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“The time-staggered nature of the industrialization process—from Britain to Germany to Russia and northwestern Europe and Japan to Korea to Canada and Spain—combined with the steadily accelerating nature of that process, means that much of the world’s population faces mass retirements followed by population crashes at roughly the same time. The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart. For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. None have sufficient young people to even pretend to regenerate their populations. All suffer from terminal demographics. The real questions are how and how soon do their societies crack apart? And do they deflate in silence or lash out against the dying of the light? Coming up behind them—rapidly—is another cadre of countries whose birth rates have dropped even faster, and so who will face a similar demographic disintegration in the 2030s and 2040s: Brazil, Spain, Thailand, Poland, Australia, Cuba, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, and Switzerland.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Globalization was always dependent upon the Americansâ€� commitment to the global Order and that Order hasn’t served Americansâ€� strategic interests since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Without the Americans riding herd on everyone, it is only a matter of time before something in East Asia or the Middle East or the Russian periphery (like, I don’t know, say, a war) breaks the global system beyond repair . . . assuming that the Americans don’t do it themselves.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Something the modern environmental movement often misses is that oil and natural gas are not only the world’s low-carbon fossil fuels, they are also the fuels that are internationally traded. In a post-globalized world, the primary fuel most countries can source locally is coal. And not just any coal, but low-caloric, low-temperature burning, high-contaminant soft or brown coal that generates far more carbon emissions than burning . . . almost anything else.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“There will be no shortage of famines in the post-Order world. Likely in excess of 1 billion people will starve to death, and another 2 billion will suffer chronic malnutrition. Some two-thirds of China’s population faces one of those two fates.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“You can have organic foods or environmentally friendly foods. You cannot have both.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“There is one itty-bitty ray of hope in the coming global fertilizer—and from that, food—shortage: most studies by most agricultural scientists suggest that most farmers have been overfertilizing for decades, especially when it comes to potassium fertilizers. This would suggest that at present most farms in most places have a potassium surplus baked into the soil. This would further suggest that most farmers can reduce their inputs of fertilizer without sacrificing yields by all that much. The question is, for how long?”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Rapid tech advancement requires a large body of highly skilled workers, the opportunities for large-scale collaboration among those workers, and a metric butt-ton of capital to pay for the development, operationalization, and application of new ideas. Demographic collapse is gutting the first, deglobalization is fracturing the second, and the combined pair are ending the third.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“The successive waves of hypergrowth—concentrated on the coastal zones where the world can see them—make China’s rise seem inevitable. The reality is China has borrowed from its interior regions and its demography in order to achieve what, historically speaking, is a very short-term boost. Never let anyone tell you the Chinese are good at the long game. In 3,500 years of Chinese history, the longest stint one of their empires has gone without massive territorial losses is seventy years. That’s. Right. Now. In a geopolitical era created by an outside force that the Chinese cannot shape.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“the absolute lowest grade for silicon as an actual industrial input is 99.95 percent pure. Getting there requires a blast furnace, which typically requires a lot of coal. Overall, the process isn’t all that complicated—you basically just bake the quartz until anything that is not silicon burns away—which means some 90 percent of this firststep processing tends to be done in countries like Russia and China, countries with a lot of surplus industrial capacity that don’t give two shits about environmental issues.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Every country puts a premium on political unification. Every country has fought internal wars to achieve it. China’s own internal unification effort is one of the world’s most heinous, stretching back across four millennia and dozens of discrete conflicts. The most recent major dustup—Mao’s Cultural Revolution—killed at least 40 million people, twenty-five times the number of Americans killed in all wars.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“By most measures—most notably in education, wealth, and health—globalization has been great, but it was never going to last. What you and your parents (and in some cases, grandparents) assumed as the normal, good, and right way of living—that is, the past seven decades or so—is a historic anomaly for the human condition both in strategic and demographic terms. The period of 1980â€�2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment in time. A moment that has ended. A moment that will certainly not come again in our lifetimes.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Sometimes it feels as though American policy is pasted together from the random thoughts of the four-year-old product of a biker rally tryst between Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as “wise capital allocation.â€� The goal isn’t efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Managing foreign territories twice the size of the United States would have been, like, really hard. And the Americans are, like, really bad at government.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Living through history is messy.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“ouroboros.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Deglobalization will shrink the global whole and shatter what remains into segregated markets. Global aging is collapsing the skilled labor supply. And financial shrinkage will make everything more expensive and more difficult.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“state.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“The global worker and consumer base is aging into mass retirement. In our rush to urbanize, no replacement generation was ever born.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“Mexican-Americans are turning nativist. The demographic in the United States that consistently polls the most anti-migration is not white Americans, but instead (non-first-generation) Mexican-Americans. They want family reunification, but only for their own families. Never forget that anti-migrant, build-the-wall Donald Trump carried nearly every county on the southern border when running for reelection in 2020.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“In each and every decade as the Boomers aged, the largest single immigrant group was always Mexican. In the minds of many Boomers, Mexicans have long been not simply the “other,â€� but the “otherâ€� that has arrived in ever-larger numbers.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“In all cases, American English tends to rub out the migrantsâ€� language within two to three generations. In the case of Mexican-Americans, however, it rarely takes more than one. In contemporary times, Mexican-Americans are the most enthusiastic seekers of the American Dream, not just economically, but culturally.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“It’s fairly common for second-generation Mexican-Americans—and nearly reflexive for fourth-generation Mexican-Americans—to define themselves as white. Within their own social strata, Mexican-Americans have redefined “whiteâ€� from an exclusive term that refers to “themâ€� and especially “those gringosâ€� to an inclusive term meaning not simply “usâ€� but “all of us.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“A precious few countries have managed a high degree of development while simultaneously avoiding a collapse in birth rates. It is . . . a painfully short list: the United States, France, Argentina, Sweden, and New Zealand. And . . . that’s it.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“The same mix of factors—demographic, labor variation, security, resource access, and transport safety—will determine who can pull it off. The first of these regions is Southeast Asia sans China. It has a number of factors going for it.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“This will generate not the sort of heavy American involvement most countries would find distasteful, but instead large-scale American disengagement that most countries will find terrifying.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“While we’ll be discovering the edges of our new economic models as we go, our history strongly suggests that fewer workers by definition means more expensive labor. That in turn should prompt everyone to figure out how to make that scarce labor more productive.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“At present, birth rates for Millennials are the lowest in American history.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“find it galling that issues such as “safe spacesâ€� in colleges devoid of divergent viewpoints, transgender bathroom policy, and vaccine benefits have even crossed into the proverbial town square, much less all but crowded-out issues such as nuclear proliferation or America’s place in the world.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

“In a deglobalized, disconnected world there simply isn’t going to be the same giant pool of upwardly mobile meat-eaters required to sustain animal husbandry on its current, global scale. This shift from high-cost animal protein to low-cost plant protein is a necessary transformation that will probably save a billion people or so from starving to death.”
― Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization