Denning:
The North American shale energy boom raises the question of whether it is worthwhile for the U.S. to continue to protect everyone’s trade.
Peter
Zeihan begins “The Accidental Superpower” by declaring that he has “always
loved maps.” From this unremarkable claim springs a lively, readable thesis on
how the success or failure of nations may rest on the very ground beneath their
feet. Rather than focusing on charismatic leaders or lofty ideals, Mr. Zeihan
stresses the more prosaic forces that shape world events: topography, soil
quality, access to water. Water especially, he says, sorts winners from the
rest. It can be a highway, a barrier, a larder and a battery. Rivers make it
cheap to transport goods and people, enabling the efficient mixing of ideas and
markets. The capital that might otherwise be spent on, say, building a road may
be used for other purposes.
It
happens that the United States—the “superpower” of Mr. Zeihan’s title—is
blessed with 12 major navigable rivers, including the Mississippi. Much else
flows from this happy accident. A less pressing need for grand, land-based
infrastructure projects, for example, may lessen the need for centralized
coordination, encouraging small government.
Other
great powers, or former ones, have enjoyed one or two geographical
advantages—think of Egypt’s mighty Nile or Britain’s status as an island
nation, from which its great naval tradition comes. But no nation combines
America’s easy navigability, abundant cropland and a moat the size of two
oceans. The geographical underpinning of America’s global role makes it likely
that U.S. supremacy will endure for some time to come. Just don’t expect it to
be easy, Mr. Zeihan says, at least not for the next couple of decades.
The
bulk of “The Accidental Superpower” peers into the future as Mr. Zeihan, a
former analyst at the geopolitical security firm Stratfor, tries to imagine
where the world, and particularly America, is headed. Conjecture is de rigueur
in the geopolitics genre—sometimes to its peril. Take “The Next 100 Years” by
George Friedman, Mr. Zeihan’s former boss at Stratfor. Mr. Friedman’s 2009 book
got some things right, notably a renewed standoff between the West and Russia.
Eventually, though, it veered into Tom Clancy territory by imagining orbiting
“Battle Stars” and a midcentury Thanksgiving Day sneak attack starting a world
war.
“The
Accidental Superpower” does its fair share of futurology. There is a Russian
collapse, a Swedish-Polish alliance and even a secession crisis—in Canada, of
all places, where the residents of Alberta (not Quebec) are restless. Most
fascinating of all is the notion that, while armchair generals have their
binoculars trained on the Middle East, the most pressing threat to U.S.
homeland security could be a spillover of Mexico’s drug war.
Even if
you don’t buy the specifics of these scenarios, they don’t lapse into a
geopolitical version of science fiction. Their overarching theme is that we are
moving into an ever more chaotic world—an idea that may sound familiar. (Think
of two much-discussed articles from the 1990s: Robert Kaplan ’s “The Coming
Anarchy” and Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?”) Mr. Zeihan’s
prediction, though, derives from a startling proposition: that the U.S., during
the Cold War, “turned geopolitics off,” if only temporarily.
Mr.
Zeihan is referring to the 1944 Bretton Woods settlement. By establishing a
monetary and trading system underpinned by U.S. military and economic might,
the settlement effectively bribed Western Europe’s tribes to set aside their
blood feuds and band together to help hold off the Soviet Union. In return, the
allies got access to the American market—the only functioning one amid the
ruins of 1945—as well as the protection of the only global navy still afloat
and, what’s more, a nuclear umbrella.
Mr.
Zeihan says that the Bretton Woods settlement is now unraveling—largely because
it is no longer essential to the country that underwrote it. Protecting
everyone’s trade by means of the U.S. Navy made sense when it strengthened
allies in the face of a Cold War adversary and guarded tankers feeding
America’s growing appetite for foreign oil. Now the North American shale energy
boom—not to mention the recent financial crisis—raises the question of whether
it is worthwhile for the U.S. to bear such burdens to the same extent.
The
obvious rejoinder to this skepticism is that the U.S. can’t simply lift itself
off a planet with terrorist networks and nuclear weapons. But Mr. Zeihan’s
point isn’t that America is about to isolate itself; it is rather that America
may see the logic of retrenching, and retrenchment will destabilize a world
built on U.S. commitments. Risk-free shipping lanes, for instance, are critical
to major exporters such as China and Germany. Without American power, the fate
of globalized supply chains is called into question. Signs of disruption can be
seen in China’s push to directly control mines and oil fields overseas and in
widespread doubts about whether an American president would send troops to
defend NATO allies in the Baltic states. The assumptions underlying the postwar
order have loosened already.
Mr.
Zeihan’s grim conclusion: The world may be headed toward a “Hobbesian period”
of rivalry over resources lasting 15 years or so. Economic pressures will be
intensified in many regions by aging populations that make demands on
overburdened, unreplenished economies. The U.S. doesn’t escape entirely, in Mr.
Zeihan’s telling, but it does better in relative terms—aided by its
geographical advantages and also, for instance, by its ability to assimilate
immigrants.
Only in
the conclusion to “The Accidental Superpower” does the author overreach,
declaring that “the world is indeed going to hell, but the Americans are going
to sit this one out.” After his having done such a good job of explaining the
nature of U.S. power and the threats to global order, the triumphalist tone of
the final pages is jarring. Still, anyone seeking a cogent, and provocative,
take on where the world is heading should start here. Even if you don’t fall in
love with maps, you’ll never look at them the same way again.
