Disunited Nations

What Hacker News says

1. arjieDec 2025
   I don't think you can have a "free and global market" when countries participate in large-scale state industrial policy. Given those constraints, you have to either enforce a zero-subsidy environment (the US has no power to do this) or you have to accept that trade control is one arm of your foreign policy goals and surrendering it entirely is unlikely to help your aims.

   For the most part, free and open trade is beneficial to the Western world order. But I think it's quite straightforward to imagine conditions under which it is not, many of which are currently in effect.

   US control of EUV technology is probably the most obvious present one, but limitations on nuclear proliferation are an obvious case where there is no free market. Even selling civilian nuclear technology is controlled.

   You may think of it analogously to Free Speech. The dream is complete and total expression. The reality is that if you allow convincing enough liars, your society starts to falter. Consequently, certain kinds of expression are not permitted - notably defamation. Think of it as more a North Star navigation ideal constrained by the trade winds (I suppose the Westerlies would be more relevant, but I couldn't resist the pun).

   If you want a couple of reads, I enjoyed A Splendid Exchange about the history of trade, which I followed by the resurgent-though-once-dismissed Zeihan's Disunited Nations (which is more a hypothesis book than a history book).

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2. Test0129Oct 2022
   For a long time (basically forever) China hasn't really invented anything of it's own. China has a large, complex, and well run espionage network responsible for stealing trade secrets from western companies. There's a great book, Disunited Nations, that talks about it in gory detail. Essentially, China will steal anything it can and build it locally. Espionage like this is generally expected (even among allies) but the scale at which China operates this is breathtaking. Majority of the large scale hacks they have done in recent history are targeting organizations with special IP (for example military technology).

   So, knowing this I would assume they will simply use this system to get access to patents for the chips they need and begin fabrication themselves. This blow slows them down but doesn't stop them. To stop them, you'd need to stop their well oiled espionage machine.

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3. DennisPJul 2022
   Over the past several months I read all his books. His previous book, Disunited Nations, is probably best for making the demographic argument. He devotes chapters to individual countries, covering their situations in detail, starting with several chapters on China.

   (His first book, Accidental Empire, does a good job introducing his overall PoV, applying it to most of the great civilizations in history starting with ancient Egypt. This book predicted in 2014 that Russia would invade the rest of Ukraine by end of 2021. His next book, Absent Superpower, has the most on fossil fuels.)

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4. mooredsMar 2022
   If you want to see the demographic disaster many countries are heading toward, can't recommend Peter Zeihan enough.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNvdBRjRno8 is a good intro

   Disunited Nations is his most recent published book: https://zeihan.com/disunited-nations/ (a new one is coming out in June)

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5. websites222Feb 2021
   Agreed! I'm plagiarizing wholesale from Peter Zeihan, I'm not a geopolitical expert. I recently read Disunited Nations. His YouTube videos and podcasts are very interesting.

   Re: your comment about being in for a bumpy ride: I think his logic is solid in that the bumpy ride is only in relation to the unprecedented post-WWII/post-cold-war era. We know from history that the norm in the world is instability.

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6. mooredsDec 2020
   If geopolitics + trends is interesting to you, I highly recommend "Disunited Nations": https://zeihan.com/disunited-nations/
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