Peter Zeihan: The End of the World Is Just the Beginning (Book Review)

Peter Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist who once worked for the famous private intelligence firm Stratfor. He published this 512 page book in 2022. I've also read his first book 'Accidental Superpower' (2014), and this new book expands on many of those ideas to forecast the future of our world. 

In 'The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization' Zeihan argues that the world is going to rapidly de-globalize in the 2020s and 2030s. He moves through various aspects of the evolving world situation: demographics, finance, transportation, manufacturing, and the availability of food. His thesis is that the world is collapsing in all of these sectors, but some world regions will do better than others, and these regions might have a chance to rebuild after 2040.

Far from being the future world superpower, China will collapse in the 2020s. No matter how one evaluates China, and Zeihan evaluates it from many angles, China is among the most vulnerable and weakest nations on earth. According to Zeihan, China will be lucky if a third of its population doesn't starve to death in the coming years, and there's no possibility that the contemporary communist country of China will even exist in twenty years. China is destined, simply by the present statistical trends (not factoring in starvation), to lose half its population by 2060, and this catastrophic loss of people will effect everything else. China is still poor in comparison to America or Europe or Japan, and as the population shrinks and manufacturing becomes less competitive, foreign investment will cease and China will be left mired in desperate decline. The vast majority of China's imports and exports are operating on the world's longest supply lines, and America will no longer protect them. China doesn't have the military to protect its own supply lines nor source the raw materials it needs from other countries. The result is that China will run out of everything and collapse. China imports 70% of its oil, and the majority comes from a Middle East which America is no longer stabilizing, China doesn't have the military or the allies to move in and stabilize its oil supply. With enemies Japan and Taiwan right off its coast, and a whole string of rivals situated along its supply lines, China won't be able to get much of anything into the country without being randomly tariffed, pirated, or blocked. Nobody in East Asia gets along well with each other, and without America separating them the region is likely to sink back into perpetual conflict over the region's scarce resources. China is in massive debt, China has very few natural resources, China has no allies, China is running out of water, China is depopulating, China is surrounded by enemies, China has no adequate military, China is full of corruption, China's market is vastly distorted towards exports and real estate and doesn't have much consumption, China is at the bottom of the value added chain, China can't innovate, China's productivity is declining. Basically everything about China is a disaster. China will lose a war with basically anyone because America/India/Japan can just block the Straits of Malacca and prevent China from getting oil shipments... and then just sit back and watch China implode from the inside out. Considering that China's neighbors all hate it, and China has invaded almost all of them, the chances of war are not that unlikely, and thus neither is China's doom.

In contrast to China, Zeihan believes North America will be the last continent standing after the collapse. America's population will grow substantially in the coming decades while China's population is collapsing into geriatric oblivion. America is among the only developed countries on earth with decently healthy demographics, it's not aging into irrelevance. Its demographic structure provides the American system with financial resources, people's investments, to keep its companies innovating and building new things. In contrast, China doesn't even have a reliable stock market, and soon it won't have enough people to invest in anything. North America, especially the United States, has more natural resources than any region on the planet. It has more oil than the entire Middle East. Global warming is actually making the American Midwest more agriculturally productive by increasing humidity and rainfall while reducing frost damage. 

Zeihan looks past America's endless culture wars. He points out that America has never been "well governed" precisely because it doesn't need to be well government. Unlike China, which has to invest enormous amounts of money and time and labor into maintaining a huge infrastructure system to connect its badly integrated geography, America is already integrated in the most secure way possible. America's river systems are more extensive then the rest of the world combined, and they cost next to nothing to maintain. Water transport is many times more efficient and cheaper than anything manmade or land based (like China's rail network). In short, American political chaos is a cultural side show. The reality is that America is so spoiled by its own natural wealth that it can afford to indulge in all kinds of destabilizing cultural insanity because its success is simply baked into the country's geopolitical nature. Zeihan foresees more integration for NAFTA. Mexico's younger demographic profile will provide America with a consumer market as it ages and a lower cost manufacturing replacement as China collapses.

Besides America, Zeihan foresees France, Scandinavia, and, shockingly, Argentina doing well in the de-globalized world. For different reasons, these regions all have the right mix of demographics/geography/autarky/military capabilities to get what they need as globalization falls apart. The other countries that will do well are those able to secure connections to the North American system. The Anglosphere: Britain, Australia, and New Zealand are already moving closer to America in preparation for the coming changes. Iceland, Japan, and Taiwan will do the same. Zeihan also sees Columbia forming a close relationship with the United States in the coming years, a move they'll initially make in desperation.

There's much more in this book that's worth reading. I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in geopolitics or history or current events. It's almost an entire education in one book. However, there were a couple of weak points that I wished Zeihan would have covered more thoroughly. 

Firstly, the entire thesis of the book is based on the idea that America will stop its sponsorship of what Zeihan calls "the Order:" the post-WWII globalized Bretton Woods system that America sponsored and maintains via its own massive military spending and economic management. The Order is what allowed for the development of free trade on a truly global level for the first time in human history. The Order allowed many unfortunate countries like China to suddenly "enter the game" and begin developing. Zeihan claims that America only sponsored the Order because it was trying to contain the Soviet Union, but now that the Soviets have collapsed there's no reason for America to continue maintaining globalization. I wish Zeihan would have spent more time explaining his confidence that America will withdraw. After all, there are several examples in history and modern times of countries simply choosing to maintain overextended empires that serve no obvious economic purposes (the later British Empire, for example, or contemporary Russia). Is it not possible, given America's natural easy capital surplus, that globalization will be maintained simply for moral or cultural reasons?

Secondly, and this is a little removed from pure geopolitics, I think the American culture wars are a little more relevant to national strength than Zeihan gives them credit for. America is inordinately blessed, but so was oil rich Venezuela before the entire country was permanently destroyed by government mismanagement and bad ideology. Even America probably isn't invulnerable to epic stupidity. 

What can Christians glean from this book? I found this book highly relevant to Christian strategic planning. My main takeaway was that North America is going to remain the center of world civilization for the foreseeable future. There is no competitor, especially not China. Even if America declines, it will remain on top of a heap of even more rapidly declining countries. What happens in America matters. As the world de-globalizes, America will remain the "city on a hill," the one place on earth where the golden age can be maintained in some form. What happens in North America will be idealized and envied around the world for a long time to come. America is the cultural and religious battleground of the present and future. It's a battleground we can't afford to ignore. English, and to a lesser degree Spanish, will continue to be the language of the world's elite, and the language of cultural and intellectual discussion. Christians need to cultivate discourse power in North America.

Another lesson is humility. We're not as important as we think we are. The long term forecasts Zeihan makes in this book are based on factors that are barely under human control. The rise and fall of civilizations is truly in God's hands. Christians who are used to saving the world's impoverished people are in for a rude awakening when mass starvation sets in. Neither we, nor anyone else, will have much control over what's coming. Zeihan says that nothing we can do will change what's about to happen, and any real planning to avert this fate was missed decades ago. Humanity is not able to change huge demographic trends, raw material geographies, or climate change. We need to trust God, work on ourselves, return to the fundamentals, and do what we must to fight through the darkness of these 2020s and 2030s.