The U.S., with its relatively isolated geography, promising demographics, and simpler supply chains, is well-positioned to not only weather the storm, but come out on top within the next few decades, argues geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan.
In his new book, “The End of the World is Just the Beginning,” geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan says the upheavals in the world today are the result of an unraveling of the global order that has characterized the post-war era up through the present.
After World War II, the United States struck a bargain with its war-torn allies, that the U.S. would handle global security and in exchange, our allies would be granted access “to every supply chain in every market and every material in the world” if they sided with us against the Soviet Union, Zeihan said.
This arrangement led to mass industrialization and urbanization. What took the U.S. decades, took China, for example, a single generation to achieve in terms of economic growth and development. But industrialization came at a significant cost: nearly every developed nation – with a few exceptions – is experiencing significant demographic decline.
“When you move off the farm and into the city, you have fewer kids. And if you play that forward for 70 years, it isn’t that the world is running out of kids – that happened 30 years ago – the world is now running out of adults,” Zeihan said. “And so we’ve got a demographic bomb, happening at the same time that the Americans broadly lost interest in the structure that allowed the Old World to occur.”
