The Accidental Superpower, a review

Originally published on substack.

“The Accidental Superpower” by Peter Zeihan is in essence an apocalyptic prophecy: due to a confluence of reasons USA is going to withdraw from acting as the world police, leaving the world in a pre world war 2 state of constant struggle for security and supremacy.

Let’s break this down into smaller claims.

Is the USA currently acting as world police?

Zeihan’s claims that as part of the Bretton Woods Agreements “The Americans offered to use their navy to protect all maritime trade”. I found no evidence of that being true. The agreements themselves are “Articles of Agreement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development” and “Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund”, unsurprisingly these agreements do not cover maritime trade at all.

Did the USA offer to use their navy to protect all maritime trade as a part of some other agreement?

I’ve tried figuring out what the official purpose of the US navy is, and found “responsibility of the navy” section in the National Security Act of 1947 (unamended version: “The Navy shall be generally responsible for naval reconnaissance, antisubmarine warfare, and protection of shipping”. While I expect “protection of shipping” to apply only to US military and merchant fleets, it seems that the subject of protection was expanded to vessels of other countries through a series of mutual defence treaties signed over a decade after Bretton Woods Agreements. It seems important to note that protection of shipping by the US navy is not universal, but only applies to US vessels and vessels of countries that are in a mutual defence treaty with the USA.

How does the US navy decide to which country a vessel belongs? This seems to be covered by Convention on the High Seas which in Article 5 states:

1. Each State shall fix the conditions for the grant of its nationality to ships, for the registration of ships in its territory, and for the right to fly its flag. Ships have the nationality of the State whose flag they are entitled to fly. There must exist a genuine link between the State and the ship; in particular, the State must effectively exercise its jurisdiction and control in administrative, technical and social matters over ships flying its flag.2. Each State shall issue to ships to which it has granted the right to fly its flag documents to that effect.

I’ve checked the nationality of one ship that was on the news recently, the Ever Given, and it turns out to be registered in Panama, which is part of the Rio mutual defence treaty, and so is subject to US navy’s protection. Ever Given’s operator is a Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corporation. Taiwan is not currently a party to a mutual defence treaty with the USA. Fun fact, registering a ship with a country different from the one with which operator/owner is registered is a common practice known as “flag of convenience”.

So even though the US navy’s protection is not universal, a significant percentage of the world’s shipping is covered by US mutual defence treaties, which requires the US navy to have global presence.

I searched for examples of US navy convoying of vessels and stumbled upon Operation Earnest Will, where the US navy escorted Kuwait’s oil tankers, which had to be re-registered as US vessels, since US law forbade the use of navy ships to escort civilian vessels under a foreign flag. Note that Kuwait was not a party to a mutual defence treaty with the USA and at the time not a Major non-NATO ally (yes, that’s a special thing of its own), so why did this whole complicated, dangerous and controversial thing happen? A US national security directive titled “Responding to Escalation in the Iran-Iraq War” provides a clue:

In light of the growing threat to U.S. and Allied vital interests in the Gulf region, the following actions are directed

So I think it is fair to conclude that the USA is acting as the USA police on a global scale, rather than global police. Which I’m taking to mean that (among other things) the US navy is not going to intervene unless a vessel has been attacked while flying a US flag or a flag of one of US Allies, or unless an attack on a vessel has some negative implications for US or Allied interests. If the USA was acting as the world police, I would expect (among other things) the US navy to intervene whenever any vessel has been attacked.

Reasons for the USA to reduce its scope of policing

One of the reasons for the USA to reduce its scope of policing described in “the accidental superpower” is demographic shift in the USA, specifically that transition of “mature workers” (45 to retirement age) to “pensioners” will reduce capital supply, and that a reduction in “young workers” will reduce commercial demand, and that the combination of the two will cause a significant contraction of the US economy.Since Zeihan uses age brackets in some places and generations in other places and then does comparisons like “[there are a lot of Gen Yers] - 35% more than Gen Xers” which is hard to keep track of, I got some data from https://www.populationpyramid.net/ to get a consistent view of the numbers. In the USA the 65+ population bracket will increase from 16.6% in 2020 to 20.3% in 2030 to 21.6% in 2040 and the 45-64 population bracket will decrease from 25.0% in 2020 to 23.0% in 2030 followed by an increase to 23.9% in 2040. Zeihan does point out that there will be low capital availability between 2020 and 2030, followed by a slow recovery between 2030 and 2040.

So that’s ~4% gradual decrease in available capital due to retirement, and some additional decrease in available capital due to increase in taxation of workers(with taxes being spent on retirees), and a 2% decrease in available capital due to reduction in the number of “mature workers”. We can probably round it up to 10% (by 2030). This sounds significant, but not catastrophic, and this calculation assumes that there will be no increase in available capital otherwise (there is a number of paragraphs dedicated to flight of capital from former soviet republics following the dissolution of USSR).

As for the “young workers”, the 20-44 population bracket will decrease from 33.6% in 2020 to 33.4% in 2030 to 31.5% in 2040. Will that 0.2% change by 2030 affect anything? Seems unlikely.

Overall an argument for cost cutting due to economic changes due to demographic changes seems plausible.

Another major reason cited by Zeihan is reduction in the need for US global military presence. With the USA achieving energy independence (due to the shale oil revolution) there is not as much need to protect shipment of oil and oil product imports. At the same time with the end of the cold war there is not as much need to protect allies.

Slight reduction in reasons to have a global military presence doesn’t seem to be a reasonable cause to reduce the scope of US military presence, but even if the USA does “panic overreact”, as Zeihan suggest it might, how easy is it to actually reduce the scope of the US armed forces?

As mentioned in the previous section, US military presence is not there to serve the world, it is there to serve the interests of the USA and US allies. The US military works on a longer time scale than is expected to be affected by this economic downturn, Gerald R. Ford-class and Nimitz-class aircraft carriers are expected to serve for 50 years, it would be a waste to not use them (and other long term capital and personnel investments) for political and economic gains. There are also demographic benefits that come from policing the world, specifically enabling immigration to the USA (I expect peace to be conducive to the kind of immigration that the USA would benefit the most from), with immigration being the main reason for the US demographic prospects being not as bleak as those of european countries.

Overall an argument for drastic cost cutting in the US military seems implausible.

Will the USA reduce its scope of policing?

No. Here is a prediction (question is in a pending state so you are likely to get “Page not found”): Will the United States withdraw from any of its current mutual defence treaties by 2030? I’m 10% confident that it will. I believe that the USA is both getting good value out of its mutual defence treaties and withdrawing from any of the treaties would encounter a lot of resistance.

Conclusions

Zeihan’s use of “Bretton Woods” as a magical phrase put me on guard and so I’ve read the book keeping in mind that the author might be trying to mislead me. I think that arguments in The Accidental Superpower are convincing only if you believe that the world is simple, and I no longer believe that.