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

by Peter Zeihan

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.

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.

No one likes moving house, so we wouldn’t relocate until an area had been picked clean. Since we tended to clear out an area pretty quickly, and because hunger would mercilessly nudge us to greener pastures, we needed to be able to easily relocate.

We needed a climate with a sufficient lack of seasonality so crops could be grown and harvested year-round, thus eliminating the starving season. We needed consistent water flows so that those crops could be relied upon to sustain us year-in, year-out. We needed places where nature provided good, sturdy natural fences so that the neighbors couldn’t just walk in and help themselves to our labor-fruits. We needed a different Geography of Success. THE WATER REVOLUTION The only places on Earth that sport all three criteria are rivers that flow through low-latitude and low-altitude deserts. Some parts of this are obvious.

A near-peer group that included everyone from the French to the Swedes to the Italians to the Dutch demonstrated that as revolutionary as deepwater technology was in everything from diet to wealth to warfare, it didn’t necessarily shatter the balance of power if everyone had the new technologies.

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.

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.

Larger farms could be more mechanized, achieving greater efficiencies and output with less and less labor. Such optimization granted them the economic heft to demand better pricing for inputs. Instead of getting a few dozen bags of fertilizer and the odd hoe and such from the local store, large farms would contract directly with petrochemical firms and manufacturers for their needs. The very rationale for small towns eroded. Globalization didn’t simply empty the countryside; it also gutted the world’s smaller communities, forcing everyone into the major cities. And as true as this was in Nebraska or New South Wales, it was wildly more true in places like the Brazilian Cerrado or Russia’s Black Earth region or China’s rice belt. Every change results in the same change: more food grown and more food distributed, but done so with less labor.

And even that assumes the rising local agricultural behemoth firms don’t muscle smallholders out, or that the government doesn’t forcibly consolidate small plots into larger, more efficient factory farms.*

As with the British and Germans before them, the peoples of all these nations experienced mass development, mass urbanization, mass reductions in mortality, mass extensions of life spans, mass expansions in population, and mass reductions in birth rates, in that order.

The pipe bomb in the ointment is that what proved true for accelerated industrialization proved equally true for accelerated demographics. In 1700 the average British woman bore 4.6 children. That’s almost identical to that of the average German woman in 1800 or the average Italian woman in 1900 or the average Korean woman in 1960 or the average Chinese woman in the early 1970s. Now, in all these countries, the new average is below 1.8 and in many cases well below.* This is a position the average Bangladeshi woman will likely find herself in by 2030.

In the 2020s, birth rates are no longer simply dropping; they have been so low for so long that even the countries with the younger age structures are now running low of young adults—the demographic that produces the children.

The long stretch of Chinese history was comparatively preindustrial until one Richard Milhous Nixon’s 1972 visit to one Mao Zedong, in what would prove a successful effort to turn Red China against the Soviet Union. The price for Chinese realignment was pretty straightforward: admittance into the American-led global Order. Some 800 million Chinese started down the route to industrialization, a route that was now less a newly blazed path, and more a fourteen-lane superhighway with double HOV lanes. Following the patterns established by much of the rest of humanity, Chinese mortality plummeted by three-quarters and the Chinese population expanded to match. China, like everyone before, saw its population surge from under 800 million in 1970 to over 1.4 billion in 2021.*

. . as well as the Chinese demography. No matter how you crunch the numbers, China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s. A full replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. As of early-2022, China’s only partly released 2011–2020 census indicates China’s rate is at most 1.3, among the lowest of any people throughout 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.

Each model has its own pros and cons. Capitalism trades away equality to maximize growth, both economic and technological. Socialism sacrifices growth at the altar of inclusivity and social placidity. Command-driven

communism writes off dynamism, instead aiming for stability and focused achievements. Fascist corporatism attempts to achieve state goals without sacrificing growth or dynamism, but at the cost of popular will, a massively violent state, epically awe-inspiring levels of corruption, and the gnawing terror of knowing that state-sponsored genocide is but a few pen strokes away. 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.

