Disunited Nations Quotes

“Many condemn Donald Trump for destroying the global Order. Let’s be real here. If there is one thing that Americans on both the Left and Right agree on, it is that the United States should pursue a more modest role in foreign affairs. The push for an American retrenchment did not begin with Trump, nor will it end with him. Besides, if a single American election can upend the Order—in an era when there is no nuclear-massed superpower foe—it was never as stable and durable as anyone thought. A more accurate assessment is that despite Donald Trump’s trademark brashness, American policy trajectory hasn’t changed much. In the seventh year of George W Bush’s presidency, the United States initiated a broad global drawdown of its troop levels. That disengagement continued both under Barack Obama and Donald Trump. At the time of this writing, the Americans now have fewer troops stationed abroad than at any time since the Great Depression.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“The real question is whether China can even hold itself together as a country.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“In many ways, industrialization is a straitjacket. The suite of industrial technologies improves literacy and mobility and reach and wealth and health, but without the inputs of oil, natural gas, iron ore, phosphates, bauxite, lead, copper, and so on, the whole process collapses in upon itself.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: Succeeding in a World Where No One Gets Along

“With the Americans distracted—especially once British strategic policy is lashed to the American will—the future tenor of the relationship is largely up to the United Kingdom. Whispers that increase in volume to conversations will increase to a public debate about just how close a relationship with the Yanks is appropriate. NAFTA inclusion? Certainly. Commonwealth? Possibly. Statehood? It might not seem all that likely due to issues of physical and cultural distance, but it is the fate of most aging parents to move in with the kids.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Argentina’s economy is a textbook example, literally, of how political decisions can stymie even near-perfect geographic advantages. A unique, indigenous mix of nationalist-socialist-fascist policies have resulted in waves of massive inflation, capital flight, sovereign debt defaults . . . and yet, Argentina’s future remains bright.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Even if the Syrian Civil War ended today, there isn’t enough water and oil to feed the population. Syria will not—will never—recover. Rivers of Syrian refugees into Turkey are the new normal, for they’ve nowhere else to flow.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“The French, who started us all down the road toward fusing our ethnic identities with state power, also started us down the road of the various consequences: the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. When the Germans and Japanese followed, we got the World Wars, the Nazis, the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, and the Bataan Death March.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Not all Saudis are sheep. As befits a cultural elite that evolved from camelback desert raiders, a far from insignificant slice of the male Saudi population is aggressive and gets a bit restless sitting in air conditioning all day. Those with a track record limited to domestic violence are ignored. Those whose violence leaks out of the home a bit are typically imprisoned and beaten into sheep. Those who are a bit more vehement are brought into the security services and become responsible for beating their countrymen. And for those special men who demonstrate a penchant for more intense and sustained violence, a special future awaits.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“In many ways, the French system takes the two types of racism most prevalent in the United States and applies the worst of both. In the American South, racism takes the form of, “We will mingle, but we are not equal.” In the American North, it is in the vein of, “We are equal, but we will not mingle.” In France, the targets of racism are out of sight and out of mind, consigned to ghettos and at the back of the line as regards government services.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Russia won the Battle of Stalingrad not based on tactics or technology, but on numbers. The same proved true for follow-on battles at Kursk and the Mius and Belgorod and Kharkov and Smolensk and the Dnieper and Kiev and the Crimea and Narva and Debrecen. In each fight, the Russians brought wave after wave of disposable troops. Most of these Soviet wins took a second attempt. Some took four. In some battles, the casualty ratios were five to one against the Soviets, but they . . . just . . . kept . . . coming.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“When imperial or Soviet Moscow said it wanted a rail line to here or a factory built there, the full force of the state was behind the action, and it simply happened. In a free-market system, the government has fewer resources relative to the broader system, private interests come into play, and the court system must balance the two in an environment in which law constrains rapid action.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“In the 2010 census, the Russian government discovered more than eleven thousand small towns, once home to over a combined one million people had been abandoned since 1990.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Depending on whose numbers you use, somewhere between six million and thirteen million people died during the Soviet Union’s collectivization crisis in the early 1930s. Most of those who perished lived in the countryside, where birthrates were highest.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“All those greentech investments in China you’ve heard about? All that talk about China being the world’s green leader? Most of those installed solar panels and wind turbines are there only due to the same overinvested, highly leveraged, expansion-at-all-costs development model that has made the entire Chinese economy a grotesque approximation of Enron in nation-state form. Greentech is no solution to China’s energy problems”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Anyone sufficiently arrogant to think the poor will simply starve in silence has a particularly weak grasp of not only biology, but history. Far more cultures and governments and dynasties and countries and empires have collapsed throughout history from famine and failures in food distribution than have been wiped out by war or disease or revolution or terrorism.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Part and parcel of Beijing’s (master) plan isn’t simply corporate expansion, but maximum employment. Give citizens jobs, so Beijing’s thinking goes, and the people won’t protest things like crackdowns on press freedoms or massive corruption or reeducation camps. Bottomless loans ensure enough economic churn to keep the masses’ hands busy, the economy moving, and the Party in power.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“When China’s financial system cracks, Beijing will face a stark choice: watch its modern food production collapse, or empty the cities and force industrial workers back into peasant gardening.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Much deeper hollowings-out have occurred in places that lack the infrastructure, educational, technological, and government advantages of the American system. Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, India, South Africa, Romania, and the former Soviet Union—really any country that has attempted to modernize in China’s wake—have been hurt particularly badly.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“That leaves the British pound—but if there is one thing the rest of the world agrees on, it is that the British should never be in charge of anything ever again.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“a sharp-edged personality that oozed detailed knowledges (not opinions, knowledges) as regards Europe and Russia and China and Turkey and so on.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Argentina enjoys some of the most secure geography on the planet. The Andes to the west, and the Atlantic to the east. The only thing coming for Argentina are the Argentines themselves.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“The state of Saudi Arabia is first and foremost a medieval-style monarchy—a tyrant-king, multi-wife, family-murdering, crush-the-peasants, rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer, off-with-her-head monarchy. Power is concentrated wholly within the ruling family. Political dissent is routinely punished by torture and execution.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Non-French ethnics can have and keep citizenship, but they are de facto forced by the French government and French culture alike to live in the country’s infamous suburb-slums, the banlieues.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“What progress the French have experienced in opening their hearts is largely limited to former imperial subjects who are Christian and who speak (perfect) French. Southeast Asians and especially Algerians most definitely are not feeling the love.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“By 2016 Germany was more powerful in Europe through political and economic control than it had been at the Nazi zenith, all without firing a shot. All because of French miscalculations.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Acumen. Efficiency. Precision. Speed. Effectiveness. Accuracy. All these and more are things we think of as characteristically German. Here’s another one: dying.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“One of the downsides of single-party rule is, when recession hits, there’s no one else to scream at.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“outsourcing (shifting production overseas but shipping the product back to the home market) or resourcing (returning production home). Japan has become the master of desourcing: shifting production to another country to serve that specific market (aka “build where you sell”).”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“If the Russians ultimately choose not to play the energy card against China, China would be the only Russian customer not to feel the sting of that particular whip.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“No mature workers means no capital. No young workers means no consumption. No children means no future.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World