Disunited Nations is my second Peter Zeihan book. The first was Absent Superpower. I also shared favorite highlights from that one; there was so much information and nuance that I reached Kindle’s limit on same-book highlights.
All highlights below are copied verbatim from the Kindle version:
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Near the end of the Imperial Age in 1920, there were about fifty countries. As of 2020, the count is over two hundred. Remove the Order and what has enabled many of these countries to form, survive—even thrive—will fade away.
Dozens of assets contribute to national survival and power, but these are the big four:
-Viable home territories, with usable lands and defensible borders
-A reliable food supply
-A sustainable population structure
-Access to a stable mix of energy inputs to participate in modern life
There can be a darker side too. If it’s easy to move goods and people and ideas, it’s also easy to move troops. Cultural merging, or assimilation, is not the only way to “unify” a territory. Hunting down dissident and minority groups is more straightforward. Again, the American Midwest is a premier example. The Native Americans never had a chance. Similar unification-via-obliteration unfolded in most of the world’s countries with flatlands, most notably in the North China Plain, the Northern European Plain, and the vast open spaces of North Africa and the Middle East.
Many make light of what it means for the Chinese population to have an extra 41 million men under age forty who will never marry. The two most common concerns are how unmoored males might threaten social stability (legitimate) and how the Chinese government might be willing to throw a few million extra men into a military meat grinder just to get rid of them
Women are now more likely to live in cramped, coastal, urban quarters where they hold upwardly mobile white-collar or light manufacturing jobs their entire careers, while men are more likely either to live in different provinces in the poor interior or to work as undocumented migrants in China’s economic underbelly.
About the only thing that encourages people to have more kids is for people to have more space. That’s why Germany did have a baby boomlet during a period they understandably don’t enjoy discussing: the Lebensraum era of the late 1930s, when Germany was busy annexing its neighbors and getting physically bigger.
As Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, so famously put it, the alliance’s raison d’être was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
Europe now faces simultaneous, interlocking crises: currency, finance, banking, monetary policy, supply chains, inequality, migration, oil, natural gas, electricity, demographics, consumption, exports, imports, Libya, Syria, Turkey, Russia. (Perhaps even America?) It gets worse: Any response requires that all European states agree on how to prioritize and address each problem.
A cohesive French identity as early as the fifth century, a full half millennium before the English and twice that before the German. From the French core in the Beauce,
The longest, most successful, and least bad-blood-ridden foreign relationship the Americans have ever had with anyone has been with the French.
Fourth, for the four new regional powers—Turkey, Iran, Japan, and Argentina—allaying American concerns and courting American goodwill will be essential to long-term success.