How did we go from “Make America Great Again” to “Everyone needs to become a backyard chicken farmer”? Did Mao Zedong rise from the dead and take over the U.S.A. while I wasn’t looking? In fact, I do think something a little like that is happening. Unless Trump is being paid by America’s enemies to destroy the country’s economy — something I think is pretty unlikely — what we’re looking at here is an ideological project. Like Mao did in China in the 1960s, Trump is taking a baseball bat to the U.S. economy in order to follow his deeply held ideological beliefs.

Despite steady GDP growth, low inflation, low unemployment, and record high stock prices, Americans told pollsters in 2024 that they were deeply unhappy with how Joe Biden had handled the U.S. economy. So they elected Donald Trump, who promised to lower costs for average Americans, create a new era of U.S. manufacturing and domestic investment, and so on. How is that working out? Well, the Atlanta Fed now projects that the U.S. economy will shrink at an annualized rate of 2.8% in the first quarter of Trump’s presidency

Three or four decades from now, I predict, we will not find our world shattered into a pastiche of isolated regional economies, separated by oceans full of pirates and marauding neocolonialist empires. Nor will we see the collapse of global food trade cause a massive die-back of the human population. Europe will not recolonize Africa and battle it out with an imperialist Nigeria for regional hegemony and so on. These are all things that Zeihan forecasts, and I predict that very few of them will come to pass. Which is not to say I think this book isn’t worth reading. In fact, it is worth reading, for two reasons. First of all, there’s a decent likelihood that many of Zeihan’s predictions are what businesspeople euphemistically call “directionally correct” — i.e., vastly exaggerated, but containing important seeds of truth. Second of all, the book functions extremely well as a disaster scenario