Getting ready for the post-American world

Everybody, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from beautifully chilly Colorado, and I have a holiday present for you! We’re going to be taking some time off here at the company, and as a result, we have pre-loaded, over the course of the last year, a couple of dozen videos on the future the world. We’re calling it the post-American series. Now for those of you who are relatively new to my work, we’ve got two big things going on in the world.

Number one, the United States is backing away from maintaining the structures of the global order which allow for globalization and free trade to occur. And whether you’re China or Germany or Korea or somebody who has refabricated your entire system to take advantage of global access, this is obviously a problem.

Second, globalization over the last seventy years has encouraged not just industrialization, but urbanization everywhere. And when you move from the farm to the city, you have fewer kids. You play that for a few decades, and it’s not that countries are running out of kids (in many cases, that happened 30-40 years ago), they’re now running out of working-aged adults. And both of these trends combined this decade to end the old system and create something fundamentally new. And that will play out differently based on what country you are.

And that is the entire point of this series. So, in a post-American world, what are things like in Canada? What does it look like in Japan, in China, in Western Europe? What does it look like in Africa or Egypt or Turkey? We’re gonna go through a whole bunch of places one at a time, one a day, over the course of the next three weeks, and hopefully you guys enjoy your Christmas present, or your Hanukkah present, or your Kwanza present, or your Happy Monday present, whatever it happens to be. So everybody have a great holiday season. Even though I’ll be taking off for a while, there will still be content coming in, and I wish the best to you and yours. Take care!