8 Quotes by Peter Zeihan

In many ways, industrialization is a straitjacket. The suite of industrial technologies improves literacy and mobility and reach and wealth and health, but without the inputs of oil, natural gas, iron ore, phosphates, bauxite, lead, copper, and so on, the whole process collapses in upon itself.

The real question is whether China can even hold itself together as a country.

Only the United States could engage in a war as dubious as Iraq or roll out a social policy as byzantine as Obamacare and walk away largely unscathed.

Most shale oil isn’t just sweet and light, it is ultra-sweet and ultra-light, and so is remarkably easy to refine into light distilled products, like gasoline.

American involvement in the Persian Gulf has not been in order to secure energy supplies for the United States, but instead to supply energy for its energy-starved Bretton Woods partners in Europe and Asia. Put more directly, the Americans do not protect the Persian Gulf kingdoms and emirates so that the Americans can use Middle Eastern oil, but so that their Bretton Woods partners in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, and Pakistan can.

The no-questions-asked protection that the Americans have extended to Riyadh is about to be lifted wholesale.

Geopolitical and demographic forces are so rooted in the unchangeable that political action often generates little but noise.

There are good solid reasons as to why nearly every major expansionary power of the past has been based in a temperate climate zone, and why all those that have lasted have been riverine-based.