by Peter Zeihan
Germany quickly surpassed its competitors in economic, financial, industrial, demographic, and military strength. It was the first country in the world to have the majority of its population urbanized—a critical development to both foster and take advantage of skilled labor in the industrial era—and by 1900 its many regional centers had grown to the point that Germany had more major industrialized cities than the rest of Europe combined. It was the first country to develop mass universities and research labs, and then to link the two directly into local governments and corporations, giving German industry the ability to source everything from loans to staff to scientific research, and giving rise to the national economic champions model of corporate organization that pervades Europe even today. And the Germans methodically and assiduously applied every new breakthrough, whether scientific or industrial, to every aspect of their national strategy, culminating in everything from engines so efficient and small that they could propel individual vehicles (via Karl Benz, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, and Emil Jellinek, whose daughter was the original Mercedes) and modern pharmaceuticals (Gregor Mendel, Robert Koch, Friedrich Bayer, and Paul Ehrlich), to cannons (Alfred Krupp) and blitzkrieg.
The sheer speed of Germany’s rise so disrupted the European system that it almost enabled the Germans to overcome all other European powers simultaneously.
“Almost” being the operative word.
Germany’s defeat in the world wars had nothing to do with luck, but rather with the same interaction of geography and technology that caused the German rise in the first place, the English rise before that, and the Iberian rise before that. Simply put, neither deepwater navigation nor industrialization was done diffusing. England could make better use of deepwater navigation than Iberia, and Germany could make better use of industrialization than England, but there was another geography that could make better use of both.
CHAPTER 4
Enter the Accidental Superpower
Where to start when discussing the United States? With the fact that the Americans inherited the best lands in the world for a very low price in terms of blood, treasure, and time? The fact that within North America there are barriers that separated the early Americans from rival populations in Canada and Mexico? That the territory of the United States is better suited to deepwater navigation than even Great Britain and better suited to industrialization than even Germany? That throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Europeans were so studiously building toward their wars of self-annihilation that they had little attention to spare for the young country that would so soon eclipse them?
These are all important points. So important in fact that each alone—much less in concert—probably would have been sufficient to create an American superpower, and so we will get to all of them over the course of this chapter. But while these advantages are indeed overwhelming from a global perspective, they are actually secondary. There is another factor in play that all but dictates the United States’ global dominance: its waterway network.
The Mississippi is the world’s longest navigable river,1 some 2,100 miles long from its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico to its head of navigation at the Twin Cities in Minnesota. That’s about one-third longer than the mighty Danube and triple the length of the Rhine. And the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.
Yet there is more to America’s waterways than just its rivers. The Americans benefit from a geographic feature that exists in few other places on the planet, and nowhere else in such useful arrangements: barrier islands. Chains of these low, flat, long islands parallel the American mainland for over three-quarters of the Gulf and East Coasts. The American barrier island chain turns three thousand miles of exposed coastline into dozens of connected, shielded bays. Tidal shifts are somewhat mitigated throughout the system, and the islands do an admirable job of blocking all but the most severe weather that the oceans can throw at the land, allowing for safe navigation from the Chesapeake to the Texas-Mexican border. The net effect of this Intracoastal Waterway is the equivalent of having a bonus three-thousand-mile-long river.
The most compelling feature of the American maritime system, however, is also nearly unique among the world’s waterways—the American system is indeed a network. The Mississippi has six major navigable tributaries, most of which have several of their own. The greater Mississippi system empties into the Gulf of Mexico at a point where ships have direct access to the barrier island/Intracoastal system.
All told, this Mississippi and Intracoastal system accounts for 15,500 of the United States’ 17,600 miles of internal waterways. Even leaving out the United States’ (and North America’s) other waterways, this is still a greater length of internal waterways than the rest of the planet combined. The result is that the United States has the greatest volume and concentration of capital-generation opportunities in the world by an absolutely massive margin, and that opportunity is very heavily concentrated in a single unified system.
The combination of size and interconnectedness of the system dictates a number of outcomes:
• First and most important, any culture based upon those waterways will be ridiculously capital-rich. When it comes to transport, distance is key. Low costs of transport allow goods to be shipped farther, and the more efficiently you can move goods from areas of high supply to areas of high demand, the greater the range at which your goods are competitive. In the American example this allows goods—whether Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars—to reach anywhere in the river network at near-nominal costs without having to even leave the country. The sheer volume of those extra savings makes the United States the most capital-rich location on the planet, and that money can be used for whatever Americans (or their government) want, from iPhones to aircraft carrier battle groups.