In 2019 the Earth for the first time in history had more people aged sixty-five and over than five and under. By 2030 there will be twice as many retirees, in relative terms.

Modern manufacturing—and especially modern tech manufacturing—can only function in a world in which gajillions of intermediate products can frictionlessly scuttle about. Only blocs in which manufacturing supply can be colocated with manufacturing demand won’t suffer from catastrophic disruption. That’s a massive problem for German manufacturing, as many of its suppliers are from beyond the horizon and roughly half of its customers aren’t even in Europe. It’s a much bigger problem for Asian manufacturing, where all intermediate products travel by sea (Germany can at least rail intermediate products among its supply chain partners), and most all of the raw materials and end markets are a multi-thousand-mile sail away. China, in particular, is dependent upon countries either a continent away or with which it nurses heavy historical or geopolitical grudges, for nearly all of the high-value-added components in its manufacturing system. With transport costs rising sharply, the portion of the manufacturing supply system that will face the greatest disruption is those low-margin pieces that rely upon low costs . . . such as cheap transport.

The second-largest piece of the globe that can be “gathered” to help cities survive is the continent of Australia plus the islands of New Zealand. Like the Western Hemisphere, the pair of southwest Pacific nations have far more resources and foodstuffs than they could ever consume. And just as Mexico and the United States now boast a mutually reinforcing relationship, so too will the Aussies and Kiwis enjoy one with the countries of Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asian nations run the gamut in terms of levels of wealth and technical sophistication, from hypertechnocratic Singapore, to nearly preindustrial Myanmar. From most points of view, such diversification is a feature, not a bug. It enables multi-step manufacturing systems to occur regionally, without overly needing to tap anything beyond. Add in reasonable levels of food and energy supply within the bloc, balanced out by Australian and New Zealander assistance, and this region should be able to squeak by. The problem for this Southeast Asian bloc is that (a) no one is large and in charge, and (b) the group lacks the military capacity to look out for its varied interests. This need not end in disaster, nor is it likely to. Both the Americans and the Japanese will have reason to seek economic and strategic partnerships with the Southeast Asians (including the Aussies and Kiwis). The trick for all three sides of the relationship will be to keep Japanese and American views in rough alignment. A serious falling-out would b...

The circa 2000 BCE solution was the shekel. Three one-hundredths of a shekel could be traded for one quart of barley. One shekel was equal to 11 grains of silver. Over time the shekel became synonymous with our modern concept of money. One shekel could pay a laborer for a month. Twenty shekels bought you a slave. By 1700 BCE and courtesy of Hammurabi, if someone injured you, you had the option of choosing restitution in the form of shekels rather than eyeballs. Bam! Finance was born! Armed with a commonly agreed-upon medium of exchange, labor specialization took a leap forward. There was now far less risk for a once-farmer to evolve into an anything-else. Income from anything-else could be swapped for barley at a known rate. After all, the shekel was literally redeemable for food. So handy was the breakthrough, use of the shekel spread far and wide. Good data from a hundred human lifetimes in the past can be hard to come by, but so central—literally and figuratively—were all things Mesopotamian that even the Egyptians and the people of the Indus Valley Civilization adopted the Mesopotamian shekel standard on those rare occasions when they engaged in transregional trade. It . . . took a while before things stuck. Not just currency. Civilization, too.

The period from roughly 1600 BCE to 800 BCE in particular was an era of civilizational chaos. It wasn’t simply that these daughter civilizations rose and fell and rose and fell, but that at times all the daughter civilizations throughout an entire region would fall together. China experienced some truly epic collapses. Two of the mass civilizational falls in this time window were so severe they took Mesopotamia and the Indus with them, with Indus civilization never recovering. Even eternal Egypt teetered there for a bit. Archaeologists refer to a subset of this timeframe as the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Christians, Jews, and Muslims know it as the era of Exodus.

