>>better for almost everybody almost everywhere since WWII.

Except for us in the US — on purpose. Globally by number, it's a huge majority doing better. China (the nation very much taking advantage of our open market) has pulled more of people than the US population out of abject poverty.

Agreed that we should have been the winners. We're not, because we traded that in for 'global security'. I'd be willing to say that the average Nigerian is better off as well - or at least Cameroonians (next country to the south) and Africans in general (by and large, they're on an inland plateau making seaborne transport into the interior difficult and have poor soils that require major inputs to be productive).

Iraqis, too - until our neocons decided they had to invade and then stayed based on IMO bad intel (although I'd also argue that anyone who mounts an unpopular invasion on ideological grounds is kind of a moron).

All that said, Zeihan’s point is that that is all going away. The US does have a ‘geography of success’, and combined with Mexico has a good demographic spread, and plenty of places across the US and Mexico where there’s a good spread of labor/skill price points — so moving manufacturing back to North America makes sense. Things are about to get a lot better for low-income people in the US — but at the expense of what he calls ‘Global Disorder’, meaning that those countries that have done so very well (at our expense to greater or lesser degree) are going back to where they were pre-WWII — but with much larger populations to feed. I’m glad about what might happen here but not particularly sanguine about the rest of the planet.