The geo-political analyst Peter Zeihan has made quite the splash in the last few years, becoming something of a minor celebrity/guru. Ziehan attempts to make predictions about the course of geo-political events. He credits himself with “correctly” predicted the Russia-Ukraine war. I put “correctly” because, as we shall see, it’s not clear whether he predicted the war for the right reasons or he was just lucky. His most controversial predictions involve China, which he claims will collapse within the next ten years. Some of his predictions are based on what might be described as a version of historical determinism. And so he will contend that if x always happened in the past, x will continue to occur in the future. His stock and trade is something he refers to as “demographic decline.” Indeed, his predictions on China’s inevitable demise are largely based on demographics, which he combines with Keynesian inspired economic tropes. Perhaps the biggest issue with Ziehan is that he will rather casually toss of rather controversial assertions about matters of fact without providing any evidence for them. For example, Zeihan claims that Xi Jinping is the most isolated ruler in the world.
In his first five years, there was what [under Xi what ]he called a massive “anti-corruption” campaign. But it was really a purge of all the competing power centers throughout the party and throughout the system.
If you had a different vision of how China should operate, you were kicked out. And if you were a local or regional boss, you were brought to heel.
In the second five-year term, Xi went after everybody who agreed with him. He made sure nobody was capable of independent thought in his area.
That has made him the most isolated leader on the world stage right now. He’s arguably the most isolated Chinese leader in history. He’s more shutoff than even the Kim dynasty of North Korea.
How does Zeihan know all this? Who or what are his sources for such claims? He doesn’t seem to have any. In the absence of evidence, one wonders whether these claims are true—or at least as true as Ziehan claims.
Ziehan’s failure to provide evidence for many of his claims is not the only shortcoming in his analysis. There are at least four other potential issues that can be raised in relation to his basic modus operandi which I will briefly mention:
Incoherence of some of his claims. Take, as one example, Zeihan’s discussion of the rationale behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Zeihan contends that this war was inevitable. Why? Because, he argues, Russia’s current borders are not defensible. There exist no mountains or other natural obstacles to prevent an armada of tanks from rolling across the open steppes all the way to Moscow. Hence Russia needed to push its borders all the way to some mountains in Poland and Romania, and Ukraine simply has the misfortune of being on the way to these natural borders. The problem, however, with this train of reasoning is that it doesn’t make much sense. Those mountains Russia needs for its survival are in NATO territory. Russia can’t push its borders all the way out them without getting into a war with NATO. Such a war, as Ziehan himself admits, would lead to an exchange of nukes. But how exactly is Russia’s survival supposed to ensured by getting into a nuclear war with NATO?
Over reliance on historical determinism. Zeihan’s bases hi assumption that Russia needs to push its borders into Romania and Poland is based on the fact that Russia has been invaded fifty times in its history. He is of course assuming that whatever has happened in the past must, by some kind of predeterminism built into the very fabric of history, persist in the future. The dog will always return to his vomit. But isn't it at least possible that conditions will change so as to break a long-standing historical regularity? Well of course it is; and that is exactly what has happened in the case of Russia. Since the last invasion of Russia (by Germany during World War II), Russia has acquired nuclear weapons. Such weapons basically render Russia safe from invasion. Would Hitler have invaded Russia in 1941 if Russia had nukes? Of course not. To repeat: just because something has happened in the past is not guarantee that it will continue to happen in the future. You have to examine what might have changed in the interval.
Economic analysis tends toward Keynesian heresies. If you look closely, at least some of Zeihan’s models that he uses for forecasting rely on economic assumptions drawn from Keynesian economics. One of the reasons he regards demographic decline as so catastrophic is that it inevitably brings about a drop in the number of young adults and this in turn leads to a dangerous plunge in economic demand. In other words, if a country has less young people, Ziehan contends that it will inevitably have a much smaller customer base. Older adults want services, not goods. This analysis relies on the Keynesian assumption that economic “demand” is necessary to keep the economy going, and if that demand should fall, then the economy as a whole must inevitably collapse into recession or worse. This is a largely fallacious notion. If an economy has fewer customers (because of, let’s say, a drop in population), then the economy doesn’t need to produce as many goods to satisfy economic demand. But that’s a far cry from assuming that anything catastrophic must happen as a consequence. There’s no reason markets can’t adjust to the new dispensation. That’s what markets are good at. The fact is, demand for specific products is always fluctuating—sometimes going up and sometimes going down. For example, the market for high-end cameras (e.g. DSLRs) experienced a significant rise in sales ten, fifteen years ago as photographers replaced their film gear with modern DSLRs. In the early digital era, quite a few photographers upgraded their cameras every three to four years because of improvements in sensor and auto-focus technology. But then the technology plateaued and it no longer made sense to upgrade one’s camera, since the newer gear offered very little in terms of real world improvement. Many photographers therefore stopped buying a new camera every three to four years. Was this some kind of catastrophe? Well, the Japanese camera industry is going through a crisis of sorts as it must write off some of their over investment in productive capacity. But that’s just par for the course. Demand is always rising and falling, and industries have to adjust to whatever the market is doing.—Ziehan is also guilty of another Keynesian fallacy, i.e., he tends to ignore or minimize the role of money “printing” (i.e., the creation of money out of thin air, whether from printing or creating funds electronically) in the creation of inflation. He’s of late been predicting several years of bad inflation in the U.S. on account of the need to re-industrialize (because of “deglobalization”). In this instance, Zeihan is guilty of assuming that inflation is caused primarily by reindustrialization rather than the excessive monetizing of government debt.
Failure to get the Covid-19 vaccines right. Although in recent months Ziehan seems to half backed off his pro-jab position, last summer he was still buying whole hog into the entire Covid-19 vaccine narrative, even going so far as to urge his listeners to get vaccinated and repeating statistics (drawn from who knows where) about how the unvaccinated were dying in large numbers. Now while Ziehan is hardly the only person to have been fooled by the official propaganda on behalf of the jabs, a global strategist who specializes in telling people what’s going to happen in the future really ought to do better. We knew by the autumn of 2021 that the mRNA vaccines had very limited efficacy (six months at best), and we also knew that about all the reports (e.g., VAERS database) of vaccine injuries. A geopolitical analyst needs to be paying attention to such things. If you’re going to predict the future, you have to be ahead of the curve on stuff like this. You can’t simply buy the prevailing narratives hook, line, and sinker. What is worse, because Ziehan (or perhaps his research team) got the mRNA vaccines so wrong, it raises questions as to what else they might have gotten wrong as well. Some of the most interesting information that Ziehan discusses relates to the intricacies of supply chains. Most of us know nothing of these intricacies. It’s nearly impossible for the non-specialist to get information on them, let alone to know how to analyze them. But because Ziehan so badly misfired on the vaccines (which some of us know something about), it raises questions about his credibility relating to supply chain information.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.