A Must to Study

You'll need to listen to this book as soon as possible to include the information in your long-term strategic plans, especially if you are a startup looking to scale over the next 10 to 20 years!

Go to Audible now and download it here!!!

As a matter of fact, Zeihan’s perspective is already showing its face in the rise of global hunger brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is the breadbasket not just of Europe, but also most of Africa, where hundreds of millions of people are in real danger of dying this winter.?As this book warns…

Below, I summarize my thoughts so you can get a jest before reading or listening for yourself. The collapse of Globalization is happening now, and IT WILL AFFECT your business and all of our prosperity.

Since 1950 and the beginning of globalization, the world has been the best it (everything) will ever be in our lifetime.

Let me repeat that, the globalization we depend on today for everything we use, and buy is dying.

Instead of cheap, better and faster that we are used to today, we’re rapidly transitioning into a world that will be pricier, crappy and slower. Because the world as we have known it since WWII is breaking apart.

What you, your children, parents and grandparents assume as the normal, good, and right way of living over the past seven decades is a historic animalic blip in the history of man. The period between 1980 and 2020 has been a unique, isolated, and blessed moment in time. This blip is coming to an end. According to Zeihan’s research and opinion is this blip will certainly not come again in our lifetimes.

“And that isn’t even the bad news.”

Since 1945 the world has been the best it has ever been and the best it will ever be which is a poetic way of saying this era, this world of ours as we know it today is doomed. The 2020s will see a collapse of consumption and production and investment and trade almost everywhere as globalization shatters into pieces.??

The purpose of this book and why I recommend all my students read it, is Zeihan lays out what this transition looks like and what we can and will have to do to live through it. How the things we know and understand about food, money, fuel, mobility, and everything will change, adapt, grow, reshuffle, fall apart, and also create new stuff out of desperation.??

Surprisingly or not, the United States and a few other places in the world will largely escape the carnage to come – not despite the global churn and degradation, but really because of it.??

Zeihan teaches us about the order-of-things today such as how the United States disadvantages itself economically in order to purchase the loyalty of a global alliance. This is what globalization is and it would not exist of not for the United States. All we have to do is imagine if the US had never entered World War II that open the door to globalization, but it also lead to the United States having to take care of the World besides itself. And the past several decades have instead seen an American sacrifice for it all.

Be this is all coming to an end.

Zeihan’s book is a huge warning, but it also shows us the opportunity to prepare and make our long-term strategic plans to take advantage of the situation accordingly. Yes, it can be frightening to believe we are a huge oil tanker that takes dozens of miles to turn, but the warning is clear – the comfortable, plentiful, 24/7 availability we have experienced is coming to an end.?

The question is how soon and Zeihan says “maybe pretty quickly.” The key point is that globalization is ending and here are the things we need to think about to get ready.

If you have read any of my posts, you know I love history, fore without history we do not know what to avoid nor how to deal with based upon experience. Zeihan provides us a decent overview of how the world developed over these decades and how it works within a globalized framework.

Zeihan pulls no punches – all of humanities’ lives are going to change and not in very good ways.?This book can prepare us for life in this new world coming. Below are some of poignant points to be made (bold for emphasis is my inflection).

“The 2020s are not the first time the United States has gone through a complete restructuring of its political system. This is round seven for those of you with minds of historical bents. Americans survived and thrived before because their geography is insulated from, while their demographic profile is starkly younger than, the bulk of the world. They will survive and thrive now and into the future for similar reasons. America’s strengths allow her debates to be petty, while those debates barely affect her strengths.??

Americans survived and thrived before because their geography is insulated from, while their demographic profile is starkly younger than, the bulk of the world.?

(Americans) will barely notice that elsewhere the world is ending!!! Access to the inputs—financial and material and labor—that define the modern world will cease existing in sufficient quantity to make modernity possible.?

The last seventy-five years long will be remembered as a golden age, and one that didn’t last nearly long enough at that.?

The real focus is to map out what everything looks like on the other side of this change in condition. What are the new parameters of the possible? In a world deglobalized, what are the new Geographies of Success? What comes next? After all, the end of the world really is just the beginning. So, it’s best if we start there. At the beginning.??

The American story is the story of the perfect Geography of Success. That geography determines not only American power, but also America’s role in the world. …THE UNITED STATES IS THE MOST POWERFUL RIVER POWER AND LAND POWER IN HISTORY.?

Without the Americans riding herd on everyone, it is only a matter of time before something in East Asia or the Middle East or the Russian periphery (like, I don’t know, say, a war) breaks the global system beyond repair . . . assuming that the Americans don’t do it themselves.?

No matter how you crunch the numbers, China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s.?…A full replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. China’s rate is at most 1.3, among the lowest of any people throughout human history.

For the rest of the world, it will never get better than it was in the 2010s. Never.?

The United States is one of the world’s four settler states, which is a pseudo-technical term indicating that most Americans can trace their lineage to folks who aren’t from what is currently American territory.?…As a settler state, the United States tends to be far more confident in its political identity as well as friendly to immigration than other countries. To the point that the United States is one of only a very few countries that even publicly publishes data on how many of its citizens were born in another country. …with the exception of the indigenous population, no Americans are actually from America.?

The dominant ethnic group in Mexico originates from Spain, while the dominant “ethnic” group in the United States is white Caucasian. …Mexicans of Spanish descent somewhat look down on Mexicans of indigenous descent, and they feel more or less the same way about Central American migrants as Americans do. Once Mexicans migrate to the United States, they assimilate quickly. It’s fairly common for second-generation Mexican-Americans—and nearly reflexive for fourth-generation Mexican-Americans—to define themselves as white.?

Take this concept of utter availability, apply it to absolutely everything, and you now have a glimmer of the absolute connectivity that underpins the modern, globalized economy. The ingredients of today’s industrial and consumer goods are only available because they can be moved from—literally—halfway around the world at low costs and high speeds and in perfect security.??

The world’s supply of grievances is inexhaustible. For the most part, those grievances have not been acted upon for seventy-five years. . . . but only because the Americans changed the rules of the game.”

This next part is the crux of the whole reasoning.

“Regardless of what goes wrong, long-haul transport is an instant casualty, because long-haul transport doesn’t simply require absolute peace in this or that region; it requires absolute peace in all regions. Such long-haul disruption describes three-quarters of all shipments in energy, manufacturing, and agriculture.?

After all, should containerized shipping break down, much of the world will be economically decimated from the collapse in manufacturing. But should bulk shipping—which transports food and fuel—break down, many of the world’s people will starve. Alone. In the dark. …keep in mind that most countries lack long-arm navies. …First and most obvious are the pirates. Second and less obvious are the privateers, in essence pirates sponsored by an actual country to harass their competitors, and who have been granted rights to seek succor, fuel, and crew (and sell their *ahem* booty) in allied ports. …The third security concern isn’t likely to be constrained to the no-man’s-lands: state piracy.

Now add in missiles. And drones. And missiles fired from drones. A return to the days of militarized merchant marines is not far off.?…Just imagine what happens when the Koreans or Israelis or French start selling idiot-proof anti-ship weaponry designed to be mounted on bulkers operated by India or Saudi Arabia or Egypt.?

By the time you read this, the world will have a fascinating, horrific case study of true financial disintegration. Nor is Russia done. Beset with a population aging into decrepitude and a system that has given up educating the next generation, Russia’s credit collapse is but one of a phalanx of factors capable of ending the Russian state. The question isn’t will the Russians go out swinging—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is testament to that—but instead, who else will they swing at??

There is a difference—a big difference—between a rising price of access and an absolute lack of access. The first leads to an industrial hollowing out. The second leads to outright deindustrialization.

Should something—should anything—happen to those imported food flows, civilizational collapse into anarchy complete with a population “correction” isn’t simply a distinct possibility, it is the most likely outcome. After all, a government that cannot feed its population is a government that falls.?

When the Cold War ended, the Americans had the opportunity to do nearly anything. Instead, both on the Left and the Right, we started a lazy descent into narcissistic populism. …The presidential election record that brought us Clinton and W Bush and Obama and Trump and Biden isn’t an aberration, but instead a pattern of active disinterest in the wider world.?It is our new norm.”

We should understand that at the end of World War II, the Americans created history’s greatest military alliance to arrest, contain, and beat back the Soviet Union and in some level East Asia. What is not understood (but for those of us who study such things and Zeihan does a good job of explaining), is that this alliance was only half the plan.

“Americans also fostered an environment of global security so that any partner could go anywhere, anytime, interface with anyone, in any economic manner, participate in any supply chain and access any material input—all without needing a military escort. This butter side of the Americans’ guns-and-butter deal created what we today recognize as free trade. Globalization. …One outcome among many was the fastest economic growth humanity has ever seen. Decades of it.”

Instead of letting all those war-torn countries go their own way, the Americans offered the world a deal of sorts. The Americans would use their Navy — only one of note to survive the war — to patrol the global oceans and protect commerce of, by and for all countries. The only catch was you had to pick sides in the brewing Cold War. You could be safe, grow wealth, and develop your economies however you wanted, but you had to stand with and in-front-of in many cases the Americans versus the Communists, especially the USSR.

