Excellent summary of Peter Zeihan’s thought, particularly with regard to deglobalization and shipping.

My impression is Zeihan’s makes his bread and butter from high-powered consulting, not his books. (His latest book is the first to crack the NYT Bestsellers list.) There are a lot of financial people using Zeihan’s ideas as a guide to investing over the next ten years.

For anyone curious about Zeihan but not to the point of reading his books or watching hours of his videos, the above article is a great start.
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You may not agree with Zeihan’s premise even after reading the book … but I still highly suggest you read it because Zeihan’s outside-the-box thinking is of clear value in a world that we all can agree is getting more chaotic and uncertain.

https://gcaptain.com/end-of-the-world-is-just-beginning-book-review/

https://gcaptain.com/end-of-the-world-is-just-beginning-book-review/

There is a large shipping company that’s made record profits in recent years after changing its operational model to bet against the US Navy. Their secret weapon is an influential geopolitical strategist who claims the decline of the US Navy (and its apathy towards commercial shipping) poses the biggest threat to the world economy. Others gCaptain interviewed believe he’s just an American alarmist who uses fear to drive book sales. Who is right?

The problem for those who discount the work of Peter Zeihan, author of the new book The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning, is his bold predictions – like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which he predicted in his 2014 book The Accidental Superpower – are coming true at an alarming rate.

Zeihan is not one to pull punches. He flat out believes the world is headed for serious trouble as it deglobalizes due to a lack of maritime leadership on the part of the United States and increasing tensions with Russia and China. He is not alone, an increasingly vocal set of influential people are warning about a changing world, what makes Peter Zeihan different is his focus on maritime security and shipping (including inland and short-sea shipping).
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Multiple sources have confirmed to gCaptain that Zeihan’s principles are being taken seriously by a small group of very influential industry players. There is even a secret Zeihan maritime book club. Sources who are influential enough that I dropped everything and read all his books.

Those in shipping who promote Zeihan’s work say the United States turned its back on ocean policy decades ago and for a good reason. The oceans are a dangerous place but following World War II the United States made a deal with the rest of the world. If nations promised to use the US dollar as the denomination of trade and English as the lingua franca of global logistics then the US Navy would protect the shipment of goods globally. You provide the boots/butter and America will open up its markets to you and provide security at sea. And not just some seas but ALL the world’s trade routes to all the nations of the world – including to the United State’s competitors like Russia and more recently China – not openly belligerent to shipping.

A cogent analysis of the predicted problem follows, so far as I can tell on the surface.
International shipping is not in my wheelhouse.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Phaser

But don’t let the typo faze you!

M-W gets it right.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/phase-vs-faze

Bonus for a ST connection:

https://www.patrickkphillips.com/grammar/faze-or-phase/

However, joking aside, I’m seeing far too many of this type of error in on-line sources: homonyms that don’t mean the same thing have to be “read around” a lot of the time, which I attribute to the decline in general education, especially a lack of wide reading in decent literature (not what’s being pushed in schools today), and the rise of the reliance on spell-checkers, which accept any word spelled correctly, even if it’s not the one you wanted.

I bookmarked a couple of recent ones just because they irritated me so badly.
That they were written by the same person is perhaps not a coincidence.
Confusions about the meaning of some homonyms is understandable, but this writer should have realized that the one she chose was just wrong.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2022/11/22/leftists-are-going-after-someone-after-colorado-shooting-and-its-not-the-suspect-n2616281?utm_medium=widget&utm_source=slider
“Rather than focus their frustrations on Aldrich and what’s potentially a failed system, leftists and mainstream media figures have their sites set elsewhere.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2022/11/22/house-democratic-leaderships-reaction-to-members-kicked-off-committees-shows-dems-in-disarray-n2616291
(This one has since been corrected, but the commenters caught it.)
“Through a fit”?!!! Don’t you mean “Threw a fit”?!

However, sometimes a typo can work to your advantage.
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2022/05/Screen-Shot-2022-05-25-at-9.20.06-PM.png?w=1160&ssl=1

And thank you for the faze alert. I felt something was wrong with using “phase” but I could not place the correction. Agree, something any of us might have done.

One of the interesting but not terribly surprising topics that came up in the recent Kanye West tell-all appearances was his claims about how powerful and influential his and ex-wife Kim’s handlers or consiglieres were. And these are merely wealthy folks, not political leaders. What do you suppose Barack and Michelle’s private environment is like?