Disunited Nations

The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

Peter Zeihan

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780062913685
• eBook ISBN: 9780062913692
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: History

Should we stop caring about fading regional powers like China, Russia, Germany, and Iran? Will the collapse of international cooperation push France, Turkey, Japan, and Saudi Arabia to the top of international concerns?

Most countries and companies are not prepared for the world Peter Zeihan says we’re already living in. For decades, America’s allies have depended on its might for their economic and physical security. But as a new age of American isolationism dawns, the results will surprise everyone. In Disunited Nations, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan presents a series of counterintuitive arguments about the future of a world where trade agreements are coming apart and international institutions are losing their power. 

Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe, with France taking its place. Every country should prepare for the collapse of China, not North Korea. We are already seeing, as Zeihan predicts, a shift in outlook on the Middle East: It is no longer Iran that is the region’s most dangerous threat, but Saudi Arabia. The world has gotten so accustomed to the “normal” of an American-dominated order that we have all forgotten the historical norm: several smaller, competing powers and economic systems throughout Europe and Asia. 

America isn’t the only nation stepping back from the international system. From Brazil to Great Britain to Russia, leaders are deciding that even if plenty of countries lose in the growing disunited chaos, their nations will benefit. The world isn’t falling apart—it’s being pushed apart. The countries and businesses prepared for this new every-country-for-itself ethic are those that will prevail; those shackled to the status quo will find themselves lost in the new world disorder.

Smart, interesting, and essential reading, Disunited Nations is a sure-to-be-controversial guidebook that analyzes the emerging shifts and resulting problems that will arise in the next two decades. We are entering a period of chaos, and no political or corporate leader can ignore Zeihan’s insights or his message if they want to survive and thrive in this uncertain new time.

Chapter 1

The Road So Far

There’s no good way to launch into a book on the past and future without using a quote from The Lord of the Rings. Probably from an immortal elf matriarch. Something about how the world is changed. Since that’s all heavily copyrighted, we’re going to have to just jump right in.

Time erodes everything. Countries included. Surviving history requires a delicate balance of factors that most of the world lacks: border zones that are difficult to cross and an interior zone where it is easy to move people and goods and ideas around. Such a mix of crunchy and gooey is rare. Most locations are either so crunchy throughout that the locals don’t get along, or so gooey on the edges that the neighbors’ armies like to host block parties on your lawn. Historically speaking, most countries have been small, brittle, fragile, and, above all, short-lived. If countries cannot arise or thrive or survive, history tends to stand still.

But that is not true everywhere. There’s a handful of countries whose geography is in balance. These countries defy time, and so have dominated much of human history. Let’s start at the beginning.

THE FIRST AGE: EMPIRE

It all comes down to a pair of concepts we all instinctually grasp but spend little time pondering.

The first is continuity: the idea that the positive things that make your life today possible—health, shelter, clean water, food, education, clothing, a functioning government, and so on—will still be around tomorrow. No brigands will steal your cow; no dryad will kidnap your children; no horde will descend from the distant horizon and burn down your local Walmart. The modern equivalent? Flip a switch and the lights turn on. Each and every time. Historically speaking, continuity is a rare, precious thing. Few countries boast the sort of crusty borders that enable them to be protected from outside threats for more than a few decades at a time. For most, going a few years is about all they can hope for.

Not all threats to continuity are from bullets or sharp sticks. Drought and flood can wreck a system just as easily. Or a rampaging, homegrown mob. Or a coup. Or particularly crappy leadership. And never underestimate the power of a good plague. Breaks in continuity shatter institutions, disrupt food production, wreck infrastructure, break educational coherence, and severely damage cultures. Recovery is, of course, possible, but in many ways every time a country suffers an invasion or civil war or coup or famine, it must start over.

The second concept, economies of scale, is even more straightforward. Imagine you’ve been tasked to build a computer. All the necessary information and equipment has been provided for you to melt and purify sand into silicon and draw it into crystals and slice them into wafers and score them with acid and lay them with metal and assemble them into circuit boards and so on. How long would it take you to do it? How long would it take you to learn all the steps independently? A lifetime? Ten? And then, at the end of it all, you’d have one measly computer.^*

Economies of scale are ultimately about specialization. Instead of you learning and carrying out every individual task, you need to learn only one—say, scoring the silicon wafer with acid. Other people take charge of all the other tasks, one each. Different people are better at different things, and matching people with their niche makes the entire system more productive and efficient. After your first month on the job, you’ve etched several thousand wafers, and you’ve gotten pretty good at it, both in terms of speed and quality. Most everyone else is having a similar experience. Collectively, the team is cranking out dozens of computers an hour. The system is scaled up. Production becomes cheaper. End-sales prices go down. And to sweeten the deal, your deep knowledge of that one facet lets you innovate at a faster pace, too.