• One of the things that the Americans have traditionally not needed to spend that money on is artificial infrastructure. In most countries the geopolitical necessity of infrastructure is a core motivator for government formation and expansion, with Germany being the quintessential example. Roads and rails do not come cheaply, so taxes need to be raised and government workforces formed. Not so in the United States. The rivers directly and indirectly eliminate many barriers to economic entry and keep development costs low. Even the early smallholders—pioneer families who owned and worked their own plots of land—found themselves able to export grain via America’s waterways within a matter of months of breaking ground. It’s a recipe for small government and high levels of entrepreneurship. It also means that as the United States developed, it was able to lay rail and road networks to supplement its preexisting river network, as well as open up new inland territories that lacked maritime transport options. These new artificial transport systems did somewhat displace riverine transport, but the constant competition that river transport provides for other modes keeps a lid on transport costs regardless of method.
• The American geography is also a recipe for a consumer base that is absolutely massive. If government is limited, then tax burdens are low, leaving more money in the citizenry’s pockets. If capital is readily available, then so is credit, enabling consumers and corporations alike the ability to expand with ease. If moving products from place to place is easy, food can reach areas that cannot provide enough themselves. It thus makes sense to specialize, and specialization steadily improves education, output, and income levels. The more people specialize, the larger, more sophisticated, and interlinked the economy becomes. The United States is far and away the world’s largest consumer market and has been since shortly after the Civil War. As of 2014, that consumer base amounts to roughly $11.5 trillion. That’s triple anyone else, larger than the consumer bases of the next six countries—Japan, Germany, the United Kin
gdom, France, China, and Italy—combined, and double that of the combined BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).
• Rivers promote unity, and an integrated maritime network promotes unity over a far larger swath of territory. Low-cost transport encourages economic and social interaction along the transport routes. The greater the level of specialization, the greater the need for that interaction (if your city produces cars, it probably needs to import steel, electronics, food, lumber, and so on). Such mutual dependence rapidly takes on characteristics that far surpass the purely economic. Deep, multifaceted economic linkages quickly generate deep, multifaceted cultural and political linkages. With the most robust, naturally occurring infrastructure, it should come as little surprise that the United States enjoys one of the strongest national identities of the major powers.2
America’s waterways have created a legacy of extreme capital richness, remarkable political unity, and a powerful consumer-driven economy, all on a scale that makes the United States the outlier in a global context. And all that with a government that is relatively small, in personnel and resources, for a country of its size.
But that’s just the beginning.
Land (and Water)
The first of the secondary factors is American lands. The majority of the Lower 48 is within the temperate climate zone—warm enough for people to live and crops to grow, cool enough to limit populations of deadly, disease-carrying insects. The Rockies are a very serious mountain chain, but unlike the world’s other great mountains—the Alps, Himalayas, and Andes—they have six major passes with minimal avalanche dangers (so they can be kept open year round). Three of those passes are sufficiently wide to house major metropolitan regions—Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Phoenix—within them. East of the Rockies there is only one geographic zone that forms any sort of significant physical limitation to development—the Appalachian Mountains—and those mountains sport dozens of passes. The easiest and most famous of those openings, the Cumberland Narrows, was the location of the United States’ first ever chunk of artificial infrastructure—the National Road, which linked the Potomac to the Ohio (and from there to the Mississippi) and is the home of eastern portions of the U.S. 40 corridor today. The two ends of the initial road, directly linking the two rivers, were only 130 miles apart. That was all it took to link the eastern seaboard of the original thirteen states to the Mississippi basin. Far from the thousands of miles of transport networks the Germans required to forcibly fashion a unified state, the early Americans only needed a short stretch of log planks. In all, roughly two-thirds (including nearly everything east of the Rocky Mountains) of the Lower 48 can be reached easily, with some 90 percent of it within 150 miles of some sort of navigable waterway.
Even better, most of that usable territory is in a single, easily digestible chunk. The greater Midwest is absolutely massive: With 139 million hectares under till, it is the largest contiguous stretch of high-quality farmland in the world. The central portions of the plain are humid yet temperate, making them perfect for corn and soybean production. The western sections are considerably drier as they lie in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, making them ideal for several varietals of wheat. In bad years the Midwest produces a billion bushels of wheat, 2.5 billion bushels of soybeans, and an astounding 9 billion bushels of corn.
Like America’s waterways, America’s lands would make the United States a global superpower on their own. But the value and importance of those lands increase exponentially when one considers that they overlap America’s world-best waterways almost perfectly.
