I think the gist of the article is that western styled democracy is always going to be more vastly more expensive & economically fragile than any authoritarian superpower that can simply threaten to kill it's own people or harvest their organs to boost GDP and serve it's elite.
It uses Syria to make case that climate change was responsible butterly effect:
> . Syria, for example, enjoyed exceptionally high fertility rates for a time, which fueled rapid population growth. A severe drought in the late 2000s, likely made worse by human-induced climate change, combined with groundwater shortages to cripple agricultural production. That crisis left large numbers of people – especially young men – unemployed, discontent and desperate. Many flooded into urban centres, overwhelming limited resources and services there. Pre-existing ethnic tensions increased, creating fertile grounds for violence and conflict. On top of that, poor governance – including neoliberal policies that eliminated water subsidies in the middle of the drought – tipped the country into civil war in 2011 and sent it careening toward collapse.
Which is shockingly accurate.
It makes parallel case for the rise of populism in US and EU becoming an increasingly less welcoming region as it faces the full pressure from collapsed countries in the middle east.
tl;dr: learn Mandarin or Russian because they are far more likely to survive a global economic collapse.