Name: The End of the World Is Just the Beginning
Rating: 4.4 (169 reviews)
Author: Peter Zeihan

What’s in it for me? A short introduction to the end of the world.

Since the end of World War II, society has advanced on a relatively straightforward track. Globally, billions of people were hauled out of poverty. The already wealthy got wealthier. Trade blossomed. Technology got faster – and cheaper. And it’s generally made living easier. Today, you can order pretty much anything you like and have it delivered to your front door in a matter of days – or hours.

But that reality, according to geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan, is about to disappear.

He believes that we’ve become too used to thinking about this world in purely economic terms. It’s all about trade flows and manufacturing jobs and new markets. But globalization wasn’t a spontaneous development. It didn’t just start one day and continue trending upward under its own power. It was the fruit of a political decision made by the United States to order the globe in a certain way.

As we’ll see in this Blink, America had both idealistic and self-interested reasons to underwrite globalization. Today, however, those reasons no longer hold – which means America is withdrawing from the world. And according to Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, that's bad news for just about everyone else.

Section One: Globalization shapes every aspect of our lives.

Zeihan says the world as we know it is ending. And we’ll get into the why in a bit. First, though, let’s talk a little about the what. In other words, what defines that world? How, in the language of geopolitics, is it ordered? Those are big questions. So let’s first make things a little less abstract.

Picture a decently sized grocery store with its aisles of well-stocked shelves, beeping scanners, and customers. Now go out back and take a look at the loading bay and the trucks, forklifts, and pallets. Wherever you look, it’s the same: endless goods everywhere. In advanced economies, today’s average grocery store offers around 40,000 individual items. To put that into perspective, at the dawn of the last century, it was closer to 200.

So what changed? Run an eye over those shelves. There’s Himalayan salt, Indonesian tuna, Italian polenta, Japanese miso, Moroccan lemons, and Argentinian merlot. Produce from every continent and ocean. Affordable. Always there, defying nature’s seasons – and flying in the face of 250,000 years of human experience which says that food is always scarce and always dear.

This kind of diversity, reliable availability, and reliably low cost is what globalization is all about. And that’s what defined our world over the last 70 years.

Globalization is about more than how supermarkets are stocked, of course. Our meals are assembled with ingredients from every corner of the Earth, but so is everything else. Smartphones, fertilizers, diesel, and single-malt whiskey – everything we buy, use, and consume has been assembled half a world away.

Goods are the blood cells; transportation networks, especially oceanic networks, are the system’s arteries. Giant freighters loaded with bulk goods – think Cambodian rice, Ukrainian grain, or Australian bauxite – provide another thumbnail image of globalization. So do the even vaster container ships that carry 90 percent of the world’s non-bulk goods – our laptops and TVs, calculators, cars, and cadmium batteries.

Interoceanic transportation is the ultimate enabler of global trade, and it drove globalization. But these networks didn’t emerge spontaneously, as you’ll learn in the next section.

Section Two: America’s Cold War strategy turbocharged global trade.

Global trade didn’t exist before 1945 – not really, anyway. There was maritime commerce – lots of it, in fact. But goods didn’t circulate globally; they moved within empires.

Take the British empire in the period between roughly 1880 and the Second World War. Indian tea, Jamaican sugar, English tools, and Australian wool covered huge distances. But they were loaded onto British ships traveling between British ports. Manufacturing and consumption were kept in-house – goods were made and consumed within the empire.

Section Three: America’s strategic calculus changed after the Cold War.

Okay, Let’s recap. Free trade, the linchpin of Bretton Woods, turbocharged globalization. But that wasn’t its purpose. Really, it was a bribe. America offered allies a deal: help us contain the Soviets, and we’ll give you access to the most dynamic economic system on Earth. America won the Cold War, but it lost its industrial base and manufacturing jobs.

Communism was a great motivator. Political leaders and voters accepted the costs of policing the world because there was no greater threat to America. However, it was harder to sell that ongoing investment in global order after the fall of the Soviet Union. Free trade, for example, had been important because it served America’s security objectives. Was that still true after 1989?

Final Summary

Globalization was underpinned by the United States’ strategic objectives in the Cold War and its reliance on foreign oil. Securing the conditions for global trade was a way of bribing America’s allies to help them contain the Soviets. After 1989, America continued supporting global free trade; like most developed nations, it couldn’t meet its own fuel needs. But those two rationales no longer apply. The Soviet Union is gone, and the United States is energy independent. America isn’t going to police the world anymore. So the rest of us should buckle up – we may be in for a bumpy ride.

Key ideas in The End of the World Is Just the Beginning

What is The End of the World Is Just the Beginning about?

The End of the World Is Just Beginning (2022) asks what happens if or when the United States stops policing the global order it established after the Second World War. The short answer is that the world as we know it will come to a grinding, potentially violent halt. The longer answer takes us on a thrilling ride through the politics and economics of trade, energy, and foreign policy.

About the Author

Peter Zeihan is an expert on global energy, demographics, and international security. Before founding his own research and forecasting agency, he worked for the US State Department and several think tanks based in Washington, DC. Zeihan’s previous books include The Absent Superpower and Disunited Nations.