Trade by protecting sea routes, countries on their own will not be able to completely protect their global interests and trade routes due to more piracy and foreign powers intercepting ships.

The global powers without energy independence (China) will have the most significant challenges as they will end up having to ship the majority of their energy from the Middle East which goes directly through the Indian Ocean to get back to China. India, who has not been on the best of terms recently with China, will be able to make things very difficult for China and their energy needs.

I agree with Zeihan completely on this as it will tie up a lot of China’s military resources and become much more expensive for them. In addition, his previous books talked about some of China’s challenges in keeping the country together as its more like 3 countries being managed by the area with the least amount of natural resources. They are focused inward trying to stamp out challenges to their rule (see HK and the Uighurs as examples).

In addition, for the US, we really do have almost the perfect geography to protect our country, but I also would say more of the attacks are going to be from technology resources rather than physical military resources.