The Problem with Peter Zeihan

Criticising Zeihan's U.S. withdrawal theory and showing he is way too comfortable outside his expertise.

In this article, I am going to argue against Peter Zeihan’s central thesis that the U.S. is withdrawing from global trade and the Bretton Woods system, further bringing about a catastrophe for rival powers such as China.

I will show that Zeihan’s thesis isn’t supported by the evidence, uses cherry picked examples and is guilty of flawed methodology and assumptions, such as geographic and demographic determinism.

I am going to suggest that these flaws are a feature of “guruism” and that Zeihan has many traits of a guru, that is, a media figure who appears profound and knowledgeable, but lacks reference to relevant expertise.

I will begin by summarising Zeihan’s main thesis as explained across multiple blog posts and videos, as well as in his book “The Accidental Super Power”.

The Zeihan Thesis

Zeihan’s central thesis on geopolitics can be described as follows:

The U.S. is a super power due to two major reasons. The first is geography. The U.S. has vast arable land, navigable rivers, two oceans for protection, and no hostile neighbors.

The United States is uniquely blessed “with the world’s most extensive natural network of waterways, more arable land than any other country, and the unparalleled protection afforded by two vast oceans”, such that America “could not help but become a global power.”¹

The second reason is the aftermath of World War II in which The United States emerged with the only intact military and economy. The U.S used this influence to negotiate a system of monetary management that guaranteed U.S. supremacy in global trade.

This system of monetary management guaranteed that the U.S. dollar became the world’s reserve currency. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, giving the U.S. central control over global liquidity and trade settlement. The U.S. had dominant influence over the new International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

The U.S. also gained access to markets in Europe and Asia while they rebuilt. With little competition in the 1940s and 1950s, U.S. manufacturing boomed. Stabilizing allies’ economies (e.g. West Germany, Japan) reinforced the U.S. sphere of influence, especially at the expense of The Soviet Union.

However, these perks didn’t come without expenses. The U.S. Navy effectively policed global shipping lanes to protect international trade. This meant high defense spending to ensure maritime security far beyond U.S. borders. The U.S. stationed troops globally and underwrote NATO and other alliances. These commitments helped ensure political stability and trade access but came at high financial and political cost.

The dollar’s reserve currency status allowed the U.S. to run persistent trade deficits. While this gave Americans cheap imports, it hollowed out domestic manufacturing and made parts of the economy reliant on foreign production. The U.S. often became the de facto global firefighter during currency crises, regional wars, or financial collapses. It bore the cost of leadership when others could free-ride.

These countries have been “benefiting from American largesse” while “not providing anything on the back end for security.”² Over decades, the U.S. tolerated trade imbalances and persistent deficits as the dollar became the world’s reserve currency – effectively allowing others to free-ride on a stable, U.S.-led system. But once the Soviet threat disappeared, Zeihan argues, the rationale for this generosity waned.

After the collapse of The Soviet Union, Zeihan claims there is no reason for the U.S. to uphold their side of the agreement. The benefits of global trade now disproportionately help others (e.g. China, Germany), while the costs (naval security, market access) are borne by the U.S.

Zeihan predicts that as the U.S. begins pulling back from its global policing and alliance management, and as a result, sea lanes will become insecure, global supply chains will break down and export-driven economies will collapse, leading to disaster and famine.

As the world burns from U.S. withdrawal, Zeihan argues that the U.S. itself will prosper. This is due to U.S. energy-independence thanks to shale oil, a favorable demographic profile, and a strong food and industrial capacity.

This thesis makes Zeihan extremely bullish on the U.S., viewing its competitors as dwindling inconveniences. This has led to Zeihan having a bearish position on China, having predicted its inevitable collapse for many years now, as we will discuss later.

Now that I have summarised Zeihan’s thesis, I will address its short comings - both in terms of the facts and Zeihan’s methodology.

Zeihan’s Errors

One of the central predictions of Zeihan’s thesis is that the U.S. navy is withdrawing from its role in policing world markets. Empirically, this is not true. The U.S. is sustaining or expanding its global military presence.

