Sounds like you haven't understood Zeihan's basic premise. Things are better, particularly in places that don’t have a "geography of success" - but that's because the US deliberately gave up an advantage in the Bretton Woods Accords, opening up US consumer markets and protecting blue water international trade with our own navy - and on our own dime.

This made good sense in 44-45. The US essentially bought a security alliance against the USSR - and in 68 bought China away from its alliance with the USSR. But with the USSR gone and the US a net petroleum product exporter, there's no more need — and China essentially using the US as a market to dump into is a good reason to step away (this latter my point, not his). His take is that the US is moving away from Bretton Woods (and I don't disagree) and that there are going to be serious repercussions as those countries that succeeded because of the global order are going to fail back to what they otherwise would have been - but with much larger populations to support. You might check out the first half of his 2014 ‘Accidental Superpower’ for a primer on what a ‘Geography of Success’ might be (spoiler: North America has it in spades) — best into to Geopolitics I’ve seen.

As far as Pinker, it doesn't sound like you made your way through the first half of his 'Better Angels’: The past was really, really bad. That first half goes into painful-to-read detail. He's calling the present ‘good’ in comparison to that terrible past, and I’d agree that in the West, at least, we’re a bit less cruel, more likely to emphasize with someone we disagree with — although I’m starting to see limits in that, which makes me tend to agree with his hypothesis (second half of the book) that education and reading in particular is a major contributor to that.