According to Marat Zembatov, Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute of State and Municipal Management, Higher School of Economics; Member, Russian-Omani Business Council, Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation; Expert, BRICS Business Council Group on Transport and Infrastructure; Ph.D. in Economics:
“Time and again, history’s fateful decisions have turned on a single need—to trade and to move goods. The roads of the Roman Empire, from Sicily to England, led to tin and amber; the great voyages of discovery brought Europe gold and sugar; and the mass migration to the New World, in pursuit of wealth and, frankly, of everything under the sun, handed the world economy wealth and everything under the sun (all of it accruing, of course, to the largest economy on earth)—including the modern container. At the turn of the millennium it became fashionable to reinvent globalization, with the accent on squeezing more marginal utility out of every dollar invested. And now—with BRICS, the SCO, ASEAN, and the EAEU firmly embedded in geoeconomic reality, the pandemic behind us, and even the conflict in the Persian Gulf all but over (Oman is back on the agenda with proposals to escort vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, which means financial reality is entering the chat, and that always trumps emotion)—one blunt question stands at full height: what next? Who will shape the new geoeconomic order of a world more connected than ever, and how? Everyone is watching the new international transport corridors. And rightly so. But few know what those corridors will be built from, or what will underpin them.
And the foundation of the new economic geography will be more than a hunt for new trade routes based on the GDP, demographics, and growth rates of the countries a corridor happens to cross. The world once again needs a short formula for global economic success—something like BRICS or the SCO. But that formula has to reckon with a different fabric of the world economy, one in which what matters is the future content of supply chains, the siting of production near sources of critical resources, power generation, and the data centers that feed big data and the new large language models. Fit all of that into the chronological and geographical frame of the geoeconomic reality now taking shape, and trust—together with the ability of territories to absorb ruptures in connectivity—will summon a brave new world into being.
For the English historian of transport and economic geography Peter Frankopan, this picture of a new world emerges as Eurasia’s historical transport axes return in the guise of modern technology. In The Silk Roads and The New Silk Roads (which Logistics Insights discussed with its readers back in Issue Seven), the center of gravity of global trade shifts toward the space bounded by China, Russia, Iran, Central Asia, India, and the Middle East. Frankopan shows that for centuries international trade and energy, religions and epidemics, wars and wealth have all moved along the same durable geographical lines—the Eurasian transport axes. And today those axes are surfacing once more through the borders of modern states (many of which took on their familiar shape only in the last century)—through ports and pipelines, railways and fiber-optic cables, energy projects and new international corridors.
Back in the 1990s, Kenichi Ohmae wrote of a “borderless world” and of regional economies growing stronger than the classic nation-state. His thesis of regional hegemony without political borders looked highly debatable when the book appeared—and still does, since the state is going nowhere. Yet sanctions and today’s hybrid conflicts, the assorted forms of export and import control (recall the prohibitive US import tariffs and the curbs on fuel exports), the race for technological sovereignty, and a new arsenal of IT tools have sharply reshaped how we think about the role of territory and connectivity in any one state’s rise. As a futurist, Ohmae caught the mood of the age exactly. Economic activity really does tend to cluster around producing and trading regions rather than along political borders. The examples are many: Northern Italy, the Pearl River Delta, Singapore, Dubai, Texas and Los Angeles, Shenzhen and Shanghai, Bangalore and Rotterdam. These hubs of the global economy have long run as production-and-logistics systems. And this, most likely, is exactly what Jacques Attali called “the hearts of capitalism.”
Attali framed the future precisely as a succession of the world’s centers of capital turnover—those “hearts of capitalism.” He coined the term “hypermobility” and dubbed its carriers “the new nomads.” Today we face a world in which roughly 300 million people (by official count alone) live and work outside their country of birth, and in which the 30,000-odd parts of a single car may be made in 30 countries. All of this was foreseen and described nearly 30 years ago by Attali, the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In his world, capital seeks the space with the fewest restrictions and the fastest turnover. To that we must now add a new condition: capital seeks more than freedom of movement. It seeks guaranteed access to a critical resource (lithium or cobalt, say), cheap electricity, and a secure transport corridor. So the future geographical center of capital may lie not where the consumers are, but where—along the path of the international transport corridors—critical resources and seaports intersect with high-margin supply chains and with centers for storing and processing data. The migrating “heart of capitalism” of the future, in other words, will be pinned to the route map of the transport corridors.
The American analyst and futurist Peter Zeihan offers a harsher version of the future. In his telling, globalization rested on American maritime security, demographic balance, and affordable energy. As those props weaken, the world slides back toward regionalization, resource constraints, and logistical fragility—decoupling once again. In practice, that is what the world glimpsed in the Strait of Hormuz. And also what we have not yet seen but Zeihan foretells: the rupture of traditional supply chains and the collapse in living standards and consumption it would trigger across most of the world. One can dispute Zeihan on the scale of the coming breakup of global trade. But the way he frames the question is useful. Connectivity, after all, is not the world’s natural state. It has to be guarded, insured, financed, and constantly rebuilt—and that takes enormous effort and energy.
The American scholar of Pakistani descent Parag Khanna is perhaps the most original of all those who have tried to picture the transport-and-logistics future. He did not merely broadcast his conjectures to the world (plenty have done that). He coined an entirely new term—with a claim to being a discipline in its own right—“connectography,” which is also the title of his book. Today one can fairly call it one of the sharpest terms we have for making sense of the new era: connectography, a way of measuring the world’s connectivity. In Connectography, Khanna shows that in the 21st century it is not only armies and markets that compete. Pipelines, fiber-optic cables, railways, ports, airports, and mega-agglomerations compete too (by the statistics, some 150 million people move to cities every year this century). Connectivity is now decisive: where there is a road, there is trade and a rising standard of living. And vice versa.
All these authors think about the transport-and-logistics map of the world in different vocabularies but in the same direction. And every one of these threads leads back to Tim Marshall, who invariably returns the questions of geoeconomics to their source—geography. Prisoners of Geography, arguably the best-known book on how every branch of the economy, transport included, is bound by the givens of nature, drives home a single idea: international politics is, in large part, states’ attempt to overcome the constraints geography has imposed on them. And today, and for the foreseeable future, that overcoming is achieved through international trade built on transport-and-logistics machinery.
Here it is worth recalling Malcolm McLean and the container revolution. When the Ideal X carried 58 containers from Newark to Houston in 1956, world trade acquired a new technical standard. The container did more than speed up loading—it rewired economic geography. The port became the key node of a standardized, secure system for delivering goods at scale. The container made possible the global factory and the modern division of labor (you may be interested to learn that the computer on which you are reading this is made of some 10,000 parts that converged on the assembly line from a dozen countries). Today, and for years to come, parts, raw materials, semi-finished goods, and finished products cross borders at dramatically lower transaction cost. And it is precisely here that the defining question of our time arises: how long will this familiar economic order hold, now that the first flashes of conflict have already thrown their shadows across the security of the world’s supply chains?”
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