Eric Engle writes in late 2022:
* What exactly is Peter Zeihan wrong about?
1. Zeihan Predicts the USA Will Withdraw from the World.
In Reality, Globalization will Continue and May Even Intensify with Invention
Peter Zeihan predicts, roughly, that the USA will withdraw from global engagement into a form of what I call neo-isolationism.
Zeihan argues that globalization has not benefited the USA. That is simply untrue. A better argument would be that the costs of global hegemony in dead Americans and trillions of dollars wasted for little or no perceptible benefit are simply too high for American voters. However, even the better argument is also untrue.
Zeihan miscalculates the costs and benefits to the USA of engagement.
The USA will not retrench, withdraw, or enter into any other form of neo-isolationism because states are, roughly speaking, rational power maximizers and the USA benefits with a sort of seignorage from global hegemony – literal seignorage in the case of the fact the dollar is the global currency, figurative seignorage in the form of several extensive and mutually supporting alliance and trade networks as well as soft power in the form of an attractive culture and ideology.
a. Zeihan Over-Estimates the Costs of the Failed Global War on Terror (GWOT)
Zeihan errs in part by over-estimating the damage done by 20 years of failed US liberal internationalist strategy. The GWOT was a costly failure. However, Zeihan doesn’t recognize just how much punishment the proles can take and still support the home team. Let’s just imagine London in 1940, Berlin in 1945, or Kyiv today. People no matter how beaten down don’t just roll over and give up.
* Although I do think Zeihan worth reading one must do so critically. Zeihan does provoke deep thinking about some of the factors which determine international relations and the resulting grand trends. His market-driven energy sector analyses are superb, since his corporate clients could never tolerate any inaccurate forecasts. When he strays outside of energy and agriculture markets, leaving the field of economics and entering into state-to-state relations the results are a fascinating mess, overlydetermined by geography and demography with inadequate consideration of history and ideology. I reach this conclusion with no great joy. Who wouldn’t wish to see the inevitable easy victory of America over tyranny through simple neo-isolationism and re-industrialization while the enemies of the republic collapse due to demography and geography? But “the world ain’t that simple bub”. The USA is locked into competition with varieties of authoritarianism and cannot merely “walk away”. China will not inevitably collapse, nor will global trade vanish to be replaced by famines and pirates. And these outlandish statements of Zeihan’s are why we can view him best as: very clever disinformation with some solid empirical foundations.
Too bad it won’t work.
