Is the old world order about to collapse?

Notes on Peter Zeihan and political forecasting: Part I

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Our reader Geoff Marcy sent me this video the other day, asking whether I thought Peter Zeihan was on the right track. I have a few thoughts about that.

I’ve written about Peter Zeihan here before, and specifically about the predictions he made in his 2017 book, The Absent Superpower. Zeihan’s predictive record, I wrote, wasn’t half bad. He argued in that book that Russia’s geographic, economic, and demographic plight made its aggression overdetermined. “If Russia is to survive its demographic Twilight,” he wrote,

it must do nothing less than absorb in whole or in part some 11 countries—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. This Twilight War will be a desperate, sprawling military conflict that will define European/Russian borderland for decades.

He envisioned that this would take place in stages. The first stage: “Wreck Ukraine and divide the Europeans.”¹