The End of the World Is Just the Beginning

An American wanker, or I should say a wanker that is American. His point of view seems to be that America is like a MCU super hero that saves the world and we'd all be f**ked if it wasn't for them. Blind drunk on the koolaid of American patriotism which discounts the credibility of his analysis. Predict he ends up as a pundit on Fox News or highly paid advisor to a Republican president.

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan.

I became acquainted with Peter Zeihan through various YouTube videos. His schtick is giving lectures and talks to customers about developments in global markets. His forte is geography and demographics. He has an enthusiastic and engaging style, which can make the most dismal subject matter seem light-hearted and, more importantly, understandable.

And Zeihan's thesis is dismal. To make it simple, Zeihan explains that after World War II, America offered the non-Communist world a deal: America would sacrifice its own economic well-being, allow its industry to be taken off-shore, and allow other countries to penetrate American markets without tariffs. America would also provide its mighty military overwatch to prevent privacy. In return, everyone had to be on America's side.

As an explanation for the last 80 years, this rings true. It explains why Americans woke up after the Cold War and wondered where our industry had gone and why we were so dependent on foreign supply chains.

Zeihan's subsidiary thesis is that America is choosing to withdraw from its global overwatch position. The troops are coming home. America will focus on itself first. No one has the military power to do the job. The American Navy could easily defeat the rest of the world's navies combined.

Based on American retrenchment, Zeihan perceives that the global order is coming to an end for a large variety of interrelated reasons. Without American global overwatch, there will be far more areas prone to piracy, like Somalia. There may also be state-sponsored piracy.

None of this should be surprising. Piracy and the habit that States have to look out for their own interests first, last, and always is the state of nature. It's normal. What hasn't been normal is the eighty-year-long “Long Peace” under American hegemony, where countries that played ball could get incomprehensibly richer by bootstrapping themselves into industrial success in a single generation by following a path laid out by England, Germany, and America that took multiple generations to climb the same arc.

In addition, many countries have chosen this moment to experience the effect of long-term depopulation trends. What was not understood when I was in my teens in the 1970s, and Paul Ehrlich was predicting Malthusian famines, is that industrial society reduces birth rates. Every culture that has climbed the industrialization arc has experienced a decline in birth rates, invariably to below replacement level. Zeihan views a lot of countries as being in a state of population decline beyond hope of recovery, including Japan, Korea, China, Europe, and many other countries around the world.

This is not your father's dystopia.

Zeihan puts a lot of flesh on the bones. He analyzes shipping, agriculture, manufacturing, etc., and the effect of deglobalization in these areas. It is not a cheery picture. He forecasts famines and a crisis that kills off billions without nuclear war.

The good news for Americans is that we should do alright. We do have a replacement population. We have close proximity to Mexico, which is a vibrant consumer country. American geography is self-sufficient and able to ship inputs and outputs without the threat of piracy or interdiction.

I listened to this book as an audible book. Zeihan's writing style is his spoken style; there are a lot of ellipses and weak attempts at humor. As an audible book read by Zeihan, the presentation is first rate. I wouldn't want anyone else to take me through the history of shipping.

There is a lot of useful information in this book. Details described by Zeihn seem to line up with other sources of information. There are times when I wondered if Zeihan was explaining the reason for things like the Global Elite's efforts to get people to eat bugs, i.e., if they believe Zeihan, then they are positioning the world now to pursue a protein source that may be critical during the predicted global crisis.

On the other hand, a lot of stuff has to be taken on a wait-and-see basis. Will there be a global famine killing billions? It could happen, but there have been a lot of failed predictions on that topic. (See Ehrlich, Paul.) Zeihan is also highly pessimistic about the ability of China to survive the 2020s. A lot of people share his pessimism. They could be correct, but we will have to see.

I think that Zeihan's take is valuable and informative, but the reader should keep well away from accepting Zeihan's potentially deterministic worldview. The globe is far too complicated for simple determinism.

Boomer doomesday science fiction. Peppered with an overuse of “like” to make you forget how out of touch with reality the author is.

Starts with a whirlwind tour through a distorted neocon pop history where only America has agency. There are no arguments in the book, there's no evidence, it's just science fiction written as fact. A world where diversity is weakness, where fascism will work well in the future because it helps the economy, where Millenials are “entitled and lazy”, where America “rubs out” Mexican culture from immigrants as if washing away dirt, where whiteness is the top prize that no one should unfairly “redefine”, where all countries want to irrationally commit suicide but are held at bay by American might, where Greece is a “basket case” and no more than a “historical doormat” and a “failed state”, where the EU's hope for survival is a bailout by the British, where the only option is “neo-imperial control” instead of cooperation and mutual growth, where the countries with access to raw materials are the ones that will prosper (ironic, given that all evidence shows this is the opposite), where Europe only excels at “less complicated manufacturing”, where colonial empires are the future and local people don't matter. The author even has the gall to make a map that shows half of Poland as being in the Russian sphere of influence, a nice shoutout to his pro-fascist viewpoint. Never mind that he's anti green tech because of “the weather”.

Poorly written drivel.

A Realist Looks To The Future. I've read several books in the last few years covering the general real-world end of the world scenarios and/ or projections for the next few decades, and this text is refreshing in just how grounded and real Zeihan's approach is. There may in fact be squabbles about a particular point here or there, or even Zeihan's entire general premise, as the only other review on Goodreads at the time I write this points out, but for me the analysis was close enough to be at least one plausible scenario among many that could play out - unlike most others I've read in this field. Add in the fact that this isn't a dry academic look, but instead a somewhat humorous and even crass at times real, straightforward analysis... and you've got my attention. Note: If you're a reader that absolutely WILL NOT tolerate f-bombs, even the occasional one... eh, you're probably gonna wanna skip this one. ;) Instead, this reads more like you're sitting at the bar with a few drinks with an absolute expert in his field, and he is going over a very detailed look at what he thinks is coming over the next 10 - 30 years. As a text, it is thus quite remarkable. The singular weakness I found in the text that was star deduction worthy was a complete absence of a bibliography, and the frequent use of footnotes without actually noting even when they were happening was a touch irritating, but not additional star deduction worthy. Very much recommended.