In The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan explains how place matters:
The first I call the balance of transport. Successful countries find it easy to move people and goods within their territories: Egypt has the Nile, France has the Seine and Loire, the Roman and Inca Empires had their roads. Such easy movement promotes internal trade and development. Trade encourages specialization and moves an economy up the value-added scale, increasing local incomes and generating capital that can be used for everything from building schools and institutions to operating a navy. Such constant interconnections are the most important factors for knitting a people into a nation. Such commonality of interests forms the bedrock of political and cultural unity. With a very, very few exceptions, every successful culture in human history has been based on a culture of robust internal economic interactions, and that almost invariably comes from easy transport.
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Countries also have to be able to protect themselves. Just as internal trade requires more than a little help from geography — well-rivered plains preferably — so too does defense. Successful countries also have borders that are easy to protect.
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It is this balance — easy transport within, difficult transport beyond — that is the magic ingredient for success.
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In all three cases — the balance of transport, deepwater navigation, and industrialization — the United States enjoys the physical geography most favorable to their application. Two facts stand out. First, since the root of American power is geographic and not the result of any particular plan or ideology, American power is incidental. Even accidental.
Second, the United States wasn’t the point of origin for any of the respective technologies that created the modern world.
Yup, our position is important, but that is not really profound.
All one has to know is the words of the long serving early 20th Century French ambassador to the US, Jean-Jules Jusserand, who observed that distant powers could not easily threaten the US because “on the north, she has a weak neighbor; on the south, another weak neighbor; on the east fish and on the west, fish”.
Zeihan’s motto should be, always use 100 words when one would suffice.
Accidental Superpower? Sounds like Great Britain.
Seems like more service to the Narrative: downplay the quality of the people.
Wonder why the North American Indigenes didn’t match or exceed Europe/Asia if the ground was so lucky.
”US wasn’t the point of origin for any of the respective technologies that created the modern world.”
LOL. Plenty of game changers in physics; chemistry; biology came forth in the US. In Zeihan’s world, I suspect Black lesbians are the acknowledged fount of all such things. The US has plenty of Black lesbians; QED.
Zohan: “Second, the United States [weren’t] the point of origin for any of the respective technologies that created the modern world.”
Does the Franklin stove count for nothing?
”US wasn’t the point of origin for any of the respective technologies that created the modern world.”
The Internet?
“US wasn’t the point of origin for any of the respective technologies that created the modern world.”
Mass production of complex assembled items.
Vacuum tubes.
Transistors (may have been independently invented in Germany, but not really developed)
Automatic telephone switching systems.
Container freight.
The Internet.
More Guns, Germs, and Steel-level drivel.
”US wasn’t the point of origin for any of the respective technologies that created the modern world.”
“The Internet?”
I sometimes seriously defend weird opinions, and I am willing to argue that the US should not have sole credit for independently inventing the Internet. However to me it seems obvious that US researchers and US contributions comprise MOST of the story of the early Internet.
Denigration of American inventions is surprisingly popular. There are some scholars even weirder than I am, and they post in the comments of Unz.com about how Americans actually didn’t invent airplanes or lightbulbs. Their screeds will probably convince very few thoughtful readers.
On a tangentially related note, William B. Shockley did nothing wrong.
“Does the Franklin stove count for nothing?”
American? More like American’t!