The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  What do the Americans have to do to make sure this comes to pass? Not a damn thing. Geography has given the Americans almost everything they could ever need. China and Europe will fall and fade without prompting. Russia will crumble on its own. Iran will scramble the Middle East like a bad omelet for its own reasons. Demographics in the United States will rebound on their own, and even determined efforts to repair the damage in other nations won’t generate their first glimpses of positive results until 2035. Shale takes care of the rest. America’s strengths may be accidental, but they are strengths—and durable ones at that—nonetheless.

  Simply put, the world is indeed going to hell, but the Americans are going to sit this one out.

  Think time will prove me wrong? Look me up in 2040 and let’s discuss. I’ll be sixty-six and looking forward to a much-delayed (thanks to the Boomers) retirement.

  Bring a bottle of something interesting.

  Acknowledgments

  It took a village to raise this idiot.

  Meet some of the villagers:

  At the corner of Unflinching Accuracy and Dogged Persistence live the fact-checkers Matt Powers and Melissa Taylor, who have done an admirable job of preventing me from looking the fool. That classy ranch-style home is the aerie of the ever energetic researcher-goddess Athena Selim, who has seen me through this and oh-so-many other projects. It is with sad pride that I bid Athena farewell as she dives into the maelstrom of secrecy that is the alphabet soup of the American intelligence community.

  Over in the hip part of town the graphic artists are busy graffitiing up the place. Alf Pardo is the master of the all-in-one concept graphics, Adam Smith makes overlapping webworks of details absorbable at a glance, while Benjamin Sledge can turn the web into an expression of art—and even make numbers look pretty.

  The sprawling campus that is part kindergarten rec room, part think tank, part Hunger Games death match is the private intelligence firm Stratfor, my home for twelve years. The intellectual dynamism of the place certainly helped forge many of the concepts within this book (while mercilessly incinerating many others). Never before (or again, I fear) will I be part of a bizarrely beautiful and wonderfully terrible team of savants.

  Nestled in a far more respectable neighborhood resides the chain of contacts who made The Accidental Superpower real. Barrett Cordero at BigSpeak helped me bootstrap myself as a professional public speaker and forwarded me to Carolyn Monaco of Monaco Associates for assistance with publicity. Carolyn found me Jud Laghi of the Jud Laghi Agency to explore the idea of producing a book, and Jud linked me up with Sean Desmond at Hachette’s Twelve imprint where the book took flight. So many (many) thanks to Barrett for taking the initial risk on me, Carolyn for her patience with my stratospherically impressive noncommand of all things PR-related, Jud for knowing precisely where to look, and Sean for making this whole thing actually happen.

  And as with most idiots, I live at the edge of town with the only person both suitably stable to talk me down and suitably odd to put up with me on a sustained basis, Wayne Watters.

  About the Author

  Peter Zeihan has lived in the world of international affairs throughout his fifteen-year career. He launched his own firm, Zeihan on Geopolitics, in 2012 in order to specialize in customized executive briefings for his clients. Before going independent, Zeihan worked for twelve years with the geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor, where he was vice president of analysis. He is a frequent contributor in the media, and has been covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Forbes, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, O’Reilly, National Public Radio, MarketWatch, and others.

  Appendix I No Fear: Climate Change

  I’m not nearly good enough at math or patient enough with people who love to argue endlessly to wade into the technical aspects surrounding the issue of whether or not human activity is indeed altering the Earth’s climate. What I can do is apply the geopolitical method to the issue and highlight a few things about a future in which trade fails, populations age, and climates change. In what follows, I’m going to assume that climate change is real, that it is happening, and that it will trend toward some of the more dire extremes that have been predicted to date. It isn’t a particularly pretty future, but once again, it is one in which the United States emerges head, shoulders, waist, knees, and ankles above most of the rest of the world.

  Global warming presents three primary challenges to our future.

  The first threat is that changing climate patterns will reduce the ability of various lands to serve as food production zones, leading to regional food shortages. This could hit the world fairly hard, as most grain agriculture—which is to say the agriculture that provides most of the calories that people consume—is actually monoculture, an agricultural practice where the land produces but one type of produce to which it is uniquely well suited. Change the climate and the grain in question is no longer appropriate to that geography.

  The second threat is that sea levels will rise, inundating coastal regions and destroying ports and cities.

  The third and final threat is from mass population movements as people flee either hunger or the advancing sea for better-supplied or drier land.

  In all three cases, the United States gets a pass.

  • The American agricultural heartland is the largest in the world by most measures, stretching across a wide range of longitude and latitude. A moderate shift in climate would shift the bands within which certain crops could be grown—a hotter climate would move the various crop belts north, a drier climate would move them east. Farmers might need to switch from corn to wheat or vice versa, but the vast majority of American farmland would still be usable in all but the most extreme of climatic variations, and all of it would still have the necessary infrastructure to support monoculture.