Consider this 2025 article from Stockholm International Peace Research³ which states the following:

“Military spending by the USA rose by 5.7 per cent to reach $997 billion, which was 66 per cent of total NATO spending and 37 per cent of world military spending in 2024. A significant portion of the US budget for 2024 was dedicated to modernizing military capabilities and the US nuclear arsenal in order to maintain a strategic advantage over Russia and China.”

The U.S. has also launched new force posture initiatives in the Indo-Pacific. In 2023, for example, Washington nearly doubled its base access in the Philippines - a move aimed at reinforcing U.S. presence near vital shipping lanes.

Regarding these new military bases, Reuters reported the following in 2023⁴:

The locations are significant, with Isabela and Cagayan facing north towards Taiwan, while Palawan is near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, where China has built artificial islands equipped with runways and missile systems.

These developments exemplify that, although the U.S. has gone through many economic changes in its foreign policy - including moving away from the type of free trade policies seen after the second world war - these changes often require a larger global military presence to facilitate them, not a smaller one.

Zeihan often talks about the U.S. no longer being interested in the middle east, but he really just means Afghanistan. This is the only country in which the U.S. has withdrawn troops. The U.S. still has permanent bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and temporary sites elsewhere.

Since Zeihan began making these statements, the U.S. has literally bombed Iran. This has led to even more troops, aviation assets, missile defenses, and a third aircraft carrier group being dispatched to the middle east.⁵

When it comes to many of Zeihan’s claims, they sound plausible to a layman hearing him speak on Joe Rogan - but there is nothing stopping you from just googling what he says and seeing that it just isn’t true, or in this case, the U.S. military is not receding from its role in global trade.

Another reason Zeihan predicts an isolated U.S. is because of shale oil. Zeihan claims that this natural resource will afford the U.S. economic independence such that it no longer needs to invest in protecting global trade routes.

It’s true that U.S. shale oil has boomed, but far from this turning the U.S. inward, it has instead transformed the U.S. into a major energy exporter. One of the reasons shale oil is such a historic development is that it transformed the U.S. economy from a net importer of petroleum to a net exporter by 2020. U.S. crude oil exports have kept climbing to new highs – averaging over 4.1 million barrels per day in 2024.⁶

Protecting sea lanes and stability abroad is crucial to continue reaping profits from these exports. For example, much of the U.S. crude now flows to Europe, especially after Russia’s war on Ukraine shifted European demand to American oil. That means the U.S. has a vested interest in keeping maritime routes (like the Atlantic and the Mediterranean) secure for tankers.

Shale oil has given the U.S. a newfound energy dominance, but capitalising on that position requires engagement with the world – including a Navy that can safeguard the global trade of oil and gas.

“Under Trump the Americans are firmly – finally – abandoning Bretton Woods.”⁷

Zeihan also points to Trumpian economic policies such as demanding that countries wanting to sell consumer goods to the U.S. must do so using factories built on U.S. soil. However, similar policies have been used by the U.S. to stay competitive against other nations - even during the Bretton Woods era.

A notable example is the early 1980s auto industry policy. In 1981, President Reagan’s administration negotiated a voluntary export restraint that limited Japanese car exports to the U.S., with the clear expectation that Japan’s automakers should invest inside the United States. The outcome was striking: within a decade, every major Japanese automaker (Toyota, Honda, Nissan, etc.) had opened assembly lines in the U.S.⁸

Policies like this are common even in times of liberalised global markets and free trade. This is because such policies exist not to end trading, but to stay competitive and trade more advantageously.

There are also methodological criticisms of Zeihan that I will now discuss.

“Since the root of American power is geographic and not the result of any particular plan or ideology, American power is incidental. Even accidental.”

Zeihan’s approach can be classified as “geographic and demographic determinism”. This approach isn’t dissimilar from that of Halford J. Mackinder, one of the founding fathers of geopolitics. However, political science has come a long way since then - i.e., the 19th and early 20th centuries.

