Aaaaand I was 100% WRONG About China

[sbarrera]

(08-27-2022, 08:29 PM)sbarrera Wrote: I watched the video. Zeihan paints a dark picture of the world post-globalization/free trade. China could lose 500 million people?? The U.S. must stop Russia in Ukraine to avoid nuclear escalation?? Eep.

I didn't expect it but the interviewers mention Strauss-Howe theory toward the end, though Zeihan brushes it off. It's too bad, because he is talking about the end of globalization and the end of financialization which is exactly what The Fourth Turning predicts.

I've seen posts/interviews from him before but haven't read his books, though I do have "The Accidental Superpower" on my list. I will get to it hopefully before too long.

So I did read "The Accidental Superpower." Zeihan is clearly a pragmatic thinking Xer (he was born in 1973) who describes the facts on the ground as he sees them. These are the key points I got from his book:

• Geography is the key determinant of a nation's wealth and power. The United States is a superpower because of its unique geographic advantages: two oceans protecting its flanks, a massive navigable river system in a fertile heartland, many excellent harbors on the coasts. This is the "accident" behind the superpower. These geographic advantages are what make the U.S. wealthy and secure; it has nothing to do with the character of the people or its system of government. If anything, geography determines what kind of government is possible. The United States' vast capital surplus, which exists because of low transport and security costs, is what makes its low regulation, entrepreneur capitalist society possible.
  
  
• The second important factor to a nation's success is demography. The young are the ones who generate consumption, while the middle aged are the ones with capital that governments can tax. Children and the elderly are both a burden. It's best to have your population bulge in the young/middle aged groups, but of course that will eventually turn into a population bulge in the old age groups. The best ways to prevent the population histogram from being lopsided toward the older age groups are high fertility and immigration.
  
  
• The long period of U.S. dominance in global affairs was a result of the Breton Woods agreement after WWII, which was basically a pact the U.S. made with its Cold War allies: we will ensure the security of the Free World in return for our allies agreeing to a free trade regime. With the Cold War over, the U.S. no longer needs this agreement to hold. Since the shale revolution has increased domestic energy production, the U.S. doesn't even need to worry about dependence on foreign energy sources.
  
  
• Because the United States no longer needs a global free trade regime as a national security strategy, globalization will collapse. This will hurt a lot of countries, particularly China, but not so much the U.S. For the United States, the biggest threat is actually the drug war, and the best solution to that is to reform immigration and make it easier for Mexican/Central American immigrants to assimilate. This also helps with the demography problem.
  

Zeihan goes into a lot of detail and predictions about many other countries around the globe, but I don't think those details are worth getting into here. This book came out in 2014, so a lot of those predictions are probably outdated by now. I will note that he does mention Russia's interest in dominating Ukraine (which would have been obvious in 2014) and he does post a lot now about the war in Ukraine.

Reading Zeihan, I couldn't help by be reminded of another Gen X geopolitical strategist, the somewhat older Thomas P.M. Barnett (b. 1962). Barnett's heyday was during the Bush era, when he published a book called "The Pentagon's New Map" about how the post-Cold War U.S. mission was to integrate the disconnected nations of the world into the globalized economy. It was like a critique of Bush's Iraq War ("this is how they should have done it...") but he was very optimistic about the possibility of the United States continuing to be a global hegemon in a kind of new phase of globalization. Zeihan seems much more the pessimist in contrast. In any event, Barnett's star faded with the failure of the Iraq occupation.