Option 4: Give up on the mass electrification the green transition says is essential. So take your pick: go old-school imperial on multiple countries in order to strip-mine a specific material while alternatively exploiting or shooting desperate locals who try to get a bite of the action for themselves, or go without and stick to coal and natural gas. The future is full of such fun choices.

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be. Most cars—EVs included—are driven during the day. That means they charge at night, when solar-generated electricity cannot be part of the fuel mix.*

On the edges are newer players looking to find their own niche. Indonesia—with its 250 million people—is lurching bit by bit into China’s space. Vietnam is hoping to leverage its dense population clusters, excellent ports, rapidly evolving educational system, and top-down, no-dissent-allowed political system to jump over China completely and become the next Thailand. India, with all its endless internal variation, hopes to take a bite out of everything.

China’s telecom firm Huawei is a case in point. Huawei directly, and via a branch of the Chinese government, which excels at hacking foreign firms, has pursued a dual strategy for two decades: steal whatever tech is possible, and purchase whatever cannot be replicated. Sanctions enacted by the Trump administration (and doubled down upon by the Biden administration) prevented legal tech transfer to Huawei at the same time American firms wised up to the hacking threat. The result? Huawei’s corporate position imploded in less than two years, taking it from being on the cusp of the world’s largest cell phone manufacturer to not even being on the top-five list within China. Most Chinese firms simply cannot function without active American participation.

The new systems will put premiums on simplicity and security just as the old system put premiums on cost and efficiency.

The workforce will be very different. Between an alternating emphasis on customization and carrying out multiple manufacturing steps in one location, there isn’t much room for people who don’t know what they are doing. One of the great gains of the Industrial Age was that low-skilled labor could make a reasonable living working on an assembly line. But now? Demand for the lowest-skilled jobs within the manufacturing space will evaporate, while rewards for the highest-skilled jobs will soar. For poor countries, this will be a disaster. Moving up the value-add scale means starting at the bottom. Between geopolitical devolutions, demographic inversions, and technological changes, most of those jobs will no longer exist. In addition, shorter, simpler supply chains will reduce overall employment in manufacturing in general as measured in terms of jobs per unit of product produced. The end result? Widening inequality both within and among countries.

Finally, and most depressingly, there are different sorts of losers in this world we are devolving into. It is one thing if your country loses a manufacturing system because someone else has a better Geography of Success for making this or that widget in the age unfolding. Change the map of transport, or finance, or energy, or industrial materials, and the list of winners or losers will shift with it. That’s not a happy outcome for the loser, but it isn’t the end of the world. Unless it is. There is a difference—a big difference—between a rising price of access and an absolute lack of access. The first leads to an industrial hollowing out. The second leads to outright deindustrialization. Just as with energy, countries that lose access to the building blocks of modern industrial society do not just enter recession, they lose the capacity to play the game at all.

There’s more at stake here than just a few stray socks. Textiles and footwear and wiring are typically among the earliest steps in the development process. Poorer countries use these subsectors not simply to gain income and begin urbanization, but also to build the sort of organizational and training experience to move up the value-added chain into more sophisticated manufacturing and systems. The relocation of these subsectors to more advanced economies in general, and their increasing automation in specific, denies countries that have not yet begun the development process the opportunity to access what has typically proven to be the bottom rung of the process. Whether the country in question is Bolivia or Laos or Congo, the risk is not of devolving to a world that predates 1939, but to one that predates 1800.

Refrigeration too is an industrial-level agricultural technology that’s a not-so-minor miracle. Meats now last weeks instead of hours or days. Perishability hasn’t so much been banished, as managed. Something as perishable as an apple, once subjected to some very industrial-era tricks that involve a near-freezing-temperature, blacked-out warehouse that had all the oxygen pumped out, can last more than a year. When placed in cool, dark, sealed, desiccated storage, wheat can last up to eight years. For fresh stuff, modern genetics improves durability to both withstand temperature variations and delay spoilage. 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.