National success requires achieving both continuity and economies of scale. Those big enough to have economies of scale rarely have good borders that enable continuity—think Russia. Those sufficiently isolated to have long continuities rarely have scale—think New Zealand.

This is not the case in every place in every time. Some locations can make it work. Some countries have the geographic viability required to make a go of things. The best of these locations do more than succeed as countries. They can reach out and absorb other, less-than-ideal lands. In doing so, they don’t just become bigger; they swallow up resources, knowledge bases, and taxes, and they make them their own, creating even larger economies of scale. They anchor their important lands on more secure footings.

They become empires. Most of human history is the story of how this or that imperial center didn’t simply come to be, but expanded to dominate our understanding of humanity itself.

Any number of things can wound an empire: climatic shifts that gut food production can crash even the most powerful of entities terrifyingly fast; internal political disputes can (literally) behead the system at the top; outlying territories can rebel, costing the imperial center an economic lifeline or a strategic bulwark. But by far the most common way an empire perishes is by way of another empire waltzing over and punching it in the face.

It added up to make the Imperial Age a brutal era. Anyone who was not from an imperial core didn’t have the best life, typically being used as cannon fodder in incessant wars among clashing empires. And it all lasted a loooooooooooooooooooooong time. The world’s first city—Uruk, in Mesopotamia, home to Gilgamesh—upgraded from a small settlement to something more permanent sometime in the middle of the fourth millennium BC. The world’s first empire—Akkadia—erupted upon its neighbors a mere thousand years later.^*

For over four thousand years, empire was the norm.

How empires interacted had a lot to do with the horse they rode in on. For a long time, quite literally. If we view history as a series of inventions, the history of empires looks like a long arc of new efficiencies in movement . . . and in death. From the Mongolian use of stirrups to move at blazing speeds across the steppe to the newfangled Portuguese ships that crossed oceans, technology brought the world’s empires into ever-greater proximity with ever-bigger consequences.

Until technology became so efficient that wars between empires tore the world to shreds. The two technological families of deepwater navigation and industrialization enabled all the empires to engage one another everywhere at the same time. The resulting ultimate, inevitable, catastrophic, system-ending conflict was the most deadly, destructive war in history.

We know it more commonly as the Second World War. It set the stage for something fundamentally new.

THE SECOND AGE: ORDER

World War II didn’t so much end the Imperial Age as eradicate it. When the dust settled, only two powers remained—the United States and the Soviet Union—and they immediately got themselves uncomfortable for a long, drawn-out struggle. The Soviet system was the final remaining empire, and it operated like all the empires before it. A single group of people—the Russians—called most of the shots, and everyone else, whether they be Estonian or Polish or Slovak or Bulgarian or Armenian or Uzbek or Tatar or Ingush, was there to provide strategic depth, captive markets, and, if need be, a deep pile of bodies to throw at the neighbors. Anyone who had a problem with that could suck on some bullets in a work camp. Very old school.

In a way the power that rivaled the Soviet Union—the United States—was kind of, sort of, an empire as well. The Americans had expanded from a small coastal base to dominate the middle third—the best third—of the North American continent. But a mix of factors made them something else entirely.

First, the Americans started life as the extension of an empire. The common struggle of the original thirteen colonies against the British system granted them the most important aspect of a common identity: a common cause. Almost by definition, empires lack that—the imperial center tends to suck the life out of colonies and protectorates.

Second, because the Americans began as a branch of the world’s most powerful military system, at independence they enjoyed a massive military advantage over most of their immediate neighbors. Combine that advantage with their resistance to Old World diseases, and the natives of North America were all but extinguished, leaving ample room for the new Americans to expand into. Historical revisionists have reevaluated and are reevaluating^* the United States’ role in the destruction of the native cultures, but the fact remains that Old World peoples cannot even fathom how extraordinarily low the barriers were to the Americans’ territorial and economic expansion. The natives’ annihilation was so complete the United States faces little of the internal heartburn of undigested peoples of imperial systems.

Third, that expansion—both in population and geographic terms—muddled the differences among the coastal states of the early nation. Thirteen distinct identities merged in the interior into something new and more holistic. Within a generation of the end of the War of Independence, the Americans thought of themselves less as citizens of the various states and more as citizens of one of two regions: the North and the South.

