The End of the World Is Just the Beginning
Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (a book review)
The premise of geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan's book is that the world has just seen the 70 best years of human civilization, and it's all downhill from here. Also, China is absolutely doomed, and is going to tank, in the next decade.
(But, there's a bright spot, if you're American — keep reading.)
It's been better-cheaper-faster, our whole lifetimes, but from here out, it's worse-more expensive-slower. And that's putting it mildly.
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Global Trade Is On the Outs
We are at the END of globalism, or the interdependence of economies around the world buying and selling to each other.
And with the U.S. backing the underdog against the other two global superpowers — even funding and arming the Ukraine military, one of the most corrupt countries in the world! — which Russia wants to control/own.
But it doesn't stop there: We also sent our geriatric Speaker of the House over to suck up to Taiwan (China's frenemy — China considers itself to OWN Taiwan, just as Russia wants to control/own Donbass, if not all of Ukraine and beyond, remember, they WERE the Soviet Union!) —
— but globalism is grinding to a rapid halt. That much is beyond clear.
How Regions Are Likely to Fare
I’ll mention a few of Zeihan ‘s regional predictions and observations:
Europe — Europe will pay worst, fastest and hardest, in the short term, given their dependence on China and Russia for food and fuel. Their rail workers and other unions are striking. They already have significant energy restrictions, and many are saying it's going to be a long, bitter winter. (I wouldn't go to Europe right now, if it were free and someone paid me to go.) I’m reading that Germans are frantically chopping down trees, for heat. (Ironically, with gas-powered chainsaws.)
The United States — Zeihan's subtext is that the U.S. actually has everything it needs, and will fare best, by far. (I have big concerns about his assumptions, in this article, especially that he ignores the fact that our government appears to be acting in “lockstep” with globalist agendas, and doing approximately nothing that is in our country’s best interests.)
China — Zeihan projects that China will totally implode in the next decade. One major problem: China forgot to have a Gen X and Millennial generation. In fact, now China is begging women to have 3 children, and denying them abortion and birth control, after 39 years of punishing them if they had more than one child! (More on China, below.)
Russia — Similarly, Russia is PAYING women to have 10+ children!
I share these last two facts just in case you don't understand just how urgently China and Russia feel that they don’t have enough young people coming up to support their massive, aging Boomer populations.
China’s in a Bad Way
Trump shined a light on China as “bad guy” … And he wasn’t wrong:
Has China risen to power in the last 30 years?
And is there severe oppression and tyranny and poverty in that country?
And has China heavily invested into the U.S. and invaded our privacy (since we don't PROTECT this nation's privacy/internet, like they protect theirs?)
YES, to all.
Further, countless American companies are “in bed” with China, and they allow China insane access to our youth, our internet, our data, and our health — because China butters their bread.
BUT: Is China really the great looming threat it’s made out to be? Consider the following:
At this point, China cannot even feed and keep its own people warm.
It doesn’t even have clean water for its 1.3 billion citizens.
It currently has at least 40 million more Millennial men than women — men who will be involuntarily celibate, because China killed its baby girls for 39 years (girls being a financial liability and boys being an asset, in more agrarian regions.)
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese people are refusing to pay their mortgages in over 100 cities, as we speak. They're furious at (a) the tens of millions of people who were locked down all spring in Shanghai, then Beijing (and now 21 million more were just locked down in the Chengdu province) and (b) being locked out of their bank accounts since the spring, which happened to many of them.
Chinese citizens were spitting mad long before March 2020, because of dirty air, human rights violations, and mass poverty. So mad in fact that they risked their lives in protest, since protesting the CCP is illegal. (In China, you’re allowed to protest the local government — just never, in any way, Chairman Mao, Xi Jinping, or the Communist party.)
Six Gaping Blind Spots
Here are six major blind spots I perceive in Zeihan's admittedly brilliant work. (It’s a history of the world, really, when it comes to rise and fall of empires, industrialization, transportation, money, and commerce.)
1. He assumes that all countries act in their own best interests.
I do not see that the U.S. leadership is acting in our interests whatsoever, the past few years.
They seem to want to deny capital for infrastructure and natural resources development. (The most obvious example: Biden canceling the Keystone pipeline during his first week in office. I have many more examples but will leave it there.)
If our own leadership wants to punish oil & gas usage while also NOT having solved the problem of how to scale up electric-vehicle production with all the metals shortages, this is a massive roadblock to the U.S. using its own resources to replace our dependence on China.
17 states have now vowed to ban gas vehicles in the next 10 years or so. Even though pretty much anyone with an IQ of 100 can quickly figure out we also won’t have any ability to replace all those cars, with electric vehicles, nor can the electric grid handle that shift, no matter how aggressively it expands.
2. He seems to view national heads of state as the highest authority.
And he seems unaware of the now 50 years of work of the World Economic Forum (WEF), plus the Bank of International Settlements (BIS, the central bank of central banks), who clearly call the shots.
Did he not notice all the national leaders acting in lockstep, starting in March of 2020 … imposing lockdowns and denying people jobs if they didn't submit to a pharma product?
Coordination of this magnitude doesn’t happen organically.
3. He thinks modern medicine extended human life expectancy.
That's a myth. Read the book What Really Makes Us Ill for a thorough debunking of all the claims of every class of pharma product.
My own research led me to the conclusion that four primary factors contributed to both our dramatically increased life span and our significant reduction in disease, starvation, and freezing to death:
Better nutrition.
Having enough to eat (courtesy of advances in transportation and the supply chain).
Sanitation. (Indoor plumbing, anyone? Better than crapping in the street?)
The advent of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems.
No, drugs and injections haven’t made us healthy. As a nation, we're actually sick as hell. At best, they throw us a life jacket when we're near death. Emergency room medicine is the one place we shine.
4. He gets Covid all wrong.
Zeihan seems to think that lockdowns were necessary to "contain the virus," and that natural immunity from getting the vaccine lasts just weeks. He also thinks the reason we never achieved "herd immunity" is that 90%+ of us didn't get jabbed.
This is all patently false and easily disproved. For example, a dozen studies show recovery from the disease provides lasting immunity from infection.
If he’s this wrong about this topic (which I know more about than he does), it makes some of his other conclusions suspect. I could write a whole separate piece on this topic alone.
For example, how did he miss the fact that Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths have SKYROCKETED in nations that have been the MOST highly Pfizered, like Israel, Australia, and Portugal?
In the Resources below, watch a 10-min video that is like a “Cliff’s Notes” on Zeihan’s book, and his premise that China is destined to be decimated, in the next 10 years. Put it on 1.5x speed, and you can watch it in 6 mins.
Notice that he says that China’s Covid vaccine “didn’t work,” and so Xi Jinping is locking people down with his “zero Covid” policy. (You might want to read that sentence a couple of times. And definitely watch the short video below.)
He said that “even if the U.S. sent China millions of vaccines” (implying that U.S. vaccines “worked” — which all evidence shows they didn’t and don’t; I’m pretty amazed if Zeihan doesn’t know this, still — they can’t achieve their “zero Covid” objectives due to lack of efficacy of their own injectable products.
These incredibly naive (or intentionally misleading?) statements, on top of what’s in these 6 “blind spots” really makes me wonder if Zeihan’s work is propaganda, sponsored by someone. Is Zeihan really so utterly unaware that there is a 0.000% chance of achieving “zero Covid,” by ANY means, especially not locking people indoors? And does he really believe that this is really the reason Xi locks down 20M to 30M people at a time, for months?
Looks to me more like genocide of (especially) Boomers. Starvation, deaths of despair, whatever — you don’t destroy industries and people in entire provinces of tens of millions of people, to ban the common cold. We’ve proven beyond doubt now, that people will get the cold anyway, some sick people and seniors will still die (as they always have, of infection/virus in the end), AND we’ve destroyed a lot of people and industry.
Either way, it’s astonishing Zeihan strictly adheres to the media’s and global governments’ story — STILL — that mass pharma injections are how we “get rid” of coronaviruses, which always have, and always will, constantly mutate. (Which is why the “seasonal flu” never gets eradicated.)
5. He doesn’t connect dots about China-US interdependency.
Zeihan doesn’t explore the impact on his thesis, that China has invested in countries all over the world, even deploying large numbers of their citizens to those countries, to defend China’s interests in those industries around the world. (They’ve even been known to take the passports of those Chinese citizens from them, when they arrive in the foreign nation, so the Chinese are unable to leave.)
The countries we are sanctioning depend on us, and we depend on them. But one of his major points is that with regard to China, they depend on us much more than the other way around. I'm not sure most Americans realize this.
This brings me to a sixth major point that Zeihan got wrong … and it’s a doozy:
6. He never talks about who’s calling the shots.
Zeihan completely fails to mention the WEF, or the many globalist plans that have rolled out for decades, under cover of various global crises, via the “Hegelian dialectic,” a process that looks like this:
They create the problem.
The people react.
They offer the solution.
The most potent example of this “problem-reaction-solution” phenomenon began in March 2020, when a “pandemic” coincidentally barged onto the scene just a handful of months after “Event 201” was executed.
Event 201 was an October 2019 “tabletop simulation” hosted by Johns Hopkins University, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the WEF. The event laid out a global plan for coronavirus pandemic response, shortly before any of us had ever heard of Covid-19.
Source: https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/event201/
Nor does Zeihan talk about the powerful forces of the corporatocracy, where small businesses are folding en masse all over the world, while 2 to 4 massive public companies at the top of each industry are consolidating commerce upward, gobbling up competitors like Pac-Man.
All of the huge corporations are following the woke agenda, the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards, the Covid agenda, and each layer of the WEF global-order agenda, to the letter.
