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

by Peter Zeihan

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.