  • In terms of rising sea levels, the Americans would lose New Orleans and most of Florida outright, and Manhattan would be threatened. But ports can be moved upriver, while an area as small and intensely developed as Manhattan could in theory be protected from rising sea levels with a combination of dikes and pumps. All other major American cities would remain sufficiently high and dry to continue operation, although the coastal ones would obviously require some (multibillion-dollar) infrastructure tweaking. The biggest loss to the Americans would most likely be the submersion of the barrier island chains, which would expose the Gulf and East Coasts to direct storm damage.

  • In terms of refugee movements, the Americans also do well. The only two countries that they border do not have meaningful coastal populations, so no extranational refugees will be pouring in. And the United States itself has more than enough usable land under even unreasonable scenarios to resettle its own displaced Floridians.

  None of this means that climate change wouldn’t impact the United States. Hardly. But the impacts would be relatively moderate—minor even—and not a great deal of new infrastructure would need to be constructed to compensate for the deviations.

  Elsewhere, however, climate change would be remarkably destructive. Most of the north-south dimension of the North European Plain is narrower than the U.S. state of Arkansas, so even a mild climatic shift could destroy local monocultures in their entirety. The Argentine plains are less than half the acreage of the greater Midwest and are bracketed by mountains, desert, and tropics with very small transition zones; a mild climatic shift could obviate vast tracts of land. Similarly, the eastern half of the Russian wheat belt is a long thin strip—thinner than even the NEP—bracketed by desert to the south and the Siberian wastes to the north. A climatic shift might “just” move the belt north or south by a few dozen miles, but any such change would move it north or south into areas with no towns and no infrastructure. In all examples, the Argentines, Europeans, and Russians would also lose major cities: Buenos Aires, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Saint Petersburg would all disappear beneath the expanded sea.

  Population relocations would be particularl
y horrifying in Northern Europe. The populations of Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands exist directly on top of major low-lying food-producing regions—the most densely populated portions of those three countries would for all intents and purposes cease to exist. Also joining the list of drowned countries would be Bangladesh, whose 180 million people would have nowhere to go but already impoverished India, and Egypt—where over half of the population lives on the Nile delta, which currently is just barely above sea level. Some 50 million Egyptians—including the bulk of the population of Cairo—would have to move upriver into a narrow valley that could not support one-quarter of them. Other major cities that would sink below the waves include Basra (Iraq), Bangkok, Venice, Port Harcourt (Nigeria’s oil capital). Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City and the bulk of the Mekong delta, the world’s most productive rice-growing region, would also be gone. The entire northern rim of Africa could face starvation, generating a deluge of refugees who would have nowhere to go but Southern Europe, a region that will already be under extreme pressure both economically and climatically.

  Somewhat less horrible threats will face populations that are fleeing hunger rather than water. Russian agricultural populations east of the Urals would be forced to abandon Siberia for European Russia. The Iberian countries would likely lose the ability to feed themselves and have nowhere to go but France. Southern Italy’s population would likely flee en masse north into the Po valley. Australian agriculture, most of which is located upon marginal land, could simply disappear, leaving much (more) of the continent empty. Brazil would see nearly all of its ports of significance reclaimed by the sea, forcing its small coastal populations inland and largely walling the country off from the world.

  By far the biggest loser among the major players would be China. The industrialized regions of the greater Tianjin, Shanghai, and Hong Kong regions are less than sixteen feet above sea level. The agricultural belts that surround Tianjin and Shanghai are also microclimates, existing in only very tight ranges of latitude, longitude, and elevation. Even a small change in climatic variance could drastically impact the productivity of lands that exist under a fairly strict monoculture of either rice or wheat. These regions in question account for some two-thirds of Chinese export activity. And most of the 100 million Chinese who live in the threatened areas would have nowhere to go but inland into the North China Plain, an area that will already be facing extreme political and economic stress.

  Appendix II Demography and Trade

  1. Anglophiles will be pleased to know that the United Kingdom still far and away ranks number one.

  1. Don’t be too hard on them. It was thirty-five hundred years ago and until their discovery of the Jordan and the Euphrates the Egyptians had never seen another river except the north-flowing Nile.

  2. The mind-set of eternal stability was so deeply entrenched that when ancient Egyptian scholars discovered that they had failed to account for the extra day in leap years, instead of adjusting their calendars they decided it would be less disruptive to wait until their calendar—too short by 0.25 days annually—simply cycled all the way around again, a process that took 1,461 years. When that day arrived, the Egyptian leadership declined to make the adjustment, since from their point of view the inaccurate calendar had triggered no deleterious events in the past millennia and a half. It wasn’t until the Greeks occupied Egypt that they forced the adoption of an accurate calendar.

