Global Disorder: The Takes of Zeihan
America First: Isolationist Senators William Borah (left) and Henry Cabot Lodge (middle) in 1924
Peter Zeihan’s new book Disunited Nations has been making the rounds in tech circles lately. Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist and forecaster who advises corporate clients on what the world will look like in coming decades. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, a good starting point is his recent talk at Upfront Summit and his appearances on podcasts like Invest Like the Best or The Pomp.
The short summary of the book is that a new age of American isolationism dawns. After seven decades, the US is giving up its role as the world’s policeman and is turning inward. America is belatedly realizing that its former foe, the Soviet Union, hasn’t been replaced by another competing superpower, making the American-led postwar alliance obsolete. Moreover, the US is now a self-sufficient nation, insulated geographically, food and energy independent (thanks to shale oil), and exhausted after two decades of fighting in the Middle East. The geopolitical consequences will be grim: American strategic commitments will wither, sea lanes will no longer be safe, global trade will break down, and old geopolitical conflicts will re-emerge. China and Russia will collapse. Even a European war isn’t out of the question. Or so the author claims.
Zeihan envisions a world that will soon dissolve into a Hobbesian nightmare of war and disorder, with a silver lining for American readers: “The world is indeed going to hell, but the Americans are going to sit this one out.” The book is structured as a series of scorecards in which Zeihan evaluates the futures of major countries along four dimensions: geography, demographics, agricultural capacity, and energy access. Echoing Guns, Germs and Steel, his core thesis is that geography has an outsized influence on a country’s development, and he makes his argument with seductively persuasive prose and great punchlines like “You want your country to be crunchy on the outside, but gooey in the middle.” Zeihan’s gift for storytelling and our current geopolitical tensions make Disunited Nations an engaging, highly informative and horizon-expanding read.
Unfortunately, the book suffers from several shortcomings and I was frankly surprised that none of the aforementioned podcasts dug into them. Zeihan often plays fast and loose with history, which leads to a rather oversimplified, deterministic explanation of world events. He rightly points out that geography still matters in our digital world but he jumps to conclusions by treating geography as destiny. Geographical forces create constraints rather than hard rules, which leaves plenty of room for surprising developments. Having geography on your side doesn’t mean you will inevitably succeed, as Argentina has taught us over the past century. And geographic isolation doesn’t mean that America will automatically avoid chaos, as Zeihan predicts it will. Oceans can’t protect you against cyberattacks or weapons of mass destruction.
Zeihan’s narrative is propelled by the notion that history is bound by environmental deterministic laws and therefore predictable. It is anything but, especially in a world as chaotic as ours. So many forces are at work in geopolitics and their interactions are so complex that even small changes produce huge differences in outcomes. Ignoring this “butterfly effect” makes the triumphalist tone and the air of inevitability of Zeihan’s forecasts really problematic. His predictions are couched in impressive storytelling but don’t come with time frames, probabilities, or verifiable sources. He provides us with no footnotes or references. It’s also no coincidence that his books target a primarily business-oriented audience that is ill-equipped and time poor to fact-check his geopolitical predictions.
There’s another problem with Zeihan’s framework. Important variables and macro trends are completely absent from his analysis and modeling. He fails to discuss climate change and its potential for wars and mass migration. He assumes that countries and the politicians who run them act rationally, at least most of the time. He otherwise ignores the human factor and the role of culture in national development. He glosses over the importance of economic and political institutions, which can be inclusive or extractive. He doesn’t give sufficient weight to nuclear proliferation, cyber warfare, and the emergence of “AI nationalism.” He barely mentions India and Africa. He also doesn’t acknowledge the role of chance or black swan events (remember, no one predicted the history-altering revolutions of 1989!). These omissions––and I’m sure there are more––greatly undermine his projections.
Zeihan is the polar opposite of what Philip Tetlock calls a “superforecaster” who is cautious, humble, and nondeterministic. His condescending, Americentric rhetoric can be incredibly irritating, especially to international readers. He sometimes reminds you of the man with only a hammer, to whom every problem looks like a nail. To be clear, Zeihan deserves full credit for correctly predicting some of the first-order consequences of America’s more insular and protectionist stance, but it’s the second, third and fourth-order consequences that are going to move the needle (for example, what if China doesn’t collapse and becomes the global foe that forces the US to look outward again?). Forecasting second or third-order effects on the world stage is an exercise in pure conjecture and it might take decades for us to find out whether Zeihan hit the nail on the head or missed the mark completely.
All of the above would suggest that you should stay away from this book, but I actually don’t think you should. Even if you don’t agree with the specifics of Zeihan’s forecasts and conclusions, you’ll still derive a lot of value from the context and forward-looking statements he provides. Zeihan’s prediction of American disengagement predates the Trump era and he has been vindicated by the general direction of trends, as we’ve seen with across-the-board renegotiation of all major trade agreements and the abandonment of landmark multilateral commitments like the Iran Nuclear Deal and the Paris Climate Accords. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated these trends by laying bare the absence of US leadership in the world. More importantly, Zeihan is correct in reminding us that the forces which shape American foreign policy are larger than Trump. The global order was already looking wobbly under Obama. Globalization was already in trouble before the Sino-American trade war and the outbreak of COVID-19. So don’t expect a rapid turnaround in American foreign policy in case the Dems win the 2020 election.
In my eyes, Disunited Nations is best read as a warning sign of things to come if—and that’s one of the big ifs—middle powers like Germany, France or Japan fail to step up and do more of the heavy lifting in security matters. Germany in particular is at risk of being smashed by the end of the American-led global order. Zeihan’s characterization of Germany as an export-dependent gerontocracy and security free-rider without a functional army is sadly not altogether wrong. Germany hasn’t contributed its fair share to the NATO budget in years and thereby failed to do its part in assisting America in keeping the global order going. The coming geostrategic tensions will hopefully shake up politicians all over Europe and make them realize that the postwar global order is worth saving, even with temporary non-participation by the Americans. Inertia might actually prove helpful. The EU has a long history of just muddling through, which buys us some time for a much needed course correction. The same goes for countries like China whose imminent meltdown Zeihan has been predicting since 2005. The world might be fragmenting at every level but we haven’t yet reached a point of no return with regard to Zeihan’s nightmare scenario of global disorder. Let’s just hope someone hands a copy of this book to Merkel and Macron.
Thanks to Max Cutler for pointing me to Zeihan’s books and for many fruitful discussions.