Perhaps because no place makes us more anxious than the future, there’s a bottomless appetite for predictions about what happens next. Last year Peter Zeihan broke from the usual pack of prognosticators with The End of the World is Just Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, a thick but very readable book about the world-changing crisis he says has already begun, and which we neglected to avoid over a decade ago.
Zeihan was raised in Iowa and began a career in diplomacy before joining Stratfor, a “geopolitical intelligence firm” based in Austin, Texas, in 2000. I probably began reading him there without knowing his name, during the months and years after 9/11 when I was desperate to understand what was happening and why.
Zeihan left Stratfor to found his own consulting firm in 2012, and he became a regular on the corporate speaking circuit while writing books like Accidental Superpower (2014) and The Absent Superpower (2016), focusing on America’s rise to global hegemon and gradual abdication of that role, and Disunited Nations (2020), about the collapse of postwar globalism – what Zeihan calls the Order, an unprecedented explosion of trade and technological advance guaranteed by America’s protection of the world’s sea lanes.
Demographics Part 2: The Canadian Treadmill…Stops
