"Disunited Nations" by Peter Zeihan. A Short Review

 

Since there are already loads of healthy reviews out there, this will be short. Zeihan's new, pre-COVID 19 volume "Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World" is an updating of his last two works, bringing his thesis up to 2020 and beyond. Most of the underlying ideas are still here, but maturing. Many of the author's predictions are based on geography, demographics, past actions, economics, etc. It's a very readable work, requiring no professional training to grasp.

Zeihan continues to show how the Breton Woods agreement benefited the nations of the world by opening up trade, undoing colonialism, providing national and international stability, and so forth. He doesn't necessarily praise the agreement, but reports in a matter-of-fact way what it did. And now that it is unwinding, so will many of it's global benefits. Therefore, much of the book is a sketch of what the world will begin looking like as things continue to unravel and we return to a globe of competing, warring nations fighting for resources and tussling to keep their domestic heads above water. Some are already losers, a few will surface as winners, and others will be morphing into different forms and shapes.

The manuscript is helpful in deciphering what's going one, what the media is reporting on, missing, mangling, and getting right. It also is very useful in trying to figure out what our presidential candidates are arguing about and why those topics are important. What I really enjoyed was the non-partisan approach (no one gets a pass), and the fact the writer comes from an intelligence analysis angle rather than a pie-in-the-sky-tealeaf-reading perspective. I highly recommend the book.