Peter Zeihan

This is something new.

You're trying to repurpose this without negotiating with us.

And so you can see how we saw a fissure in the alliance at that point.

You move on further into, say, the 2010s and the war on terror, and the United States just became obsessed with things from the European and the Japanese point of view were ever more esoteric.

And they wanted economic opportunities that went different directions.

So the Germans started getting the vast majority of their energy from the Russians.

A lot of countries started integrating with China because they saw an economic advantage to doing that.

If it happened to hollow out the American industrial base or even some of their allies, that was fine because economics evolve.

The United States saw problems with the structure because we were no longer being able to dictate the security environment.

And everyone else saw problems with the economic structure because they saw the Americans in many ways becoming a barricade towards what they thought was perfectly natural activity.

And the bilateral agreement between us and all the allies that had held for 40 years broke down bit by bit at pretty much every functional level until we get to Trump.

It was always going to end now, this decade, 2025 to 2035, for demographic reasons.

The problem there is when we started to globalize back in the 40s and 50s, everyone moved off the farm and into the town.

When you're on the farm, kids are free labor.

You have a lot of them.

You move into town, all of a sudden kids are expense.

And so we went from on average in the Western world having something like four or five kids today to having only one to two.

You do that for 80 years and eventually it's not that you run out of children.

That happened in the 80s and 90s in most countries.

We're now in the position in this next 10-year period where we're running out of working-aged adults, and there is no trade if there is no one to consume or produce.