Fourth, these two regions duked it out in what remains the deadliest conflict in American history in both relative and absolute terms. At war’s end, the North was victorious, but rather than purge or subjugate the defeated South, the Northerners reintegrated their defeated brothers into the Union while simultaneously beginning the long, multifaceted process of incorporating nonwhites into the greater whole. This Reconstruction was awkward and incomplete and absorbed the bulk of the split country’s attention for three decades, but despite its at-best half-victories on racial inclusion it succeeded in both maintaining and expanding America’s continuity while simultaneously deepening its economies of scale. By 1900 the United States boasted more arable land, better borders, a better integrated population than any other single self-ruling power, and a larger population than any such power save the decidedly unegalitarian czarist Russia.

Finally, the Reconstruction success deepened America’s cultural integration process, blurring the differences between North and South. To give an idea of just how successful this has become in contemporary times, citizens of the American states of West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania—states on opposite sides of the Civil War who suffered the most brutal fighting of that conflict—are now most likely to list their ethnic background as “American.”

Such melding is critical. The United States is not an empire. There is no clear political or economic core. New York, California, Texas, and Florida all have very strong ideas about just who is actually in charge. There is no singular region that enjoys preferential treatment. American politics might often be divisive, bitter, loud, rude, annoying, childish, venomous, inane, flabbergasting, willfully ignorant, and unfathomably obtuse, but it is pretty clear it is not any Americans’ destiny to serve as cannon fodder. Combine that shared identity with fantastically crunchy borders and a truly wonderful gooey center, and post-Reconstruction America isn’t simply a fundamentally different sort of political beast; it is the most powerful country on Earth.

But “most powerful” does not mean “all-powerful.” When the Americans emerged from Reconstruction, they discovered a world in the midst of a significant military-technological upgrade that brought the empires into even greater proximity. New ships could cross oceans in weeks instead of months. New artillery could reach miles. Aircraft would soon debut. America’s strategic isolation was being intruded upon. Ultimately, reluctantly, the Americans felt compelled to join in the world wars, the apex of industrialized slaughter.

And they really didn’t care for what came next. One tender-hearted Joseph Stalin had taken the disaster of a country he’d inherited from Vladimir Lenin’s failed economic experiments and used the white-hot fires of brutality and battle to forge a war machine of unparalleled size and power. With an inhuman lust for casualties normally reserved for AI-driven killer robots in post-apocalyptic horror novels, Stalin fueled that machine with millions of Soviet soldiers, and then wielded it with sufficient skill and fury to beat back the Nazis inch by bloody inch. GIs had good reason to freak out a bit, as they were now facing off against a battle-hardened Soviet force that was literally raping its way through eastern Germany and the German capital.

The field of combat did not appeal; the Northern European Plain is flat and open. The German war machine had charged west and east across it with frightening speed—a speed the Soviets may not have been able to match in their westward assault, but that they more than made up for in sheer horror. It crossed the mind of more than one American military commander that the Americans had found themselves facing the same quandary of the Germans and French and Dutch and Poles and Russians before them: how the hell do you establish a defensive position on the vast wide opens of Northern Europe?

The potential ally list wasn’t encouraging either. The Europeans—former imperial centers all—had a historyful of antagonisms and backstabbing stretching back to their misty beginnings. How could the US take a ragtag group of war-broken countries with an epic poem of mutual grievances and get them to work together against a threat as monolithically terrifying as the Red Army?

In Asia it was even messier. At war’s end the Americans were not simply occupying Japan in totality; rather, the way the Americans had fought the war had created the greatest power vacuum in Asian history.

The American campaign didn’t eject the Japanese from every inch of the territory the Japanese had captured. Instead the Yanks hopped from island to island, only seizing sufficient bases to maintain their advance. This continued until ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Moments of Transition
• Chapter 1: The Road So Far
• Chapter 2: How to Rule the World, Part I: The American Model
• Chapter 3: How to Rule the World, Part II: The British Model
• Chapter 4: How to Be a Successful Country
• Chapter 5: Japan: Late Bloomer
• Chapter 6: Russia: The Failed Superpower
• Chapter 7: Germany: Superpower, Backfired
• Chapter 8: France: Desperately Seeking Dominance
• Chapter 9: Iran: The Ancient Superpower
• Chapter 10: Saudi Arabia: The Anti-Power and the Destruction of the Middle East
• Chapter 11: Turkey: The Awakening Superpower
• Chapter 12: Brazil: Sunset Approaches
• Chapter 13: Argentina: The Politics of Self-Destruction
• Chapter 14: The Misshape of Things to Come: The Future of American Foreign Policy
• Chapter 15: The United States: The Distant Superpower
• Chapter 16: Present at the Destruction: The Dawning of the Fourth Age
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher