CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Geopolitical analyst and author Peter Zeihan, a Marshalltown native and 1992 MHS graduate, will release his fourth nonfiction book, titled “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization,” on June 14.

Jerry and Agnes Zeihan both spent their entire professional careers in the world of education — he at South Tama, she at Marshalltown — and even they admit that the subjects their son Peter covers in his work mostly go completely over their heads.

“When people ask, I say, ‘Go to the Internet and look him up’ because what does your kid do? Well, I don’t know,” Agnes said. “He’s not living in our basement.”

Peter, a 1992 Marshalltown High School (MHS) graduate who now resides in the Denver area, remembers being four years old, looking at a map of Iowa and wondering what was beyond the state’s borders. This curiosity has led him across the world, first as an aspiring diplomat and later as a geopolitics consultant and published author whose debut book, “The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder,” established him as a leading voice on the subjects when it was released in 2014.

“There are a fair amount of people out there who do study politics or demography or geography independently, but they are usually looking at it with a specific corporate view in mind, where my work is more holistic,” Peter said.

Zeihan is set to release his fourth nonfiction work, titled “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization” on June 14, and he said it will in all likelihood be his final book on geopolitics and demography for the foreseeable future. For a kid who graduated high school without much of a plan for the future and flirted with a plethora of majors, he’s managed to make quite a name for himself in his chosen field.

“My original thought was that I was going to go into disarmament, and then the Soviet Union was very rude and collapsed on me,” he said. “So I tried on a lot of things.”

After finishing an undergraduate degree in international relations with a minor in organic chemistry at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo., Zeihan went on to graduate school at Otago University in New Zealand and finished another degree in Asian Studies before finishing another graduate degree in economic development from the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky.

From there, Zeihan initially thought he’d follow a relatively conventional path and go to work at the State Department, but as he discovered during an internship there in the mid 1990s, the so-called “one strike rule” — if an employee or intern does one thing the secretary of state doesn’t care for, they’re gone — was going to be a problem.

“They’re not interested in being informed. They’re not interested in policy suggestions. They’re just interested in people who do what the secretary wants when she or he wants it. Considering the mess that foreign policy was under the Clinton administration, I thought ‘No, not for me,'” he said. “I’m really glad I did that because the next four presidents were even worse.”

Jobs at a D.C. think tank and working for his uncle, former State Rep. Henry Rayhons (R-Garner), followed, but in his own words, Peter “hated them all.” He was ready to throw in the towel and go back to school to study organic chemistry again when a friend from Patterson called him about a company called Stratfor in Austin, Tex., which melded geography and analysis and seemed to be right in his wheelhouse.

Peter wrote an email urging a few corrections to papers the president of the company had published, and although the initial response he received was less than friendly, it gradually turned into a job interview. Stratfor stuck, and he ended up working there for 12 years and rising to the rank of vice president before branching out on his own and launching Zeihan on Geopolitics.

Before he built up a client base at the new company, Peter said he had a lot of free time and started writing “Accidental Superpower” as a result. He submitted his manuscript a month ahead of deadline, and because of world events he had mentioned in the book unfolding in real time — in this case, the Russian invasion of Crimea — the publisher quickly released it.

Citing statistics like the fact that 90 percent of all books sell less than 100 copies and only about three percent break even, Peter was encouraged by the enthusiastic reaction to his debut.

“Right out of the box, for it to not just break even but do well was kind of a shock. I had done it originally because a book is a calling card, and it establishes gravitas for speakers. And speaking is still, today, 70 percent of our money,” he said.

Central to Peter’s core theory, he explains, is the idea that the global modern economy mostly arose because of a U.S. desire to buy allies in hopes of winning the Cold War over the USSR, and since its collapse, he adds, voters have chosen the presidential candidate who is less interested in globalization in eight consecutive elections.

The economic shifts have also caused depopulation as more people move to cities and have fewer children, and in most of the world, members of older generations outnumber the ones below them — specifically in China, where a one-child policy has distorted the demographic makeup and put the country’s rise to superpower status in jeopardy.

“The economic models of socialism and capitalism and fascism don’t work with the population structure we have now, so globalization was always going to collapse this decade. The question was when in the decade? Well, COVID sped things up,” Peter said. “Trump sped things up. Biden is speeding things up, and then of course the Ukraine war is a hard stop. So we’re already kind of in the final hours of global trade.”

According to Peter, whether that’s good or bad depends on who is asked and what they care about, but his books attempt to take readers up to the break — which he had originally guessed would occur around 2025 before the pandemic hit — and predict the outcome.

“Living in the chaos and predicting the chaos sounds like a major headache,” he said. “But now it’s happening here and now, and I’m not ready yet.”

With his unconventional outlook and angle, Peter, unsurprisingly, doesn’t feel particularly at home in either major political party, but he’s often still invited onto channels like Fox News and Bloomberg News to discuss his work. He also does his best to keep things in perspective and examine the world rationally even if it doesn’t always align with his own viewpoints.

“I personally am an internationalist, a globalist and a green, and people who believe my way have lost every single election since 1985, so I put my heart in a safe deposit box when I start doing my work,” he said. “I talk about the world that I see, not the world that I want to see.”

“The End of the World Is Just the Beginning” will be published by HarperCollins and available everywhere on June 14. It can be preordered through most major booksellers.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.