The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  Most readers are probably unaware of the robustness and stability of this record. Some may be wondering how this record meshes with the conventional contemporary wisdom that the United States’ best days are behind it. The conventional contemporary wisdom isn’t simply wrong, it’s laughably so. In 2014, we’re not witnessing the beginning of the end of American power, but the end of its beginning. In fact, we’re on the cusp of a shift in the international order just as profound as those delegates back in 1944 experienced. The free trade era Bretton Woods created is winding toward an unceremonious end. But there is no grand plan, no great conspiracy. Impersonal factors beyond our control are not only tearing down the world we think we know, but also haphazardly putting a new one in its place.

  I’ve divided this book into four parts. The first, chapters 2 through 4, deals with how geography shapes international interactions, primarily focusing on what makes some countries more powerful than others and ultimately what makes the United States more powerful than all. In the second section, chapters 5 through 7, we’ll dive into the current moment of history and break down trends that are all—independently—coming to a head. We’ll see how they are all far past critical mass, and are now irresistible, even accidental. We’ll revisit Bretton Woods in a new context, as well as address the world’s demographic time bombs and the emergence of the shale industry as a major international factor.

  The remainder of the book is reserved for the future. In chapters 8 through 10 we’ll peer forward through the years until 2030, exploring the new world about to emerge, complete with the shape of a greatly revised American alliance system and the major aggressive powers. Finally, we’ll close out with the five crises of the future, the major threats and challenges of a fundamentally new era.

  For now let us focus on the why of the world as we know it. The premier tool in this regard is geopolitics, the study of how place matters. How rivers lead people to interact differently than mountains. How those differences lead to great variations in wealth, culture, and military strategy. Geopolitics strips away the ideological, the emotional, and the normative (what we want, what we feel, and what we seek), leaving only what is.

  It all comes down to three geographically based factors.

  The first I call the balance of transport. Successful countries find it easy to move people and goods within their territories: Egypt has the Nile, France has the Seine and Loire, the Roman and Inca Empires had their roads. Such easy movement promotes internal trade and development. Trade encourages specialization and moves an economy up the value-added scale, increasing local incomes and generating capital that can be used for everything from building schools and institutions to operating a navy. Such constant interconnections are the most important factors for knitting a people into a nation. Such commonality of interests forms the bedrock of political and cultural unity. With a very, very few exceptions, every successful culture in human history has been based on a culture of robust internal economic interactions, and that almost invariably comes from easy transport.

  But note that I called it a balance of transport. Long-term success isn’t simply based on economic dynamism. Countries also have to be able to protect themselves. Just as internal trade requires more than a little help from geography—well-rivered plains preferably—so too does defense. Successful countries also have borders that are easy to protect. It does no good to have a great internal trading network if the next country over can park its tanks on your lawn. Deserts or mountains are good for such border zones. Oceans are better. It is this balance—easy transport within, difficult transport beyond—that is the magic ingredient for success.

  The second factor is the ability of a country to benefit from the package of technologies known as deepwater navigation, including everything from easily portable compasses to cannon. In many ways deepwater navigation is simply a (gross) extension of the balance of transport. It adds a series of technologies that allow sailors to know where they are when they lose sight of land, as well as ensuring sufficient engineering robustness so that cargoes and crews can make it safely to their destination despite challenges natural and man-made. Economically, deepwater navigation allows countries to extend their local economies to the global level, radically increasing wealth opportunities. Militarily, countries that can operate on the deep blue sea can keep security threats far from their shores.

  Third, there is the package of technologies known as industrialization: assembly lines, interchangeable parts, steam power, and the like. If deepwater navigation extended the balance of transport to a global scale, then industrialization put it on steroids. Industrialization is about using machinery both to increase worker productivity and to marry production to higher-output forms of energy like coal and oil, as opposed to wind and water. These changes increase economic output by an order of magnitude (or more). Courtesy of industrialization, vast portions of the planet that had been chronically stuck in a technological dark age suddenly became capable of development. Such is the ultimate cause of the rise of countries like Brazil, Russia, and India.

  In all three cases—the balance of transport, deepwater navigation, and industrialization—the United States enjoys the physical geography most favorable to their application. Two facts stand out. First, since the root of American power is geographic and not the result of any particular plan or ideology, American power is incidental. Even accidental.

  Second, the United States wasn’t the point of origin for any of the respective technologies that created the modern world. Consequently, we need to turn to other countries and other times to show how and why these three factors arose, took on importance, and came to dominate the human condition. Then we’ll be ready to explore how and why these technologies favor the United States more than anyplace else in the world.

  For the first concept—the balance of transport—we’ll have to go back.

  Way back.

  Way, way back.

  CHAPTER 2

  Egypt: The Art of Getting from Here to There

  Moving things around is hard. Really hard. Anyone who has ever rowed a boat or paddled a canoe in a place where he had to make a portage can (quite enthusiastically) tell you how much easier it is to move stuff around on water than on land, but have you ever thought about just how much easier it is? Let’s put it into a context that East Coast Americans can relate to.

