologies and inputs transformed the natures of their possibles. This “Green Revolution” ultimately proved responsible for nearly quadrupling the agricultural bounty of what we know today as the developing world.

That greater variety is the third and arguably the most important factor that ended the Wheat Age: people chose to simply stop growing wheat. In the long-lived Imperial Age, control of the high-output wheat-producing zones was the very definition of success. Reliable food supply directly led to reliable population growth and reliable military expansion. But in the era of the industrialized Order, the strategic calculus changed radically. Global trade softened the imperative of needing to obsess about wheat self-sufficiency.

Higher calorie and protein-content products such as corn, soy, lentils, or oats spread like weeds. The world’s better rangeland shifted over to animal husbandry. Irrigated lands—whether in Iraq or California’s Central Valley—took up orcharding at industrial scales.

Rice doesn’t just like heat and humidity; most versions need to be drowned at various stages of growth—perfect for warm, wet lands. Oats and barley like it cooler and drier, shifting them to higher latitudes. All grains need a dry period to ripen before harvest. As a rule, the upper latitudes are simply too cold for anything except specific wheat varieties or maybe beets,* while the tropics don’t get cool or dry enough for most crops to germinate and dry properly—encouraging the adoption of completely different crop sets: everything from mangos to yams.

Egypt grows cotton and citrus for export rather that wheat for local consumption. Both countries export their ag products for top dollar, and then import cheaper foodstuffs—like wheat—that they could have grown themselves had global agronomics pushed them in a more autarkic direction.

This banishing of wheat to the periphery means the bulk of the world’s wheat is grown in just a handful of places: the American Great Plains, the Canadian Prairie Provinces, Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin plus the continent’s southwestern fringes, the drylands of central Argentina, southeast England, the endless small fields of highly protectionist France, dumpling country in northern China, Pakistan and India to feed the teeming masses and limit the need for imports, and the great expanses of the Russian wheat belt, a zone that includes Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. (Of these, only France, Pakistan, and India grow wheat in areas that could grow lots of other things more efficiently, but for these three, efficiency isn’t what governments are targeting.)

The industrialized Order hasn’t simply enabled us to increase the total calories grown by a factor of seven since 1945; it has enabled vast swaths of the planet to have large populations wh...

If the goal is efficiency and rising standards of living, this all makes sense. But it doesn’t take much of a shift in the mechanics of global trade to shatter this interlinked system. If the geography of access shrinks, what makes the “most sense” changes drastically.

Manufacturing and energy and finance are cool and all. They have collectively brought the entirety of humanity into the modern age. But agriculture? It is the first step along the path from the misty terrors of yesteryear to the world we know.

Should contemporary agriculture unwind, it will mean a massive contraction in volumes and varieties and availabilities and reliabilities of foodstuffs. It will mean that entire countries that have used modern agricultural technologies and markets to pull themselves out of the preindustrial age will no...

Roughly two-thirds of the human population lives in the temperate and near-temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere. This hemisphere is a net food importer. About the only good news is that the Southern Hemispheric temperate zones—regions highly resistant to the coming geopolitical storm—are very lightly populated compared to the Northern Hemisphere. That makes the countries of the global South big food exporters. But considering that the collective size of their agricultural regions is less than one-fifth that of the Northern Hemisphere . . . the global South can only help so much. Any Northern Hemispheric disruptions to either food production directly, or supporting industries indirectly, immediately turn into food shortages on a scale humanity has never before experienced.

Oil and oil-derived products are critical to all things agricultural. If they aren’t present in sufficient volumes, the tractors, combines, trucks, trains, terminals, and ships that are central to producing and transporting foodstuffs and their input streams simply do not function. And forget the electric vehicle craze. Leaving aside the minor details that, come harvest time, farmers are out in the fields eighteen hours a day (or more) and that there is no battery system in the world that can handle that sort of out-charge with only six (or fewer) hours of in-charge, as well as the less minor detail that an EV ship could not recharge in the middle of the freakin’ ocean, electrification technology does not yet exist that can manage the high power-to-size requirements for either heavy equipment or long-range oceanic shipping. There simply is neither an existing technology nor an imminent technological revolution that can replace oil and natural gas in the agricultural sector.

One of the great technological advances that brought us not simply the modern age but basic civilization itself was the ability to capture energy from moving water and air via watermills and windmills in order to grind grains into flour. We now manage said grinding with electric mills. In a world suffering circumscribed access to the basic energy inputs that generate electricity, good luck maintaining not simply an industrial lifestyle, but a post-waterwheel lifestyle. Think all the way back to the first chapter. How many of the world’s varied geographies have good geographies for waterwheels? You think there’s enough of them to grind flour for 8 billion people???

Oil is typically the primary ingredient for pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, while most fertilizers’ base materials also include natural gas. The collective adoption of such chemical inputs in the late 1800s in the advanced world increased grain output by roughly a factor of four, with the developing world participating in such bounty in the decades after World War II and especially after the Cold War. Without such inputs, the reverse will be true.

Natural gas is central to nearly all aspects of the fabrication of nitrogen-type fertilizers.

Anyone who cannot source crude for domestic refining cannot produce nitrogen fertilizers.

The country that will certainly face the biggest declines in agriculture output will be China. Not only do the Chinese grow pretty much everything at scale, but Chinese soil and water quality is so low that Chinese farmers generally use more fertilizer per calorie produced than any other country—five times the global average in the case of nitrogen fertilizers.

There is a lot more to fertilizer than simply oil or natural gas. There’s a second classification of fertilizer based on a material called phosphate. Phosphate is, in essence, fossilized bird poop, which serves as a suitable substitute to . . . human poop. I’m slightly oversimplifying here, but the mined bird poop is treated with acid, ground to a powder, and tossed on plants. Its commodification and production in industrial volumes has proven absolutely critical to the rise of industrialized agriculture, especially because a) there are a lot more people who need food now than there were in 1945, and b) most of humanity agrees that storing and spreading our own poop is something we would really rather not do. Testament to these facts? Phosphate-based fertilizers experienced an eightfold increase in production and application since 1960.

One of the many complications the world of hyperspecialized globalized agriculture has created for itself is that we now grow or raise each plant or animal where it makes the most economic sense within a holistic system. For example, cattle have shifted into the Great Plains, while corn and soy dominate the Midwest. In the pre-Order days, the two would have been more or less colocated. In that pre-Order system, the farmers would use cattle manure to provide phosphorus for their fields. Without immediate proximate supplies of animal poop, farmers now have no choice but to use artificial, phosphate-type fertilizers. That has required both international supply chains to source and process the phosphates, and gasoline and diesel to get the fertilizer to the field. This entire model collapses in a post-globalized system.

Every crop needs a lot of potassium every year. On the sourcing side, nearly all the world’s potassium comes from a mineral known as potash, and internationally traded potash comes from just six places: Jordan, Israel, Germany, Russia, Belarus, and Canada.

The second means of mitigating famine is to grow products more in line with local, rather than global, demand. Many of those displacement crops that have contributed to global health and wealth these past few decades will go away. Expect three patterns to manifest, based on climate, geography, and culture.

Whether you look at it from the point of view of inputs or reach or tech or capital or planting preferences, the volume of foods produced on Earth in aggregate must decline. Second, wheat plantings will come back in a very big way . . . after they disappear in a very big way.

Most wheat is grown only in places where only wheat can grow, but it can only grow in those places so long as the input streams are not interrupted. Deglobalization tells us that in most such locations, there will be a helluva disruption. Globally, we are on the verge of a shortage in humanity’s number one foodstuff.

Third, this is a recipe for gross rural poverty. Removing monoculture reduces economies of scale. Returning to wheat removes cash crops and the income that comes from them. Since 1945 the number of people involved in agriculture has plunged by 80 percent while gross rural incomes have increased. Not rural incomes per person, but instead rural incomes per acre. In per capita terms agricultural lands have experienced some of the greatest income increases in human history. Without internationalized input flows or international export options, much of this will now unwind.

all the soy farmland in that region amounts to less than 7 percent of the soy-matching climate zones in the Western Hemisphere, most notably in Argentina’s Cordoba, America’s Iowa, and Brazil’s Parana. Unsurprisingly, something like 70 percent of the world’s corn exports and 85 percent of its soy exports come from three countries: Argentina, Brazil, and the United States.

deglobalization will not force a collapse in the world’s production profile for corn and soy.