The world’s greatest river network—that of the Mississippi and its six thousand miles of navigable tributaries—directly overlies the world’s largest piece of arable land, the American Midwest. The Intracoastal Waterway services the entirety of the Southeast as well as the plains of Texas. The Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay take care of California’s Central Valley, and the Columbia and Snake service the agriculturally useful regions of Washington and Oregon. With the exception of the western fringe of the Great Plains that lies in the shadow of the Rockies, no American agricultural region is more than 150 miles from a navigable waterway. This allows the capital, agricultural, and transport bounty to reach the vast bulk of the American population. Of the United States’ 314 million people, some 250 million of them live within 150 miles of one of the country’s navigable waterways.
Global Breadbaskets and Dust Bowls
Climate combined with terrain and elevation is an excellent predictor of what nations can potentially do. Elevations over five thousand feet typically mean mountains, which eliminate navigable rivers from possibility. Rail lines also quickly fall into uselessness in the highlands—a slope as little as 0.25 percent reduces the weight a locomotive can lug by half—and the separating nature of mountain ridges means that any infrastructure built in one area does not benefit another. Tropical climates similarly complicate infrastructure and introduce endemic disease into the strategic math. Deserts, tundra, and taiga simply cannot generate large populations or feed them from local sources. Such wastelands and highlands have never generated powers with a global reach. Tropical powers may support larger populations, but they too tend to be sharply circumscribed.
On the other end of the spectrum are the Goldilocks zones with warmth but not oppressive heat and water but not excessive wetness. All of the major powers of the past five hundred years have come from these easily developed, temperate lands. As pure happenstance would have it, the easily developed lands of the United States are not only the largest contiguous piece of such lands in the world, but they are also almost perfectly overlain by the American waterway network.
Between such zones of ruin and perfection lie the transitions lands that can be developed, but only if funded by a large and sustained supply of capital. Much of the economic and political activity of the past sixty years concerns these moderate-difficulty lands.
This second map puts geographic theory into practice. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the world’s farmland is located in lands where development is easy.
Global Agricultural Land
Thanks to this overlay, there are ample opportunities for local (“local” meaning local to the United States) economic development. The hostile geographies of most countries often make it cheaper to ship goods to the coast, and from there to other locations across the globe, than to engage in overland transport to service areas within one’s own borders. The wealth of internal distribution options the United States enjoys means that for the bulk of its history American dependence upon the international trade system has been less than 15 percent of GDP.
There are portions of the global system that have high-quality lands in quantities that are in the same class as the United States, but almost all lack the potential to develop into a unified, internally focused system.3
Protecting the Core
As the luck of the geopolitical draw would have it, the United States’ big chunk of high-productivity, high-capital land is also one of the most physically secure regions on the planet. Such security is best thought of in four layers: local buffers, local powers, ocean buffers, and potential global rivals.
Local Buffers
As easy as it is to get around within the American section of North America, it is remarkably difficult to cross into the American core territories from either the Mexican or Canadian cores.
America’s southern border region is all either desert or highland or both, relatively flat on the northern side of the border, but rugged on the southern side. Aside from the border communities themselves there are only two meaningful Mexican populations within five hundred miles of the border, Chihuahua and Monterrey, and even they are five hundred mountainous miles apart from one another. As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands. In the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, the Americans took full advantage of that lack of stagin
g areas, that thick buffer, and their superior transport to strategically outmaneuver the larger, slower, and exhausted Mexican forces—and this in an era before the Americans had battleships and jets. At the war’s conclusion, the United States seized half of Mexico’s territory (including California)—the half that was easier to get around in.
Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated. In the border’s eastern reaches mountains and thick forests so snarl transport options that infrastructure even today is thin and vulnerable. In the far west the Rockies are a great border zone in that there is nothing for hundreds of miles on either side of the border that resembles a major staging area. The sole point of potential conflict is the Strait of Georgia, the body of water between Canada’s Vancouver Island and the northwestern extremes of the U.S. state of Washington. A Canadian impingement upon the strait would block maritime access to Puget Sound, home of Seattle and Tacoma. Yet the region’s population (im)balance is heavily in the Americans’ favor: The three Pacific coast American states outpopulate British Columbia by ten to one.
In the middle portion of the border region—the Prairie provinces–Midwest border—connections are almost omnipresent. This is a bad deal not for the Americans, but rather for the Canadians. South of the border zone one encounters ever denser American populations with ever more developed land and ever better transport infrastructure, both artificial and natural. In contrast, moving north into Canada one hits an initial line of cities—Calgary, Regina, and Winnipeg—and then a whole lot of nothing. The Prairies have little choice but to be American in economic orientation and even somewhat midwestern culturally. Their physical links to both British Columbia and the core Canadian provinces of the east are weak at best and regularly disrupted every winter. Their links to the colossus to the south, however, are substantial, multimodal, multiply redundant, and almost always functional.