According to this form of political determinism, the success or failure of a nation state is an inevitable result of its geography and demographics. For example, earlier we discussed Zeihan’s view that the U.S. became a superpower due to its river systems, natural resources, discounted protection due to having two oceans, and so on.

This approach is interesting because there are plenty of counter-examples in which nations became extremely powerful with strategically inferior geographical contexts to the U.S., like Britain or Japan.

Yes, these nations have a strong, natural defense afforded to them in virtue of being islands, but there are many island nations that did NOT become super powers. The differences comes down to maritime dominance, industrialisation, and statecraft - factors ignored by a geographical determinist approach.

Conversely, regions with notable geographic vulnerabilities, such as the North German Plain, have experienced unprecedented peace for over seventy years, largely due to political integration and institutional developments like the European Union and NATO.

In addition, Zeihan believes many countries are facing inevitable collapse due to demographic issues. Zeihan has a special emphasis on China, stating that its one child policy, elderly population and gender skewed demographics will cause its collapse.

“I would say we expect the economic collapse of China in this coming decade.”⁹

Zeihan is so confident about this, we have to mention his 2010 business insider article in which he stated China would collapse by 2020… Well, it’s 2025… China will be collapsing any day now I guess. I will comb over Zeihan’s other failed predictions later in the article.

Nonetheless, in this picture that Zeihan presents, culture, ideology, human agency and policy are largely irrelevant and ergo, there is a total dismissal of how institutions and policy choices can alter a country’s fate.

Zeihan has a habit of looking at current trends and then assuming that these trends cannot change in the future and are set in stone. In his mind, policy makers basically have no job to do as they are powerless to influence their nation’s success or failure on the world stage. Geography and demographics is destiny.

Zeihan’s approach to geopolitics is one of storytelling and narrative building. Zeihan provides very little citations in his books and seldom references other academic works or experts in geopolitics or political science. Zeihan himself has no academic background in geopolitics or international relations (other than a BA).

He confidently forecasts severe societal outcomes as inevitabilities without any analytic caution or modesty, an approach that differs greatly from actual geopolitical scholarship.

This style is characteristic of “guruism”: it simplifies complex global dynamics into digestible, dramatic arcs that sound persuasive to lay audiences but bypass the methodological standards experts rely on.

Now that I have criticised Zeihan’s primary thesis about U.S. withdrawal from global markets - as well as discussing the methodological issues Zeihan is guilty of - I want to put forward some more evidence of Zeihan’s guruism.

Other Evidence of Guruism

“Guruism” is a concept from the “Decoding The Gurus” podcast and has been wonderfully expounded on by psychologist Matthew Browne, and anthropologist Chris Kavanagh.

I have another article called “Decoding Decoding The Gurus” that breaks down their 10 facets of a guru. You can read that here. But basically, a guru is a media figure that deals in pseudo-profundity, sounding impressive while actually having little academic influence or expertise.

Moreover, one feature of guruism is prediction making. Unlike predictive power in the sciences - i.e., the merit of a good theory’s ability to be falsified on the basis of testable predictions - gurus focus on making predictions in order to bolster their appearance.

A lay person’s idea of an academic is often not so different from a soothsaying sage who can tell the future with strong foresight. In reality, rattling off predictions like this with zero interest in testing or revising one’s own theories isn’t how political scientists behave.

Zeihan’s followers often cite his incredible list of correct predictions when rushing to his defense. Like with other gurus, this is an example of the sharpshooter’s fallacy - i.e., circling all the correct predictions while ignoring all the failed ones.

In addition to the already discussed failed predictions about China collapsing by 2020, or the U.S. withdrawing from global trade, here is a list of other predictions Zeihan has gotten wrong:

• In 2023, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zeihan stated Bitcoin would go to zero.¹⁰

• In 2022, Zeihan told Reuters a conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia was probable, again, due to a U.S. withdrawal from the region that didn’t happen.¹¹

• In the same Reuters interview, Zeihan stated literally billions of people would starve this decade due to demographic collapse in conjunction with supply shortages created by the covid pandemic, especially in Germany and China.