At war’s end the Americans used “Bretton Woods” to create the globalized world order and fundamentally change the rules of international relations. Instead of subjugating their allies and enemies after the war, they offered peace and protection. The amazing thing was it transformed regional geopolitics along with subverting the USSR by putting formerly warring empires of the earlier ages still festering on the same team. Rivalries were put asunder and gave way to inter-state cooperation. Amazingly it worked out well for the world.

“(But now…)?The American-led Order is giving way to Disorder. —?The post–Cold War era is possible only because of a lingering American commitment to a security paradigm that suspends geopolitical competition and subsidizes the global Order. With the Cold War security environment changed, it is a policy that no longer matches needs. What we all think of as normal is actually the most distorted moment in human history. That makes it incredibly fragile. And it is over.?…Globalization was always dependent upon the Americans’ commitment to the global Order and that Order hasn’t served Americans’ strategic interests since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.”

So without the Americans protecting the world’s oceans, not every region will be able to maintain civilized order themselves. The old rivalries are already resurfacing and creating chaos not only in those regions, but into other parts of the world as in Ukraine no longer feeding Africa.

“The Order established stability, which fostered economic growth, which enabled technological advancement, which led to the availability of these materials, which allowed their inclusion into the products, modernity, and lifestyle of the modern age. …In the Order the only competition over materials access was over market access. …Invading countries for raw materials was expressly forbidden. You simply had to pay for them.”

Here are a few things we need to consider, understand and prepare for in our strategic planning:

The world population is growing other while birthing replacements slows.?

“The global worker and consumer base is aging into mass retirement. —?Now, in all these countries, the new average is below 1.8 (children) and in many cases well below. …much of the economic growth comes from a swelling population. What most people miss is that there’s another step in the industrialization-urbanization process: lower mortality increases the population to such a degree that it overwhelms any impact from a decline in birth rates . . . but only for a few decades. Eventually gains in longevity max out, leaving a country a greater population, but with few children. Yesterday’s few children lead to today’s few young workers leads to tomorrow’s few mature workers. Now, at long last, tomorrow has arrived.”

The world is going to return to growing the food it needs locally for the people to survive. This cannot happen in every demographic and country and a whole bunch of people will not survive.

The reality of going all electric is it will not be a reality. The supposed solar boom of the past decade only generates 1.5 percent of total energy use.

“Just in time” supply chains that have evolved over the past 20 years?are already in decay as a result of the pandemic, and it will not return to be the standard practice any longer.

Climate?is?changing, but is it really getting hotter everywhere – and then also, is that a bad thing?

“We do not at present have good enough data to project climate change down to the zip code level. Anyone who tries is at most making an educated guess… The data isn’t controversial. It isn’t political. It isn’t a projection. And if there is a trend line of change, you know that the needle has moved already, and you just need to follow it forward a bit. …On average, temperatures in both places have risen 1.1 degree Celsius since 1900. …Will deeper climate change occur in the years and decades after? Maybe. Probably. Okay, almost certainly.”

What Zeihan says about “our” future.

“We (the United States; and North America) will be better off than all others, because: NAFTA! (U.S., Canada, and MEXICO!).”

“Part of the Mexico factor is obvious: in 2021 the average Mexican was nearly ten years younger than the average American.”?

“Each country making stuff that we use is making different “levels” of stuff… and, basically, few countries will be able at some point to make everything… —?With global peace, countries are able to specialize. Taiwan in semiconductors. Brazil in soy. Kuwait in oil. Germany in machinery. China steals, but can’t replicate…”

Here are the takeaways we must heed for our future:

We must all gain an understanding of how the world of commerce, finance, agriculture, and technology affects our daily lives.

There is no way humanity will be able to control what is about to happen; even if the US Government were to continue the support of globalization, other forces are so much greater it is out of our control.

Geography, history, and nations' political interactions will drive the paradigm shift.

The United State Navy will still be the saving grace for the world, keeping only in keeping it from decaying into total chaos.

We all must prepare to live with “less” and without immediate reward or satisfaction.

If Zeihan is correct, and he is the best expert we have on the subject in the world, there may only be a little we can do about all of this except to prepare our minds, our families, and our economy for the changes that are coming.

We are incorporating our thinking this information and so should you!

If you are interested, or you know anyone who may be interested, reach out to me directly on messenger, or through our mobile community app,?GordonJones.org

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Have a great day, Gordon

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