That leaves Morocco as the world’s great hope, and for once there is actual hope. In addition to its already-productive phosphate assets, Morocco occupies a territory called the Western Sahara, which has the world’s largest undeveloped phosphate supplies, most of which are located within a few miles of the coast.* Even should Russian and Chinese supplies fall off the market completely, the United States plus an enlarged Morocco should be able to supply sufficient volumes for all of North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. That’s great for them. And . . . wretched for everyone else.

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. Jordan is a borderline failed state even with unlimited American security and economic support and de facto Israeli management.

The first category of food-exporting countries are those whose supply systems for everything from finance to fertilizers to fuels are sufficiently in-house that they can continue producing their current product set with only minor adjustments. France, the United States, and Canada are the only countries on the planet that check all the boxes. Russia is a near miss. Russian farm vehicles are, well, Russian. Saddled with an aging and collapsing population, Russia simply doesn’t have the labor to maintain ag output with anything less than the sort of mammoth field equipment that Russia is incapable of manufacturing for itself.

Ranked from those facing the least to greatest challenges: New Zealand, Sweden, Argentina, Australia, Turkey, Nigeria, India, Uruguay, Paraguay, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Italy, and Spain. All have shortcomings—most notably in accessing equipment, fertilizers, and energy—but none are likely to face the sort of extreme supply or security challenges that will wreck production in more vulnerable locations.

Hyper food-secure France is going to get all neocolonial. Paris will establish a suzerain relationship with Belgium, will attempt one with Switzerland, and will firm up links with a willing Morocco and Tunisia and an unwilling Algeria. The French will also establish as many dependencies as possible in the oil-rich states that are part of what was once known in imperial days as French West Africa, most notably Gabon, Congo (Brazzaville), and Chad. India will spend some food to own Bangladesh, which will find itself in the worst of all worlds. Less precipitation in the southern Himalayas means the overall productivity of Bangladeshi rice paddies will drop. But what water flows the country receives are more likely to be in the spring, when they could well overflood rice production, dealing local food production a double blow. Nigeria, the only African nation that can maintain its agricultural output without extensive outside assistance, will establish a sphere of influence that includes Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, and Benin. In a bit of turnabout-is-fair-play, oil- and natural-gas-rich Nigeria will find itself sparring, neocolonial-style, with the French throughout West Africa, and doing reasonably well in the contest. Turkey was already going to emerge as the master of the Eastern Mediterranean. It will use its superior land quality, mild climate, and command of the region’s oil and trade flows not only to keep its agricultural system...

Normally when we think of digitization we’re thinking of online applications for loans or working from home during COVID or blah-blah-blahing away on smartphones, but digitization also applies to a few techs that are extremely ag-centric. First, the obvious application: genomics. We’ve all heard of genetically modified organisms, the culmination of a series of digital technologies that allow us to modify characteristics of plants to make them more resistant to salt, drought, heat, cold, pests, and/or fungus. There’s also something called “gene editing,” which is pretty similar to the making of GMOs, but the tweaks to the genome are more targeted and could—theoretically at least—occur naturally or via more traditional methods such as crossbreeding. Gene editing simply speeds up the process from dozens of generations to one. The bottom line is that technologies now exist to hack plants and get them to spend more energy on propagating (that is, growing the bits that humans ultimately eat). That increases yields while reducing input requirements. Perhaps the best example of what can be achieved with everything from crossbreeding to selective breeding to genetic modification and genetic editing is contemporary corn.

Expect three patterns to manifest, based on climate, geography, and culture. First, large-scale, export-driven monoculture will give way to small-scale, local-driven polyculture. That will (hopefully) help serve the caloric and nutritional needs of local communities, but it will come at the cost of economies of scale. 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.

The world’s biggest and most creative field corn consumers are the Americans, who produce field corn in such prodigious quantities, they feel it reasonable to process it into thousands of products, ranging from high-fructose corn syrup to faux-plastic bottles to sparkplug ceramics to schoolhouse chalk. The biggest volume of those products by far is the biofuel colloquially known as ethanol. A mix of subsidies and mandates requires American gasoline to contain 10–15 percent of the corn-based product, which doesn’t sound like too much until you realize that at ethanol’s peak, some half of the American corn harvest was being turned into a gasoline additive. The mandate absorbed so much corn it drove up not just corn prices, but the prices of pretty much all crops by displacing farm acres to corn: wheat, soy, cotton, and hay got decidedly perky from the competition, as did pork and beef due to the higher costs for feed.

