The Accidental Superpower Quotes

“Geopolitical and demographic forces are so rooted in the unchangeable that political action often generates little but noise.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“American involvement in the Persian Gulf has not been in order to secure energy supplies for the United States, but instead to supply energy for its energy-starved Bretton Woods partners in Europe and Asia. Put more directly, the Americans do not protect the Persian Gulf kingdoms and emirates so that the Americans can use Middle Eastern oil, but so that their Bretton Woods partners in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, and Pakistan can.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“There are good solid reasons as to why nearly every major expansionary power of the past has been based in a temperate climate zone, and why all those that have lasted have been riverine-based.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Just as geopolitics tells us that the free trade era is closing, demography tells us that the era of consumption-driven growth that has been the economic norm for seventy years is coming to an unceremonious end.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“The looming crisis of the contemporary system is actually pretty straightforward. Everything that makes the global economy tick—from reliable access to global energy supplies to the ability to sell into the American market to the free movement of capital—is a direct outcome of the ongoing American commitment to Bretton Woods. But the Americans are no longer gaining a strategic benefit from that network, even as the economic cost continues. At some point—maybe next week, maybe ten years from now—the Americans are going to reprioritize, and the tenets of Bretton Woods, the foundation of the free trade order, will simply end.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Only the United States could engage in a war as dubious as Iraq or roll out a social policy as byzantine as Obamacare and walk away largely unscathed.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“The no-questions-asked protection that the Americans have extended to Riyadh is about to be lifted wholesale.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Most shale oil isn’t just sweet and light, it is ultra-sweet and ultra-light, and so is remarkably easy to refine into light distilled products, like gasoline.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Nothing pushes down Mexican labor costs—increasing the differential—like a drug war raging throughout the country. In fact, the more violent the war, the lower Mexican labor costs, and so the greater the Mexican/American differential and the more attractive Mexico becomes to foreign direct investment seeking an advantage in the American market.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Considering how complex and ever-shifting the “politics” part of geopolitics can be, demography’s solidity and high levels of certainty can be incredibly refreshing.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Russian circles even today, but whether it was tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars, the simple point is that it all flowed to”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“whether it be from electricity production, chemical production, or transport fuels—by their own government’s numbers, 34.7 percent originates from oil, 26.0 percent from natural gas, 17.4 percent from coal, 8.1 percent from nuclear, 5.5 percent from hydropower, and only 3.4 percent from nonhydro renewables like solar and wind.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“It is something of a grim irony that the drug war is perhaps the best thing that has happened to Mexico from an economic point of view. Now, that requires a bit of explanation.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Perhaps Mexico’s biggest tragedy is that when—against very expensive odds—someone does manage to make a portion of Mexico functional, that someone has every interest in resisting contributing to a broader regional or national effort to replicate the success.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Where the British made landfall with small, scrawny, scurvy-ridden landing parties eager to trade, the Vikings made landfall with large, strapping warriors eager to satisfy more basic instincts.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Iran is clearly the superior power, with nearly triple the population and a military that is actually used to shooting people while the Saudi military does not operate well outside of air-conditioning.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“The idea that extreme growth and extreme wealth and cheap credit is “normal” is a pretty easy trap to fall into.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“Korea and Vietnam were wars the Americans had to fight not because they wanted to fight them or even because local strategic considerations were worth a war, but rather because failure to rise to battle would have generated a crisis of confidence that risked bringing the entire alliance structure down.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“The industrialization of England took nearly 150 years. The industrialization of Germany was carried out in less than forty.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“In fact, the Bretton Woods agreements are the single most important factor behind the Japanese and Korean miracles, the European Economic Community and its successor the European Union, the rise of China… and the statistical monster that is the U.S. trade deficit.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On