The New World Order Is Here - Peter Zeihan

"America doesn't win the next era because it's brilliant. It wins because everyone else is screwed." What's that mean?

Doesn't exactly fit on a bumper sticker, but yeah, that broadly works. Uh, you got two big things that are going on. Uh, number one, in the globalized world, it's all about who you can access safely, and in the Western hemisphere, we really don't have to worry about any security threats from a trade point of view. So people always talk about, "Oh, if the US and China get into a war, won't that be bad for X, Y, or Z?" It's like, I don't mean to suggest it would be a piece of cake. But the, the Chinese are dependent on trade and we're not, uh, it's really that simple. And if we can nail down Canada and Mexico in a productive relationship, you know, we used to call that NAFTA or NAFTA 2, we're now having second thoughts. Uh, that's half the hard work right there. Uh, in addition, we export food, we export energy. The Chinese import both, biggest in the world, in fact. Uh, and so maintaining supply chains for us is an issue of building the industrial plant, and while you can't just wave a magic wand and make that happen overnight, we've done this several times before. Every country on the planet has. Of course we can do it again. It would just be nice if we started sooner rather than later. Uh, the other piece is that the Chinese stopped having babies about 45 years ago, and they're now on the verge of running out of 50-year-olds. And there is not an economic model that humans have yet to dream up that will work with where they will be demographically in less than 10 years' time. So we are living in the equivalent of, like, 2006 subprime where everyone's like all "ooh" and "aha"-

(laughs)

... and it's all about to go tits up.

(laughs) S- uh, appropriately apocalyptic from you, uh, to start. Um, the stuff about China, is, is that a challenge of just geography, uh, virome, biome, topsoil, like, just sort of the, the constitution of where they are? Is that, that sort of one of the fundamental problems?

All of that, all of that is legitimate concerns. Uh, the river where most of them live on, uh, the Yellow isn't navigable. They have never been able to use it for trade, so they've never internally traded among themselves. Uh, the one river they have that is navigable, the Yangtze, has always been an independent pol- well, I shouldn't say always, but often been a political, uh, an independent political entity going back for 3,000 years of Chinese history. And down in the south in the tropics where you've got Hong Kong, you've got city-states in little enclaves of flat land that have always looked to the outside world rather than to the Chinese. Uh, the soil sucks. Uh, the northern part where 70% of the population lives, it's loess soil in a drought zone. So if anything ever happened to logistics or distribution, what would go down in Northern China would be what has gone down in Northern China 27 times before, and that's civilizational collapse. If we were talking about any country that had fewer people than the Chinese have always had, you know, that would just be the end of them. It's just that there have always been enough Chinese in the past to pick up the pieces and move forward on the other side of the break. But that requires you having children, and so this really is an end to the concept of China and the concept of even the Han Chinese, because we're in a situation now, well, where probably they have more people over age 4- 54 than under. And, I'm sorry, that just doesn't work, uh, and very soon it will be over. That's before you consider the broader geography of China versus the rest of the world. You got the first island chain off the coast, so the Chinese have never, ever, ever been able to be a global commercial power except when the United States, when it created the global system, told everybody that they couldn't bring guns to trade talks. And that one decision that we made allowed the Chinese to play on the global field in a way that they just never could until that point. And so lo and behold, this is the one era of Chinese history where they're unified and successful.