Since much of the population of the developed world has lived during an extended epoch of relative global peace and flourished during a similar period of unprecedented prosperity, it becomes extremely difficult to imagine that this world as we know it is coming to an end.
In The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (2022), renowned geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan argues convincingly that the world order established after World War II is undergoing a significant and, in Zeihan’s eyes, inevitable transformation.
Unlike other “end-of-the-world” scenarios such as global warming—where we are told that we must simply stop emitting greenhouse gases to get this one under control —Zeihan offers no specific set of actions we must take to avoid a looming disaster fueled by the hard numbers of demography and the harsh realities of geography. Indeed, he writes with a jarring and blatant certainty that leaves little room for doubt or consideration of alternative outcomes.
While predictions of the future can often be taken with a grain of salt, many of Zeihan’s points are grounded in real numbers and science. The key indisputable fact of Zeihan’s argument is that the development of a global economy following World War II has upended the demography of the entire planet. Simply put, a prosperous and rapidly urbanized world has led to lower birth rates and increased life expectancy resulting in a dramatic change in the ratio of children, young workers, mature workers, and retirees.
Globalization during the American-led “Order,” Zeihan writes, has “generat[ed] a sustained consumption and investment boom the likes of which humanity had no previous experience with. With security guaranteed and supplies of capital and energy and foodstuffs ample, six thousand years of ups and downs were replaced by an unstoppable freight train of progress.”
Zeihan adds that this “freight train of progress” comes with a built-in expiration date because “demography does not lie.”
“Eventually gains in longevity max out, leaving a country [with] a greater population, but with few children,” he adds. Yesterday’s few children leads to today’s few young workers to tomorrow’s few mature workers. And now, at long last, tomorrow has arrived.”
In the 2020s, birth rates are no longer simply dropping; they have been so low for so long that even the countries with the younger age structures are now running low of young adults—the demographic that produces the children… [B]irth rates will not simply continue their long decline, they will collapse.”
“Today,” Zeihan deduces from a great number of charts and graphs, “we live in a world of accelerating demographic collapse.”
“By most measures—most notably in education, wealth, and health—globalization has been great, but it was never going to last.” The recent past has been “a historic anomaly for the human condition both in strategic and demographic terms. The period of 1980-2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment in time. A moment that has ended. A moment that will certainly not come again in our lifetimes.”
This leads us to another component of Zeihan’s argument: The global world order created after World War II became entirely dependent upon America’s oversight. As Zeihan offers, “As of 2022, some 80 percent of global trade by volume and 70 percent by value is transported by oceangoing vessels.” As America withdraws as global trade’s “police force,” these massive ships will be subject to great peril from piracy; of the individual and state variety.
A rejection of immigrants from around the world is a symptom of the dismantling of the global system we rely upon. Remember, it was 2015 that Donald Trump rode down the gilded escalator and announced his candidacy for president by castigating Mexican immigrants in the most devastating way imaginable. This is not to blame Donald Trump for America’s growing isolation for he is but the symptom of a change of heart among the American people. Similar xenophobic sentiments have been expressed throughout Europe as immigrants from Africa and the Middle East flee their countries.
The United States has not only become hostile to immigrants, it has stepped back from our critical role in many of the planet’s stabilizing forces. Most obvious are the many disparaging comments directed at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and America’s growing inaction in the face of the first large scale land war in Europe since 1945.
The United States withdrew from the World Health Organization in 2020. In 2025, the United States withdrew from several agencies of the United Nations including an abrupt and deadly withdrawal from the US Agency for International Development. The Trump administration has also withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, again, and made threatening comments directed at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This withdrawal from the world stage is occurring while democracy is in decline around the world and many nations, such as the United States, are embracing nationalistic and isolationist policies.*
American isolation and the aging of the world’s populations is going to thoroughly disrupt global trade. “Combine geopolitics and demographics,” Zeihan predicts, “and we know there will be no new mass consumption systems. Even worse, the pie that is the global economy isn’t going to simply shrink; it is being fractured into some very nonintegrated pieces, courtesy of American inaction.”
These “nonintegrated pieces” are the focus of Peter Zeihan’s glance into the future. As the various regions of the planet no longer have world-wide markets for the goods they produce, they are going to become increasingly reliant upon their local geography.
Zeihan predicts that many countries will find it extremely difficult to adapt, because even as the American-led post-WWII order “result[ed] in a fundamental rewiring of the human condition,” most of the people on the planet today have been trained to function in a world dominated by free global trade and a significant portion of these human beings are going to find it extremely difficult to function or even survive a world without it.
Producing enough food to feed an aging population and providing enough energy to maintain the quality of life brought about through globalization are going to be the biggest challenges for many people around the world. Needless to say, some will fare better than others.
Here is a brief snapshot of Zeihan’s thoroughly informed and documented analysis.
While Britain, the United States—and a few other developed nations—industrialized and urbanized over the course of two hundred years, others have done so at break-neck speed.
As Zeihan tells it, “the rapid rise of China,” for instance, “in economic, military and demographic terms—is nothing more than two hundred years of economic and demographic transformation squeezed into a searing four decades, utterly transforming Chinese society and global patterns of trade…” Unfortunately, as Zeihan warns, “[t]he faster the transformation and growth on the front end, the faster the population collapses on the back end.” According to Zeihan, China is not going to fare well.
“No matter how much you crunch the numbers, China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history.” However, “this population growth story is over and has been since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s… The country’s demographic contraction is now occurring just as quickly as its expansion, with complete demographic collapse certain to occur within a single generation.” It is startling to me, as I ponder the possibility of Zeihan’s future for China, that his statements are less prediction than pronouncement.