  The Geography of Limitation

  Meet Farmer Smith. In the early nineteenth century, Farmer Smith had a small but productive apple orchard in upstate New York. Every fall he loaded his horse, Tobias, with 250 pounds of apples for market, which was all that Tobias could carry over the paths that snaked through upstate New York’s hilly terrain. Farmer Smith’s apples were very popular; he did well, saved his money, and planted more apple trees. In a few years Farmer Smith had done well enough to afford a cart to transport his harvest, and with Tobias strapped in he could now take two thousand pounds of apples to market with each cartload. Years passed, the weather held, and Farmer Smith’s apples continued to sell; with his proceeds he bought more acres of land and planted more apple trees. By the fall of 1825, Farmer Smith was in luck: The long-awaited Erie Canal was finally finished and open for business. Tobias had long since been put out to pasture, so Farmer Smith roped his new horse, Jedediah, to the barge he’d rented in Albany. Jedediah was able to pull thirty tons of apples all the way across the state to Buffalo, where the canal ended and Lake Erie began. And thanks to the waterways of Lake Erie, Farmer Smith could now sell his apples as far away as Detroit.

  Almost two centuries later the proportions in the above example have barely budged. In fact, all that’s changed is that “horse power” has been replaced with “horsepower.” Modern container ships can transport goods for about net 17 cents per container-mile, compared to semi-trailer trucks that do it for net $2.40, including the cost of the locomotion mode as well as operating costs in both instances. But even this incredible disparity in cost assumes access to an American-style multilane hi
ghway, the sort that simply doesn’t exist in some 95 percent of the planet. It also assumes that the road cargo is all transported by semi rather than less efficient vehicles, like those UPS trucks that probably brought you this book. It certainly ignores your family car. It also does not consider the cost and maintenance of the medium of transport itself. The U.S. interstate highway system, for example, responsible for “only” one-quarter of the United States’ road traffic by miles driven, has an annual maintenance cost of $160 billion. By contrast, the Army Corps of Engineers’ 2014 budget for all U.S. waterways maintenance is only $2.7 billion, while the oceans are flat-out free. Toss in associated costs—ranging from the $100 billion Americans spend annually on car insurance, to the $130 billion needed to build America’s 110,000 service stations, to the global supply chain needed to manufacture and service road vehicles—and the practical ratio of road to water transport inflates to anywhere from 40:1 in populated flatlands to in excess of 70:1 in sparsely populated highlands.

  Cheap, easy transport does two things for you. First, it makes you a lot of money. Cheap transport means you can send your goods farther away in search of more profitable markets. Historically that’s been not only a primary means of capital generation, but also a method of making money wholly independent of government policy or whatever the new economic fad happens to be; it works with oil, grain, people, and widgets. In business terms, it’s a reliable perennial. Second, if it is easy to shuttle goods and people around, goods and people will get shuttled around quite a bit. Cheap riverine transport grants loads of personal exposure to the concerns of others in the system, helping to ensure that everyone on the waterway network sees themselves as all in the same boat (often literally). That constant interaction helps a country solidify its identity and political unity in a way that no other geographic feature can.

  Until modern times, any particular person’s world was a pretty small place. This was a simple matter of physics. The wheel eased overland travel, but carting your stuff across endless stretches of land took a lot of energy—so much energy that it was nearly unheard of for people to get their food from more than a few miles away. Anyone who spent his day lugging food wasn’t spending his day growing it. Nearly all the work had to be done with muscle power, so the excess food produced per farm was very low. In the era before refrigeration and preservatives, hauling foodstuffs more than a few miles would have been an exercise in futility. Even armies didn’t have much in the way of self-managed supply chains right up into the eighteenth century. Instead militaries relied on the kindness—or lack of defenses—of strangers for provisions.

  This kept cities small. Very small. In fact, up until the very beginning of the industrial era in the early 1600s, all of the global cities that we think of as epic—New York City, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Shanghai—took up less than eight square miles. That’s a square less than three miles on a side, about the distance that someone carrying a heavy load can cover in two hours, far smaller than most modern airports. If the cities had been any bigger, people wouldn’t have been able to get their food home and still have sufficient time to do anything else. The surrounding farms couldn’t have generated enough surplus food to keep the city from starving, even in times of peace. The same goes for civil administration. If the tax man, policeman, and garbage man couldn’t physically service the territory effectively, then there was no government, no services, and no ability to protect civilians from the dangers of the outside world. Those cultures that tried to grow their cities larger than this natural limit found that famine and cholera returned them to the eight-square-mile size with all the speed and delicacy of, well, famine and cholera.

