Playing Jenga With Shipping

The world may come undone VERY quickly.

I purchased Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World Is Just the Beginning on Christmas Eve of 2024. I read history, policy, and for views of the future the works of Dmitry Orlov have always weighed on me. Also worth noting are the effect cyberpunk authors Bruce Sterling and William Gibson have on my thinking; their books have always had that “day after tomorrow” feeling about them.

Reinventing Collapse, on November 7th, was my pointing out that now might be a great time to read Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects and The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivor’s Toolkit. My underlying thinking was that if even a fraction of the tariffs mentioned during last year’s campaign, or a fraction of the deportations, actually come to pass, that both China and the U.S. economies were going to go sideways fairly quickly. Policy & Prejudice and Going Hungry By Choice are focused on domestic issues that will quickly follow.

Do you recall Insurance Sector Collapse Process? That article is about climate change, housing prices, and the fact that Mother Nature is not influenced by partisan news. Zeihan doesn’t specifically mention Lloyds of London, but the inability to insure shipping comes right back to that insurance syndicate. Lloyds not a company, it’s a cluster of hundreds, and when they insure something I think no member can take more than 2.5% of the total liability.

Just a couple days ago, Where Globalization Dies, was about the friction in the Baltic, with Russian sabotage stirring Estonia and Finland into action. The Russian shadow fleet is insured by a notional Russian carrier that probably won’t pay a ruble in the event of a loss. The three tankers going down in the Black Sea in quick succession put that lack of coverage into people’s minds. The loss of the large utility ship in the Mediterranean may mean the ships of the Black Sea fleet who were lurking at the supply station in Tartus may be stranded in Benghazi for the foreseeable future.

This video is Zeihan reciting all the various shipping hazards, reminding us of what the world was like prior to the formation of the United Nations and NATO post WWII. The U.S. is abandoning its role as global traffic cop, and he doesn’t specifically mention China, but if they lash out at Taiwan as tariffs turn up the heat on Chairman Xi, the supply chain disruptions we saw from COVID will seem a harmless civil defense exercise compared to what’s next.

If you’re not hip to what things were like before Pax Americana calmed the seas, Googling combinations of “commerce”, “raider”, and “cruiser” will take you back to a time when midrange navy ships were built for the job formerly done by privateers during the age of sail.

Zeihan could be a little bit premature in his doomsaying, but if that’s the case he’s thinking weeks, when a rosy estimate might allow for months.