The areas that will suffer the greatest impact on agricultural capacity will be those that were already marginal: arid but not desert, hot and wet but still serviceable. The pain will be felt more acutely in the dry locations rather than the wet ones for the simple reason that it is far easier in terms of energy and infrastructure to drain overly wet regions than to provide water to overly dry ones. Such marginal lands face a double blow. It took industrial technologies to turn these marginal lands green, and it took the Order to enable the industrial technologies to reach many of these marginal lands in the first place. Any of these locales that lack the river or aquifer access required for mass irrigation—and that is most of them—face stark reductions in productive acres as well as catastrophic reductions in agricultural output per acre of what’s left. This, unfortunately, represents a ginormous proportion of the Earth’s surface, including agricultural powerhouses ranging from Bolivia to Brazil to Paraguay to Italy to Spain to Portugal to Algeria to Nigeria to Congo to Pakistan to India to Thailand to China to Vietnam to Indonesia to Australia to Mexico to South Africa. Conservatively, that adds climatic challenges to the agricultural production zones feeding some 4 billion people.

For those of you organic buffs out there who refuse to eat anything that’s been touched with anything artificial, know that a roughly half-mile radius around organic banana plantations is practically nuked with (eminently non-organic) pesticides and herbicides and fungicides to protect your proclivities.

Apples and pears (collectively 21st by value) used to be the easy crop, but in the globalized Order we all decided apples the size of tennis balls just wouldn’t cut it. If you want an apple the size of your head, you need fertilizer and irrigation. The result has been a wild degree of market segmentation not just among countries, but within them.

The 2020s and 2030s will be exceedingly uncomfortable for many, but this too will pass. Best of all, we can already see the sun starting to burn through the clouds. A few things to consider: Capital availability is a function of demographics. The Boomer generation’s mass retirement in the 2020s is to our detriment. They are taking their money with them. But by 2040, the youngest Millennials will be in their forties, and their money will have made the system flush once more. On the topic of demographics, the 2040s will host two simultaneous beneficial outcomes. The kids of the youngest Millennials will be entering the workforce, heralding a sort of a return to “normal” for the American labor market. Nearly as important, Mexico’s demographic structure will be shaped a bit like a chimney, similar to that of the United States in 2000. That was a magic moment in America when we had a similar number of children and young workers and mature workers, making the United States capital rich and consumer rich and productivity rich while still having a future generation to plan and hope for. ¡Viva Mexico! Between now and 2040, America’s reindustrialization will be complete. Mexican-American linkages will prove to be far tighter and far more consequential than anything the United States ever achieved with its northern neighbor. Most American refineries will be using North American–produced crude rather than extracontinental imports. The inflation and systemic stress that come from quick...

It’s a pattern we will see over and over and over right up to the naked now. Who gets to do the high value-added work is still something we fight about today. Such employments generate not simply the highest wages, but the fastest technological and capital builds and the largest tax bases.

It’s worth noting that many systems that claim to be socialist in reality are anything but. The version that most haunts the American Right, for example, is the “socialism” of Venezuela. In Venezuela, socialism is the brand name used by the elite for political cover while they loot everything up to and including things that are literally nailed down, all for their own personal gain. We should be afraid of it. But that’s not socialism. That’s kleptocracy. Definitely not a functional -ism. And I’m sure there are some classic political scientists and/or ideologues who associate “socialism” with “workers owning the means of production.” That has happened exactly never, and I tend to ignore things that have never happened. Contemporary economists equate the term “socialism” with the generous social welfare states popular in Europe, and I see no need to argue with them.

In contemporary times, we have witnessed this trend in spades. America’s 1990s and 2000s tech explosion would not have been nearly as massive without the talent imported in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.