Peter Zeihan - The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder

Ive always loved maps. My mom tells a story of how when I was five I unfolded a map of my home state of Iowa and started tracing roads away from my hometown, building up to the thickest, brightest line I could find and then connecting it to the next thickest, brightest line I could find until I had traced myself off the maps edge. When I inquired what was on the other side of the Missouri River, my mom realized that Id be leaving Iowa someday.

Map tracing turned into backpacking and route finding, which in time evolved into a mixed-discipline university experience involving everything from Korean land reclamation to Caucasus pipeline planning to German refugee policy to Australian irrigation systems and Brazilian port development. It was all about determining why development strategies that worked so well in one place were disasters in others.

Somewhat ironically, I was almost finished with grad school before I realized that I wasnt the only person to have had such thoughts. In fact, there was an entire discipline based on the concept:

Geopolitics is the study of how place impacts everything: the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the size and serviceability of your mortgage, how long you live, how many children you have, the stability of your job, the shape and feel of your countrys political system, what sorts of war your country wages or defends itself against, and ultimately whether your culture will withstand the test of time. The balance of rivers, mountains, oceans, plains, deserts, and jungles massively influences everything about both the human condition and national success.

Of course, you shouldnt treat geography as deterministic. The Nazis loved geopolitics, but instead of using the study of geography to shape their policies, they used it to justify their ideology. They were hardly alone. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europeans of all stripes used the subdiscipline of geographic determinism to assert their cultural and intellectual superiority over the rest of humanity. At one point, geographers as a whole realized that such concepts were, well, hugely racist and the study of political geography in most formsparticularly in the United Stateswas largely abandoned.

There is definitely a baby/bathwater issue here. There are good solid reasons as to why nearly every major expansionary power of the past has been based in a temperate climate zone, and why all those that have lasted have been riverine-based. This doesnt make the people of these zones better or smarter. It simply means they have more and more sustainable resources, fewer barriers to economic development, and economic and military systems that allow for greater reach. The trick is to begin with geography and see where it takes you; dont start with a theory and use geography to justify it. Its a strategy that has served me well in my life as an analyst, and one that I have attempted to apply to everything I study.

This means that I often find myself drawing conclusions I find unsettling. My personal ideology is green and internationalist and libertarian, which means Im an idealistic pragmatist who falls asleep during long meetings. Aside from a few snarky footnotes that bravely survived the editorial gauntlet, my ideology is not represented in this book. I have solar panels on my house, but I see a global future in which coal reigns supreme. Im an unflinching supporter of free trade and the Western alliance network, seeing the pair as ushering in the greatest peace and prosperity this world has ever known. Yet geography tells me both will be abandoned. I prefer small government, believing that an unobtrusive system generates the broadest and fastest spread of wealth and liberty. But demography tells me an ever larger slice of my income will be taken to fund a system that is ever less dynamic and accountable. I am not required to savor my conclusions. This isnt a book of recommendations on what I think should happen. This is a book of predictions about what will happen.

At its core, The Accidental Superpower is about the advantages and disadvantages that geography imposes. How such characteristics interact to create the world we now know. How fluctuations in those interactions are about to turn that world on its ear. How the most powerful state of the ending era will evolve into something far greater in the new.

Without further ado, lets get to the heart of the matter.