Sure - the bulk of his predictions haven't panned out, and they always align more or less with what the American state department
would like to be rather than
what is. He's part of the Gordon Chang and Stratfor crowd that has been rationalizing American foreign policy for the last thirty years as some coherent master plan (rather than the disaster it has been). This group, Ziehan included, tends to:
1) Hyperfocus on specific issues, usually material, while ignoring ideological, social and psychological contexts of decision-making (this is most apparent in their annual "China will implode now" predictions made every year for the last forty years (
His 2010 prediction for a pre 2019 collapse of China into many small states is looking great these days, isn't it?). His hyperfocus on material things such as resources also generally is overly simplistic, ignoring technological innovation or improvements to productive processes. It tends to be in the vein of "hey, this has been this way for the past forty years, so let's extrapolate forty years into the future assuming no change whatsoever." Take Global Warming - Ziehan dislikes Canada and Russia's future, seeing them inevitably as joining the US or collapsing. But if you read his analysis on the countries, he completely ignores
climate change which both Russia and Canada are likely to hugely benefit from. No significant analysis of the next hundred years can ignore the projected explosion of agricultural productivity in these two countries, yet Zeihan does.
2) His general international policy is some attempt to revive a pre-1945 system of nations with a strong Western core and peripheral nations in orbit around it. The cat is out of the bag. The West is 11% of the world's population. It is not, should not be, and will not be, the center of human affairs - but one power among equals. Yet for Zeihan, the reason d'aitre of US policy should be to promote a Western-led world order. Bad objectives leads to bad reads on many situations. Which leads to...
3) He is an apologist for the US, to the fault - I remember one article about Angola where he got very fundamental and basic facts wrong in order to support a narrative of a Soviet coup against a popular pro-Western government (which never existed? Angola went from Portuguese colony to a Marxist dictatorship without any interim pro-Western government in Luanda). Regardless, his approach to US policy is very much biased in the "judge us by our intent, and others by their action" way, which is a kindergarten level of empathy. Henry Kissinger is an idiot, but he at least approaches some understanding of other cultures. Just look at the above link - a lot of doom and gloom about the rest of the world, but nothing about the growing sectarian splits in the US, insurrection at the capitol, and so forth. He's bullish on the US and bearish on the world to a fault.