Zeihan: Why Geography makes Americans hard to understand

The American ethos has been somewhat unstable over the centuries, which may be partially explained by the country's unique geography. — Image credit: Envato

The traditional American ethos, characterized by a spirit of optimism, has long defined the nation, leaving visitors impressed by Americans’ enthusiasm and hopefulness. Although most Americans today feel more pessimistic about the future and nostalgic about the past, they still often find ways to maintain their optimism.

Watch the video above as Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan explains why he believes the American ethos has been somewhat unstable over the centuries. He suggests that the country’s geography plays a key role in making Americans so complex and difficult to understand.

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Excerpted from Peter’s Aug. 21 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:

We’re going to group therapy today, and on the docket for discussion is what makes Americans so difficult to understand? Not in a weird accent kind of way, but in a “why are we the way that we are” kind of way.

Yeah, we’re all manic-depressive, but how did we end up like this? If you look back at U.S. history, there are some clues as to how we got here. The first settlers struggled with the geography of America, but soon discovered vast fertile lands once they trekked into the interior. This led to rapid economic growth and a sense of boundless opportunity (aka the American Dream), that established the national ethos of hard work will always pay off.

This overly optimistic and often unrealistic worldview in the states isn’t seen most places. Take Canada for example — the harsh landscape within Canada led to a more passive-aggressive national character. Or Australia — the barren outback meant that they had to develop strong external relationships to thrive. Each of these countries’ ethos is unique and contributes to much of the miscommunication that happens throughout the world.

The U.S. also has a quirk in which we overreact to crises. The launch of Sputnik by the Soviets led to a complete overhauling of American industry and education. 9/11 led to the U.S. asserting its power globally. This is a blessing and a curse, and you don’t know how it will end up until years down the road.

So, rules of engagement for understanding Americans, just treat us like teenage girls…

This video was recorded during Zeihan’s backpacking trip through Yosemite at the end of July.

Hey everybody. Peter Zion here coming to you from upper spiller Canyon and Yosemite. Just in front of me is Horse Creek Pass, which sucks. Anyway, the spiller Canyon behind me, that’s much better.
Anyway,
we’re doing a number of videos while I’m out backpacking. This one, we’re gonna talk about why Americans are so manic depressive, or as most other countries refer to it, why Americans are batshit crazy? It has to do with geography. When the original settlers started
laying claim to the eastern seaboard of what’s now the East Coast of the United States, we were just another colony. And even when the United States got its independence, its opportunity for Grove was very limited. You basically had a thin coastal strip that wasn’t even particularly well connected. And there was the Chesapeake Bay right in the middle, which was valuable. But if somebody as somebody having to take over Baltimore, like, you know, war of 1812, kind of thing, it cut the United States in two. So we discovered that Americans had a very regional approach to everything, until we started penetrating inland. Part of the Treaty of Paris that gave the United States the eastern side of the Mississippi Basin, basically going up to the Appalachians, and then later the Louisiana Purchase, which gave us the western side, provided a change, and one that really has shaped America’s mindset ever since. Because when you had people taking the National Road, you had people get into the Ohio River Valley and starting to explore what they soon found out were the best farmlands on the planet, overlaid by the largest natural navigable waterway system in the world, right on top of each other. Anyone for the price of a Conestoga wagon, which in modern times is like $14,000 could basically go out to this interior zone and within eight months, be exporting grain through New Orleans for hard currency. And we saw this last for five generations, which the notable interruption of the Civil War. So for five generations, Americans found more and better lands. They got richer, and there were really no security concerns from their point of view. You do that for 150 years, and you develop a series of national ethoses and mythos is and for the United States, that mythos was that the world is ultimately a kind place and that you just have to work hard, and security will take care of itself, and wealth will take care of itself, because that is what we knew for 150 years now, as we have all learned, that is not how the world actually works. From time to time, the world reaches out and punches you in the face, and for Americans who went for five generations without a serious adjustment, well, we lose our mind because we can convince that the covenant with God has been broken and that our days are over, and we start a panicked recreation of everything about ourselves in a desperate attempt to survive. Now, is this an overreaction? You betcha. But does this have an upside? Absolutely, because if you respond to negative stimuli with a reinvention, then the sky is the limit. And so gonna give you a few examples here. Kind of the quintessential one is Sputnik. I mean, let’s be honest here it was a beeping aluminum grapefruit, and the Americans were head of the Russians at the time in rocketry, in metallurgy and electronics. But because the Russians were able to launch something that went Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, we lost our shit, and we completely overhauled our industrial base, we completely overhauled how we handled public education, and we then coasted on those advantages for the next 50 years. 911 is another really good example. It was a tragedy by undermeasure. I don’t mean to talk people out of that, but as a side effect of the war on terror, Americans ended up having on the sharp end of American power striding every major waterway on the planet, something we have yet to use, and when that time comes, all the hard work is done. Vietnam, another great example. We lost a war to a post colonial power that was a rice producer, and we were the world’s largest rice exporter at the time. As a side effect of our reaction to Vietnam, we took about a decade off, and we completely overhauled our defense industry, marrying technology to our weapons system in what has become known as the revolution in military affairs that gave us everything from satellite communications to cruise missiles to J dams.
Our reaction, our overreaction to stimulus is one of our great advantages, but it does mean we’re a little when we’re dealing with the diplomatic side of things, because when something goes down that we think is too much, we have to remake everything now our closest cultural cousins, the Australians, the New Zealanders and the Canadians.
Something similar to this. Let’s start with our Canuck neighbors. Actually, the Canucks and the Australians both, unlike the American settlers, who found more and better lands, the Canadian and Australian settlers basically found a dead heart. The Aussies found the Outback, which, you know may be good for mining, but it’s certainly not good for the average person to start anew. And the Canadians found the Canadian Shield, which is forested land with a broken crust where you might be able to again mine, but you’re never going to farm. And so you had a very different approach. In the case of Canada, this is where the passive aggressiveness comes from, because they’ve always seen the country to their South doing very, very, very well with absolutely no planning with the Australians. This is why they have a tendency to be very varied, forward, very, very forward thinking, because they know, at the end of the day, their capacity to leverage their own geography to achieve this route is somewhat limited, and so they have to have good relations with someone else. It used to be the United Kingdom. Now it’s definitely the United States. And then there are the Kiwis. Similar situation with the United States a little bit in that they pushed inland and they found more and better lands, especially relative to the size of the country. But there was one big difference between New Zealand and the United States. New Zealand’s remote the Americans have a massive coastline on two ocean basins. And so we take the size of the United States and you combine it with its resources, of course, it’s going to be a global power, which is one of the reasons why we punched in the face every every once in a while, the New Zealanders never had that. The Kiwis could exist in a degree of splendid isolation. Should they really choose to? And as a result, they kind of have all the upsides of what goes on in the American mind, but none of the downsides. Because the last time that there was a war on New Zealand shores, it’s, you have to go back to, like the 15th century. I think that’s 15th, 16th, 13th,
mid teenth century, when the Maori settled there in the first place and went to war with the natives who were already there, the result is a very, very different political culture. Okay, that’s it for me. I will.
That’s my next stop. I’ll see you guys there.