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

I generally don’t think people who make bad arguments that fall apart under logical scrutiny are in most cases consciously trying to deceive their readers.

like a movie antagonist who says “We’re not so different, you and I,” real villains are always screaming at the top of their lungs about the tiniest flaw in the moral character of their opponents. If Star Wars were real, the galactic internet would be flooded with screeching tirades about Han Solo’s criminal past, how Princess Leia got her position through nepotism, or how Luke Skywalker once made out with his sister.