• Again, in this same interview, Zeihan stated Russia would go westward beyond Ukraine due to demographic desperation and invade NATO states in the baltic region, like Poland, making a NATO-Russia war “unavoidable”.

• Zeihan claimed in a blog titled “The End of Russian Oil” that without access to U.S. engineers and technology, Russia wouldn’t be able to pump its own oil and would face an energy crisis. Russia today has a surplus of oil and exports more than it consumes.¹²

Many people aren’t educated on supply chains, energy infrastructure, demographics and the topics Zeihan talks about. Hearing Zeihan confidently discuss these issues can really give the impression that he is an expert.

However, when Zeihan ventures into topics with wider public engagement and issues that many people are enthused about, his reception is far more mixed. For example, his commentary on Israel shows he is wrong on basic facts like the number of hostages in Gaza.¹³

He has also made the tired claim that Israel is essentially a U.S. geopolitical project to exert influence in the Middle East, a claim often made to bolster support for Israel, which also oversimplifies a much more complex (and less mutually benefitial) relationship.

In reality, U.S.-Israel ties were tepid for decades: the United States maintained an arms embargo on Israel during the early years of its statehood and did not become its principal military supplier until the mid-1970s, particularly after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

While of course, he relies on the prior of U.S. withdrawal from international relations to interpret the probability of events surrounding Israel, Iran and the U.S. But obviously, if you don’t share that prior, many of the events Zeihan highlights appear less like symptoms of a grand realignment and more like routine disagreements within a still-intact alliance structure.

The comments on his video “What's Up In the Middle East: Israel's Future” are extremely negative. One commenter stated, “When you already know about a subject, is this how accurate Peter Zeihan is on every issue?” Another wrote, “Every time Peter talks about Israel I think to myself maybe this guy doesn't know as much as we think he knows about everything”.

I raise these comments not to say Zeihan is an idiot, he is a smart guy who knows some stuff… But he isn’t an expert - and it’s irresponsible to posture as one and communicate confidently on complex topics that have real consequences for people without any regard for genuine expertise.

All this being said, I enjoy listening to Zeihan and hearing his perspective. However, I wish I was listening to him as a friend at a dinner party rather than through a platform with millions of viewers.

Zeihan isn’t the most insidious guru. In fact, he is low on the list when it comes to the most narcissistic, cynical and harmful gurus in media. The reason I wanted to write this article was precisely to illustrate that guruism is a spectrum and not always obvious.

1. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2015-02-16/accidental-superpower-next-generation-american-preeminence-and

2. https://san.com/commentary/us-navy-no-longer-in-business-of-providing-global-security/

3. https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/unprecedented-rise-global-military-expenditure-european-and-middle-east-spending-surges#:~:text=Military%20spending%20by%20the%20USA,total%20spending%20across%20the%20alliance

4. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-reveals-locations-4-new-strategic-sites-us-military-pact-2023-04-03/#:~:text=Defence%20chief%20Carlito%20Galvez%20called,in%20the%20South%20China%20Sea

5. https://nypost.com/2025/06/18/us-news/us-moves-its-newest-super-carrier-uss-gerald-ford-to-mediterranean-as-massive-military-hardware-buildup-near-iran-continues/

6. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64964#:~:text=Europe%20and%20the%20Asia%20and,crude%20oil%20benchmark%20Dated%20Brent

7. https://zeihan.com/i-think-they-get-it-now-part-i/#:~:text=bipartisan%20and%20served%20as%20the,Bretton%20Woods%20foreign%20policies

8. https://americancompass.org/the-import-quota-that-remade-the-auto-industry/#:~:text=auto%20assembly%20plants%20in%20the,May%201

9. https://www.businessinsider.com/stratfor-predictions-for-the-next-decade-2010-1?IR=T

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11. https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/global-markets-breakingviews-2022-12-01/#:~:text=The%20unwinding%20of%20globalisation%20is,NATO%20is%20inevitable%2C%20says%20Zeihan

12. https://zeihan.com/the-end-of-russian-oil/

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