How Long Can the United States last as the most powerful country in the world?
There is a revolution about to happen and it might turn out that the USA is the only country of size that will survive the change. Computer hardware and software expressed as Artificial Intelligence is going to crash non government paid employment.
We can see now that Autonomous Vehicles will replace truck drivers and warehouse workers. Retail (including food service) is being crushed with the combination of internet purchase/delivery and retail stores that will not require significant staffs (see Amazon no checkout stores). The workers who sit behind desks and perform routine tasks requiring moderate to skilled judgements will be replaced by AI. Assistants to skilled and critical knowledge workers will largely disappear as well. And of course manufacturing will continue to be automated and sometimes completely replaced (like 3D manufacturing). And government jobs will also be subject to these trends. Armies will become ‘robotized’ and weapons will become extremely ‘smart’ and extremely efficient. And medical advances will be astounding.
We look at the world and progress as linear. For the last 150 years progress hasn’t been linear, it’s exponential. The changes we’ve seen will continue and at a higher rate. Energy will be near free (project nat gas from the last 20 years to the next 50+), ditto food and other essentials. We are going to see massive deflation…a 40+ year ‘slow’ crash.
And the effects will be crushing for most of the world. The USA is likely the only large country that might be able to make it through this transition. In the first world, 40% to 60% of employment might disappear. Even worse in the second world because labor rate differentials will be irrelevant. In the third world, total collapse. The third world will never get a chance to use it’s cheap labor to climb the economic and social ladder. For most of the world the future looks worse than this:
The United States of America:
As the world computerizes and deflates, the USA will react in these predictable ways:
- The USA will begin to close it’s economy to imports and immigration. Jobs in the USA will be created from this import restriction program. Reduced immigration also limits pressure on jobs. This combined with a birth rate below replacement level should preserve enough jobs to keep a functioning society.
- The USA, as a surviving first world economy, will be able to export critical technology, knowledge and IP. Items that will be hard to impossible to create in 80% of the world. More USA jobs.
- Continued high defense expenditures. The world will become more difficult. Much of the world will be unstable and unlivable. USA defense will turn to a defensive posture that prevents power projection towards the USA and imposes a high price on use of WMD against the USA. Large portions of the world will be abandoned by the USA…Africa, South America and SE Asia.
Basically the USA ‘prospers’ and becomes stronger in a relative sense.
People’s Republic of China
China’s problem is that it did not get economically far enough in time. Today a third of China remains traditionally poor. More importantly, half of China has seen or been given a taste of first world life. The trends described above will devastate 80% of those who have moved up in the last 25 years. Not just the unskilled but the skilled factory techs who will be replaced by better machines and AI. Some number of people will remain employed serving the internal market but the internal market does not have the financial strength to fully support this.
China will turn inward in a desperate attempt to hold the country together. This will fully consume the available resources. Their might be some regional conflicts as a population distraction but holding more land and people won’t offer any benefits.
China will probably survive but it will be tough.
Russia
Total collapse. It will become a Third world country at best. $10 oil starves Russia of cash to employ it’s people. Same with other resources. Power projection collapses.
Europe
It will be ‘everyman’ for themselves.
Southern Europe becomes like central Africa (but better weather). Extreme poverty for the 90%. These countries exit the EU and the Euro.
Some parts of Northern Europe might look like the USA. Countries like Norway with resources that have some value and those with ‘savings’ (investments or modern industrial structures) should survive with a reasonable standard of living for most. Other parts might have societal collapse (will Belgium survive? Hungary? Finland?) and thus require neighboring countries to up defense spending and to reinstate borders. No power projection past the continent.
Asia.
Taiwan, Japan & Korea might trend like Europe. Absolutely no power projection. India, SE Asia, Pakistan, Mid East all collapse. Absolutely no power projection.
Bottom line, in a world of rapid deflation, massive automation, and AI takeover, a case can be made that the USA is the sole survivor among today’s major powers. This tech trend prevents new major powers.
In this scenario, the USA is the ‘last man standing’ and maintains it’s position as the sole superpower well past the known horizon (into next century). It won’t be easy but it could work out. And maybe Trump is the first manifestation of this response.
For more on this you can read:
Near the end of the Second World War, the United States made a bold strategic gambit that rewired the international system. Empires were abolished and replaced by a global arrangement enforced by the U.S. Navy. With all the world’s oceans safe for the first time in history, markets and resources were made available for everyone. Enemies became partners.
We think of this system as normal-it is not. We live in an artificial world on borrowed time.
In THE ACCIDENTAL SUPERPOWER, international strategist Peter Zeihan examines how the hard rules of geography are eroding the American commitment to free trade; how much of the planet is aging into a mass retirement that will enervate markets and capital supplies; and how, against all odds, it is the ever-ravenous American economy that-alone among the developed nations-is rapidly approaching energy independence. Combined, these factors are doing nothing less than overturning the global system and ushering in a new (dis)order.
For most, that is a disaster-in-waiting, but not for the Americans. The shale revolution allows Americans to sidestep an increasingly dangerous energy market. Only the United States boasts a youth population large enough to escape the sucking maw of global aging. Most important, geography will matter more than ever in a de-globalizing world, and America’s geography is simply sublime.
