The Absent Superpower

Peter Zeihan and the Pax Americana

Note: I wrote this in September 2020. I’ve changed the headline to link it to a new essay about Peter Zeihan. I’ve changed nothing substantive.—Claire, September 17, 2022

It wouldn’t be fair to say that the world beyond Washington has completely disappeared from American consciousness. The New York Times recently published two genuinely extraordinary stories. In the first, an anonymous Chinese source provided the Times with more than 400 pages of internal documents about the brutal and merciless destruction of the Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang province. In the next, an anonymous Iranian source provided 700 pages of internal intelligence reports about the Iranian takeover of Iraq to The Intercept, which worked with The New York Times to vet and publish them.

Both stories are astonishing, and both were, if briefly, on the front page of The New York Times. But they were not there because—in response to urgent reader demand—American newspapers sent well-funded teams of dogged co…