Thirty Years of Dis-OMG!!!

In the year 2052 AD, if I am still alive, I will be 83 years old.

A ten year old today will be 40, with a job and a family, probably What will the world be like? This is based on Peter Ziehan's ideas about geography, demographics, energy, agriculture, transport and industry, all based on the disintegration of the existing global order, which came about after WWII to fight the Cold War. The US bribed up an alliance based on trade and it worked so well that it expanded and broke the Soviet Union economically.

The only problem is that we are thirty years on after the end of the Cold War and the New World Order which Bush the Elder talked about never happened. The US doesn't want to play world policeman anymore and has largely gone home after 20 wasted years on the 'Forever Wars' in the Middle East and to a lesser extent Africa. Uncle Sugar isn't gonna guarantee the shipping lanes after Covid made it clear that we need to reshore, basically, everything. It's gotten cheaper, anyway, what with the rising labor costs in China and elsewhere, the cheaper electricity costs in the US, and the shale oil and gas boom which has made the US energy independent. Cheap natural gas has transformed our chemical industries, so that after a decade of retooling we produce a lot of plastics and other industrial chemicals again.

This is good for the US, but bad for the rest of the world. Without the US, the Persian Gulf burns down eventually, until and unless the Saudis and the Iranians can get along... which is bad for East Asia and especially China.