  This smallness is why it took humanity millennia to evolve into what we now think of as the modern world. Nearly all of the population had to be involved in agriculture simply to feed itself. The minority was nonsedentary peoples (history calls them barbarians), who discovered that one of the few ways to avoid needing to spend your entire day growing food was to spend your entire day stealing other people’s. The only way for the farmers to survive was to have some of their own ranks become soldiers and guard against the barbarians, or become engineers to build defensive works. But those who were not farming still had to be fed. Hitting a balance that would grant both security and full bellies was difficult, if not impossible, in most locations. Urbanization—which, considering the era, typically meant a few families building their huts near each other—was rare and temporary, and the global population remained low for eons. Historians often debate what to call this age, with some form of “precivilized” normally winning out. I refer to this age much more directly: when life sucked.

  Location, Location, Location

  Approximately eight thousand years ago, however, things started to change. Around 6000 BC, a few tribes had relocated out of the savannah of contemporary Sudan into the floodplains of the Nile. This was not a decision to be made lightly. At the time all settlements that engaged in farming did so as a supplement to hunting and gathering, not the other way around. The savannah’s wide-open ranges were game-rich and offered robust supplies of fruits, nuts, and roots. The lower Nile, in contrast, flowed through the desert. The maximum width of green lands was no more than the floodplain—at most single digits in miles—and seasonal floods stripped most of the floodplain free of the sorts of mature vegetation that could support animals in numbers, humans included. After the floods the result was a muddy, denuded moonscape, which quickly cooked into a cracked, baked plain. Turning the Nile into a breadbasket would require centuries of backbreaking labor to store water for the dry season, rebreak and retill fields that would wash away in every flood season.

  Yet for the lower Nile’s early inhabitants, all that work was worth it. The Nile provided two things nearly unique on earth. The first was perfect agricultural inputs like reliable water and high-fertility soil. It wasn’t scant desert rainfall that gave rise to the mighty Nile, but instead the seasonal torrents from the Ethiopian highlands and overflow from the African Great Lakes. The seasonal floods washed down soil of fertility far higher than what could be obtained outside the river valley. The Nile was flush with water supplies every year in a cycle so reliable that true droughts were quite literally biblical events.

  Perhaps more important was the second factor: The lower Nile was safe. One could stand on the ridges above the Nile floodplain at any point within a thousand miles of the sea, look east or west, and be met with the exact same view: an endless desert waste. With the technology of transport largely limited to what you could carry yourself, it was simply impossible for any hostile force to cross the desert. Which meant that it was nearly impossible for anyone—whether in the form of lions or barbarians—to reach the lower Nile. It was one of the few places in the world where there was enough water to survive, and enough security to thrive.

  This combination of factors—high soil fertility, water supplies independent of (and therefore more reliable than) local rainfall, and physical security—not only provided food surpluses, but it also meant that even with a permanent guard there was still a surplus of labor. That surplus labor could be put to use in expanding irrigation networks (and generating yet more food surpluses), building an army (and taking over the neighboring city and its food production capacity), building walls (generating more security and freeing up yet more labor), or for general civilizational advancements in everything from metallurgy to writing. In short, this specific type of physical geography nearly guaranteed that the Egyptians would be on the road to civilization.

  Over the next two millennia small tribal farming settlements consolidated into a series of city-states for mutual defense and to more efficiently apply labor to the problems of taming the Nile. The higher organization and greater labor specialization led to the copper breakthrough of 3600 BC. Copper sounds like a small thing, but once humans figured out how to smelt and cast it, they replaced their wood and stone implements with metal, generating staggering improvements in the productiv
ity of each worker—and each farmer. The resulting population boom generated more and larger cities with bigger and more complex political systems. Allied city-states merged into kingdoms that then struggled for supremacy. By 3150 BC, a single government dominated all of the useful Nile territories between the Mediterranean coast and what is today the city of Aswan. The era of the mighty Egyptian pharaohs had begun.

  The Nile was not the only terminal desert river valley to give birth to an ancient civilization; Lower Mesopotamia and the Indus River share similar geographies and spawned similar cultures for similar reasons. Yet the Nile was the only piece of the ancient world that advanced not just in terms of technical skill such as writing and road construction, but also in terms of political organization into larger and more complex governing structures. Egypt also proved to be the longest-lasting of the ancient civilizations, outliving its ancient contemporaries by two millennia.

  What explains Egypt’s success? Why did Egypt consolidate while its peers remained fractured? How did it so outlast the dozens of civilizations that evolved from it?

  It comes back to the first principle of the balance of transport: Moving stuff is hard.

  Egypt: The Hard Part Is Getting There

  Externally, Egypt’s buffer areas were far superior to those of Mesopotamia and the Indus. The Tigris is only rarely out of sight of the Zagros Mountains, while the Tigris and Euphrates both flow from Anatolia. It may be difficult to move things about in mountainous territory, but most mountains are sufficiently high to wring moisture out of the air. Where you have rain, you can have food—agriculture even. Both Anatolia and the Zagros have housed human populations as long as human history has been recorded. As for the Indus, its upper tributaries directly abut the Ganges valley, allowing for regular contact with that—far larger—river valley. Local deserts insulated both Mesopotamia and the Indus from multiple directions, but not all directions. Their geographies were secure enough to spawn civilizations, but outside forces were still able to reach them, and so they never had the time to consolidate as Egypt did.