Peter Zeihan

Although this book is only a few months old, world events seem to have raced ahead of its premise: that the disengagement of America will cause greater hardship to America’s allies and competitors than to America itself.

If you read headlines (and who doesn’t) you’d quickly learn that the opposite is true: America’s hegemony is threatened more by its own intransigence than by anything anybody could have dreamed up for it.

If anything, the current international public health emergency has demonstrated that the American republic was designed to fail from the beginning.

Why?

Because it valued liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Krispy Kreme Donuts?) over cooperation, consensus, and compromise.

This book gives “report cards” on America’s major competitors and the forecasts are pretty grim. China will implode. Russia will fizzle out. Germany has had its day and its green plans are a sham. In spite of its demographic cul de sac, Japan will assume its rightful place among the Asian tigers.

N. Korean, Iranian, Indian, Pakistani and Israeli nuclear programs? Shrug.

Nowhere in this global strategic analysis does one find the role of ocean acidification, ocean rise, the deterioration of the ice caps, the decline of the permafrost, or the seemingly unstoppable rises in CO-2 emissions.

The book reads more like a prep book for a presidential debate than a sober analysis of who wins, who loses, and why.

There is no analysis on the concentration of wealth, or the scale of international crime, the offshoring of wealth, or the grip of transnational corporations.

Don’t black lives matter? Not in this book.

Where in this equation are data and processing power and the integrity of electronic networks? And where do artificial intelligence and CRISPR fit in?

Nowhere in sight.

About a year ago I read Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. If you want to wake up frightened, that is a better place to start.

Before I read this book I was skeptical that nations standing alone will have a great impact on global trends. I am still of that opinion.… (mais)

An eye-opening and very thoughtful and evidence based account of the current state of the world and what can be done to change the trajectory of where we are on. I think this is a good alert to those people who want to know what will happen in the next 5 to 10 years, and what will happen to specific countries within that time as well. The contraction of China, the continual hegemony of the United States in economic terms, And the real difficulty in converting from a petroleum-based economic project to that of a climate preserving carbon neutral project are highlighted with stark clarity.… (mais)

I enjoyed the somewhat conversational style/tone and imagining the future. And, I learned a great deal more about world geography and the shale industry. I found the entire book fascinating (although I wish I had more knowledge so I could be a more critical reader.)

This book needs GOOD maps. These maps were too small and it was nearly impossible to see the differences between the many shades of grey. At least for the last book, I was able to find where someone had colored his maps and put them on the internet (so I could also zoom in.)

Also, it needs a good editing. The occasional mistakes (where a word was omitted or added or where a sentence was incomplete) were very distracting. I would read the sentence over and over to try to make sense of it, only to realize that it was a mistake.
I still don't see how global oil prices could go to $150 a barrel but remain under $70 in the US.… (mais)