Peter High: In your book, The Accidental Superpower, you talked about how a variety of rules that we have come to take as given over the past seventy years are going to be changed regarding geopolitics. Especially considering the recent election, I would be curious about how the theses you had posited in that book remain, are amplified, or are changed.

Peter Zeihan: There are a couple of things going on simultaneously. First, because of demographic aging on a global scale, the United States is emerging as the only market over the long-term. Second, the United States is backing away from the world. It is reducing the American footprint overseas while its ability to intervene increases. What we have done with Special Forces, what we are doing with drones, what we are doing with satellite tech--the ability to reach out is higher than it has been for decades. But our need to do that with troops on the ground or maintaining the day-to-day order of the international system is going away. Third, Trump is taking a lot of the trends that already existed in American politics and kicked them up a notch. We are already going through this period of new isolationism and here comes a trade warrior who wants to renegotiate every trade deal on the books, specifically fingering Mexico and China, two of our three biggest trading partners.

You put these three things together and you get a United States that is transitioning from being the global guarantor of security, global trade, and energy markets to one that, at best, has stepped back from it all and, more likely, even sees a vested interest in disrupting it to a certain degree. At the same time, the U.S. is the only market. The split between successful countries and failed countries in the future is how well can you buddy up with the only country that matters? Everything else is going to be a free for all. In the United States, you have the market, the financial capital, the labor system, the consumption base, the energy--and you can project power out, rather than have to defend your own borders.