  3. At the Roman Empire’s height, the capital sourced much of its wheat consumption from Egypt.

  1. The legitimacy gain was so pervasive that Lenin had no luck shopping communism around in industrial Europe. Even under World War I shortages, the Germans were much better off than they had been thirty years prior. He had to go somewhere where the Industrial Revolution hadn’t yet happened to find people whose living standards were stagnant to falling, and therefore people who would be willing to try something revolutionary.

  1. From this point on the term “navigable river” refers to rivers that can handle drafts of nine feet for at least nine months of the year.

  2. In most cases international linkages don’t achieve the same sort of cultural interaction because personal interaction doesn’t occur very often. It’s the combination of personal accessibility and economic interdependence that puts a riverine culture on the path to unification. It should come as little surprise that the portion of early America that was least integrated was the South. That region’s rivers flow directly to the sea in a manner similar to Northern Europe, resulting in somewhat localized rather than federalized identities. Similarly, today it is notable that the Pacific coast states often seem culturally out of step with everyone east of the Rockies. That region is the one portion of the United States in which integration with foreign nations is of similar difficulty to integration internally. That, and next-door Vancouver is awesome.

  3. We will address several of these lands—in particular Europe’s northern plains, the Russian grain belt, the Ganges basin, and the North China Plain—in later chapters.

  4. Incidentally, these are also reasons why riverbanks are in general superior to seacoasts for capital generation. It takes a hell of a hurricane to make a river unnavigable, and rivers are typically immune to tidal surges. Additionally, rivers by definition have two banks, doubling the potential amount of port frontage real estate.

  5. The Saint Lawrence’s year-round head of navigation is at Quebec City, although when the river is ice-free ocean shipping can reach Montreal. After Montreal, however, extensive engineering is required to bypass shallows, rapids, and falls, the most famous of which is Niagara.

  6. Applicants have to open an account with the bank they intend to get a loan from, and then deposit the equivalent of their would-be mortgage payment monthly for several years before the bank will fund the mortgage.

  7. Six months by wagon, or a little over three months by sea by sailing around South America.

  8. The two straits that separate Japan from the Asian mainland.

  1. It should come as no surprise that one of the few battles in which the Americans did not enjoy such a numerical advantage was also one in which American naval power was useless: the Battle of the Bulge. That battle also holds the distinction of being the World War II battle in which the Americans suffered both the most casualties (eighty-one thousand) and the most deaths (ten thousand).

  2. As the Americans painfully learned in Vietnam twenty years later and then painfully relearned in Iraq forty years after that.

  1. Everyone has his or her own start/stop years for the various generational breaks. Here are mine: Baby Boomers, 1946–64; Gen X, 1965–79; Gen Y (a.k.a. Millennials), 1980–99; Gen Z (a.k.a. Post-Millennials), 2000–2019.

  2. None of this is meant to say that the Americans (and others) are not facing a pension shortfall. They are. They all are. But this is still the largest single class of financial assets that the world has ever seen, both in absolute and relative terms, and its mere existence has skewed not just national politics, but international economics as well.

  3. I’m also counting upon the depth of that belief generating a lot of book sales.

  4. In the financial world this is the infamous “chasing yield” problem. The idea is that there is so much investment capital out there that investors are willing to ignore warnings such as high debt levels, lack of collateral, poor credit histories, accounting malpractice, fraud, state intervention, default, theft (both white-and blue-collar), and some things that might even be considered serious in order to get a couple more percentage points of return.

  1. “Petroleum” is a catchall term that includes all types of crude oil, natural gas, as well as associated liquids such as propane. When I use the term I’m referring to all types of petroleum. When discussing more specific products separately, such as oil or natural gas, I will use those terms specifically.

  2. Such layers are typically in excess of two thousand feet below the surface. Also, note that brackish groundwater is not interchangeable with
seawater. The many organisms that live in seawater make it unsuitable for fracking without extensive filtration.

  3. Just as there is no “average” for well depth, there is no average for water requirements. Various geological and technological factors—porosity, clays, chalks, number of fracks, depth of wellbore, and more—can make wells need anywhere from 2 million to 12 million gallons of water. Liquid transport trucks normally carry 5,500–11,600 gallons of liquid, so being able to mix the frack fluid on site could potentially eliminate 90–180 truck trips per well.

  4. At present the deepest water source for an American city is 1,700 feet for Rapid City, South Dakota.

  5. This improved concentration isn’t just a safety issue. The more concentrated the frack effort, the more impact it has on a very specific zone of high-petroleum-concentration rock, rather than a less controlled frack effort that extends beyond the densest concentrations of petroleum.

  6. The EPA has been working on an overarching report on the status and safety of the shale industry for several years. Its issuance has been delayed several times, ostensibly for reasons of completeness. Odds are heavy that when it is finally released the EPA—and, by extension, President Obama—will place a stamp of approval on the shale industry, which will damage the administration’s standing with the environmental community.