China has been seen as the workshop of the world where large numbers of low-skilled workers produce the export products that fuel global trade. Demographic changes threaten what Zeihan calls this “secret sauce of the Asian manufacturing model…”
It is plain truth that China’s massive growth has screeched to a halt and, if Zeihan is correct, it will soon no longer have safe sea lanes to transport its goods to its markets overseas in North America and Europe.
As the United States continues to draw ever-inward, the seaway trade routes established during the last 80 years are going to be much less protected. This alone harbors doom for China as it “imports more than 70 percent of its 14 million barrels of oil it needs every day…” Japan’s navy might be able to protect Chinese shipping around the globe but this would require cooperation between countries that largely “loathe” one another.
More likely, the lack of American-inspired protection around the world will vastly diminish the markets for Chinese products. With fewer young and mature workers and a massive aging population, there will not be enough food and energy to sustain large urban populations. Just as a vast number of rural Chinese fled to cities during China’s rise, Zeihan predicts a massive urban exodus to the countryside as a simple matter of survival.
In other parts of the world, Zeihan examines how countries in different regions might align themselves in order to succeed in the new world order. The problems are many.
In Northeast Asia, for instance, cooperation between Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan has been singularly dependent upon “America’s two largest military deployments – in South Korea and Japan…” As America grows increasingly isolated, Zeihan says there is nothing to “keep the locals from being at each other’s throats.” We need not travel back too far in our history to discover examples of Asian nations struggling against one another.
As Zeihan proclaims, “in the world unfolding there is no way on Earth the East Asians are capable of the sort of productive cooperation necessary to enable broad-spectrum, multimodal, integrated and peaceful manufacturing supply chains.”
The problems he cites are more basic. Energy and food will be difficult to come by. For instance, as Zeihan bluntly observes, “Taiwan, Korea, and Japan import more than 95 percent of their” oil. Japan imports more meat than any other nation. You can imagine how this might look; or better yet, check out Zeihan’s book for a blow-by-blow account of the personal ramifications these numbers portend.
In Southeast Asia, the prospects are not quite so dim. If Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines can cooperate, they have the geography to provide food and energy, and also the resources to continue to develop their infrastructure. What they lack is the power to defend the seaways. Japan might be motivated to offer this protection as it has the only other navy besides the US that can effectively project their strength over long distances. Of course, this alliance of Asian nations would be made up of people who have regularly warred with one another.
Zeihan gloomily adds that if the US withdraws quickly, “the entire Asian model fails overnight.” And even with continued American involvement, “rapidly aging workforces are perfectly capable of collapsing under their own weight via mass retirement.”
Much of the rest of the world will struggle as well. “Europeans,” Zeihan writes, “pass[ed] the point of demographic no return even before the new millennium. Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Austria will age into mass retirement in the first half of the 2020s, while nearly every country in a Central European line from Estonia to Bulgaria is aging even faster and will age out in the second half.”
Here too, regardless of American involvement, “demographics alone ensure that Europe as we know it will collapse…” As amazing as this all seems, Zeihan backs up his predictions of a dire future with persuasive evidence demonstrating that “the labor balance that has enabled European economic functionality since 2008 is about to evaporate.”
The scenario that Zeihan imagines has already begun to play out. As he writes, “the top destination [for European goods] is the United States, a country that is turning ever inward and at the time of this writing, is already edging its way into broad-spectrum trade war with the European Union.” (re: at the time of this writing, Zeihan’s book was first published in June of 2022.)
Much as the nations of Southeast Asia might be successful in the formation of regional alliances, Zeihan also explores in great detail the feasibility of regional European alliances that might combine to provide access to enough food and the resources, mainly energy, to maintain the current standard of living. France and its former colonies in North Africa have the combined geography to get by; so too, Turkey and Mesopotamia, and Germany and Scandinavia.
Zeihan also predicts that “the United States will largely escape the carnage to come.” As for food, “[t]he Greater Midwest by itself boasts 200,000 square miles of the world’s most fertile farmland… Midwestern soils are thick, deep prairie soils, laden with nutrients. The Midwest is squarely in the temperate zone. Winter brings insect kills, which keep pests under control” leading to “annual soil regeneration and decomposition… The full four season experience all but guarantees ample precipitation, allowing irrigation to the region’s western fringes.” There are not many places in the world that are so fortunate.
The United States is also energy independent and the things it lacks in resources to continue producing the goods we prize can be found through an alliance with Canada. As for demographic collapse, the United States has the same numbers of much of the rest of the world; fewer young people, more old people. But, just look next door and you will find a country that has bucked the global demographic trend. Mexico has a substantial working age population who have long-demonstrated their willingness to do the dirty work.
Argentina has similar geographic attributes if it can forge alliances. “In a world that will soon face shortages in everything from foodstuffs to industrial processing to coherent and sustainable manufacturing systems, Argentina & Friends checks all the boxes.”
Only a very few regions of the world will be able to sustain their quality of life during the Disorder. Many recently urbanized and industrialized populations will have no markets for the goods they produce and no access to the necessities and comforts of life to which they have become accustomed. Many simply do not have the geography to produce enough food for a swelled population and, even if they did, these people no longer possess the skills their ancestors had. This might be the time, Zeihan writes, to “focus your time on learning how to can vegetables.”
As to energy and adding insult to injury, in much of the world, the only locally available source of energy is coal of the variety that heavily pollutes the air. In a de-globalized world, it seems to me there will be little done about the warming planet.
The numbers that Peter Zeihan shared offer up a tragic near-future for many. In short, much of the world will be unprepared and ill-equipped to manage their societies in a post-globalized world.
I’ll try to be a bit cheerier next time.
*American Isolationism