If he doesn't understand the top-level forces either creating or capitalizing on a crisis, for their own end game, then he's as confused about cause and effect as most people are — only he's fiercely committed to his thesis that mid-layer government players are actually calling the shots here.
In my own few thousand hours of research since the crisis began, my conclusion is that the people "in power" are merely puppets on a stage and do very little that moves the needle that guides our future.
For starters, learn about the Klaus Schwab/WEF “Forum for Young Global Leaders,” which pumped out 6 young prime ministers and other heads of state I can think of.
Those bizarrely identical decisions that rolled out all over the world, where a “vaccine” product was only "emergency use authorized” but never approved via rigorous testing, happened at a much higher level.
What to Make of All of This?
I’ve now read Peter Zeihan’s entire book, astonished to reach the end without his addressing the Great Reset that all the NGOs and central banks (including the WEF, IMF, WHO, and BIS) embrace, as well as every leader in the Western world.
(Did anyone notice the chief executives of New Zealand, Canada, the U.S., the UK, Germany, and other countries chanting “Build Back Better,” all in the same week? Is it possible that Zeihan didn’t? Or could he be afraid to talk about this rather critically important component of geopolitics?)
I've also listened to a dozen long interviews of Zeihan, and again, I've never heard the slightest mention of who the players are, at the top.
Either (a) he’s somehow ignorant of those dynamics, (b) he’s afraid of them, or (c) he’s sponsored by them. I’m beginning to suspect (c), since his book hit the NYT bestseller list.
(The NYT is the one bestseller list that apparently has little or nothing to do with how many books you sell — only that they cover topics that the NYT committee likes. I say this because my last book sold 15,400 copies in its first week of release — more than any other book in America at the time, except for one of Oprah’s books, which was in its second week. The NYT is the ONE bestseller list I didn’t hit. I have to assume that Zeihan’s book meets with the approval of the elites.)
A note: Zeihan claims that the U.S. Navy is ten times larger than all the navies of the world put together (U.K. and Japan are #2 and #3) and that we will no longer serve as the global police force of the waterways, ensuring safe global trade as we have since 1946.
Why? Because we are essentially in a hot or cold war with the two most powerful other nations on Earth, whom we have sanctioned.
(Sanctions have had no real effect on war outcomes, and they only serve to hurt us: All the most populated nations of the world are now finding ways to break up the U.S. petrodollar, which accounts for so much of why we have enjoyed a lifestyle superior to every other country, for decades.)
Your entire lifestyle is underpinned by the "stuff" you get from China/Taiwan, from your garage door parts, to your microwave, to your smart phone. More than half the stuff currently in any American home is made in China.
Still a Great Read
Despite my being troubled by these six accidental or intentional blind spots by the author, I have been talking about and sharing his work, as I consider it important.
It’s still a great read for the “Cliff’s Notes” of how industrialization has actually happened over and over again across the world.
And how, if you like living in a post-industrialized world, you might want to vocally advocate for giving a wide berth to free trade, AT LEAST within our own country’s borders. The Biden Administration, and many governors, don’t seem interested in encouraging and facilitating even the basics, of free trade, in our own country.
The 2020 Small Business Assault That Helped Wake Me Up
We have seen countless assaults on the free-market system since March, 2020, which in my own life was best highlighted by the April 2020 release of the 23-page “Utah Leads Together” document, with hundreds of new rules and restrictions that applied only to small businesses, issued by the then-Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox.
(Cox is now governor there, though I’ve yet to meet a single person who voted for him. And I was well connected in Utah for the 33 years I lived there until I left in 2020, growing an 8-figure business, and active for many years in the political party Cox says he represents, even as a county and state delegate.)
As usual, Cox’s “Utah Leads Together” was the exact opposite of its title’s promise: it stripped small businesses of the right to even “lead” themselves at all; it was the state government hobbling small businesses, in hundreds of new ways.
The socialist takedown of Utah on the heels of nonstop media coverage of Chinese people keeling over dead as they walked down the street, and the false promise of “two weeks to flatten the curve,” were for me two early warning signs that nothing less than a direct frontal assault was underway.
Cunningly, the assault on our entire lifestyle, and our remaining already-scarce freedoms, was wrapped in a package that most people would accept. (Obviously, similar things happened in almost every other state.)
I’m Inviting Zeihan on My Podcast …
Are you wondering, as I am, why Zeihan published a 512-page tome on the current state of geopolitics, with these six gaping blind spots?
More and more Americans are concerned about the many “experts” who tell us 90% of the truth, but lead us off a cliff in the end, omitting critical pieces that affect the sovereign man and woman. I share that concern.
I’m going to send him this blog post and ask if he’s willing to come on my podcast and help me understand his thinking.
Watch for that, everywhere my “Vibe” podcast (and all my other platforms) is served. If it never happens, you’ll know that Zeihan declined my request for an interview.
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Resources:
Watch this video for a “Cliff’s Notes,” in 6 minutes you can watch it at 1.5x speed, of Zeihan’s thesis that China is doomed.