The End of the World Is Just the Beginning

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.