Crashing the Car of Pax Americana

I just happened to spend much of yesterday driving through the heart of Applachia - from SW Virginia to NE Ohio. The impoverishment and hollowing out of these communities is hard to fathom and Walmarts, cheap iPhones, cheap entertainment and cheap drugs don’t feel like a fair tradeoff.

How can we keep Pax Americana going in a way that benefits all Americans - and by benefit I mean offers lives of dignity with meaningful work, meaningful relationships and recognition of value?

As Ben points out in his post (and a side note to the main theme there) – there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the loss of the manufacturing and “good jobs” in America over the past 45 years. As a kid growing up in a town of 10k in Eastern Oregon there were 2 sawmills and a plywood mill running 24/7 - 6 days a week. By the time I graduated HS they were all gone. You would assume Baker City would have turned into a ghost town but the people wouldn’t let that happen. Is it rich today? No. But the people wouldn’t accept defeat, so they got creative and patched together a place that most still are proud to call home. Tourism to the Oregon Trail, old goldmine towns, retirement destination, and outdoor recreation are the main drivers today. My point is this – did we owe the loggers and mill workers a job in Eastern Oregon? What is the answer for many Americans that have lived through this same loss of mill jobs? Are we helpless to create a different future?

I find myself in agreement with Ben Hunt’s reflection especially his call to recognize the long arc of coordination that once defined Pax Americana. The long arc that was a win-win for the United States AND the world explained by game theory’s Stag Hunt and Prisoner’s Dilemma metaphors. The competition game played over thousands of years leads to inevitable decline. Take the time to feel the metaphors. It took me a long time to feel them in myself.

Where Ben frames it in geopolitical strategy, I respond from within—through a path of mindful cooperative surrender.

By refusing to mirror the aggressive tactics of the competition game, I believe we plant seeds of peace in the very soil of conflict. This is how I’ve defined my version of “choosing to lose.” It’s not weakness, but a strategy rooted in trust that something better can grow. When one side defects, it’s tempting to respond in kind—but doing so only confirms and deepens the cycle. Instead, when we respond with restraint, compassion, and courage, we offer a new pattern. We don’t escalate the conflict; we transform it.

To me, this is the beginning of a win-win solution. Not by meeting aggression with aggression, but by crossing a ravine—one carved by decades of America’s politic, economic and moral infighting. May we build a bridge across this ravine with humility, shared truth, and mutual regard. Each act of listening, of non-retaliation, of honest dialogue becomes another plank.

We don’t have time to explain this to the electorate. The conversation must start with the oligarchs—the men and women who stood silently in front of the curtain during the inauguration, now within the first hundred days. These are the ones who know how power works behind the scenes. And after those hundred days, it must continue with the 456 elected representatives who hold the legislative keys. They too must be invited—not with shouts or threats, but with the quiet urgency of truth—to reimagine the game we’re playing.

I understand the tragedy of a world that no longer trusts its own institutions. But while Ben describes the danger of losing the upper-left quadrant, I am building a new one within myself—a quadrant of breath, feeling, and neighborliness.

So yes, I agree with Ben: we are crashing something precious. But unlike those who would grip the wheel tighter and race forward, I propose we use the brake pedal to slow down AND win the war not by defeating the enemy, but by refusing to become them.

Jimmy aided by chatGPT4o

Good note, but you’re preaching to the choir. Maybe ask AI to translate it into a form that a reptilian brain can comprehend?

Jim
This was beautifully hopeful and a sentiment we should take to heart.
Sam

Should have stopped by and said hello.

I spent almost eight years working in the Appalachian Basin. You have no idea just how bad it is and how deep the pain runs. (You also probably don’t know just how hilariously well armed the Amish are in that part of Ohio; some of those guys could put on a gun show by doing nothing more than opening their barn doors)

What if that’s not what a lot of those people want? Because in my experience down there this was not a universal goal, nor would it even carry the majority of the population on any given day.

When the shale boom came it brought with it billions of dollars of absolutely free money that was handed out in exchange for what the residents previously believed was damn near worthless land. Tens of billions flowed from the ground and into the pockets of landowners. All the hotels and motels were full every night for years. Every restaurant was packed day and night. Energy companies paved roads, donated to every local community organization, soccer team, bought every animal from every 4H kid at every county fair. Every county courthouse was filled with landmen who spent all day making copies of deed records, at 25¢ a page. Thousands of pages, by 15-20 guys, every day. The Recorder’s office was running a machine that spat out $5,000/d, every day, for months. Companies cut checks directly to the county for expanded hours so their people could work before and after regular closing times. They paid tens of thousands for a few extra hours a day over the course of a few months. Government revenues ballooned.

Then what happened?

Hundreds of good paying jobs were created overnight…and most went to workers from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, not Ohio or Pennsylvania. Know why? Nobody could pass a drug test. No, I’m not shitting you. I had a friend who had a wireline company and he tried to hire two locals. Both didn’t even show up for the drug test. That was the last time he bothered to even advertise his job opening in the area. He hired professionals from out of state. Less hassle.

Before a single cubic foot of gas or barrel of oil came out of the ground the local Ford dealership made news as it catapulted to the top of the list of highest volume dealers in the state. It seemed like every farm large and small had a new F-150 in the gravel driveway.

The casinos across the river had multiple record years in a row after a decade of a slow decline. Strip clubs boomed.

And nobody really built anything. The families who were rich before were simply even more rich after. One prominent local attorney—whose conduct would have gotten him disbarred in any other place—tightened his grip on the area, and after a particularly major payout bought a second home in Lake Como, Italy.

The old men dying of black lung kept on dying. The young men continued their drift into addiction, which had started to take hold years before that. Crime went up despite poverty going down.

The local wastewater treatment plants were at least smart enough to make deals with the service companies to clean the used frac water. Again, government receipts grew, but how much of that made it to the people? (Not much)

Nobody bothered to clean up the brownfields and open a new facility making drill pipe. That ended up happening an hour north instead. It took two years for the owner of a previously defunct gravel yard to open back up, despite the fact that he was sitting on a gold mine. (I know this because I tried to buy part of it from him and he not only wouldn’t sell but quite literally did not understand the magnitude of what was about to happen)

Very little changed because the people didn’t want anything to change. Many of them talked about Weirton Steel as if it was still 1981, and cursed the foreigners (ArcelorMittal) who owned what was left of it. (And in a small twist of irony the man who bought that bankrupt company off of the employees in 2002–for a hilariously low ball price—would go on to be the Secretary of Commerce under the first term of the president that they voted for in overwhelming numbers) It’s been 15 years of oil and gas money steadily flowing to the area, and nothing has changed. The complaint that “there aren’t any jobs” is old enough to drink. Some people had the good sense to leave. Everyone else was just more comfortable staying and watching everything die.

I’m not unsympathetic, but the way these folks are talked about—and talk about themselves—you’d think they had no agency of their own. They think their salvation is just around the corner, if only we’d just blew up every working institution around the globe they’d make it to the other side of this mess. It’s paternalistic horseshit that Trump is selling and they’re lining up around the block to get their wheelbarrow full of it.

DY - I found this to be incredibly insightful. Thanks for sharing it.

You said it in your post already, they were raised in a generational system of opression and abject poverty and throwing money at the problem didn’t work in bringing them back. There was casinos there to pray on them when money did fall down like rain. They were still under the illusion of nostalgia of better days.

Hard things are hard to fix.

And I admit anectdotally I have been more often than not-and especially recently- been harsher with my patients in terms my expectations for them. It’s not that I don’t understand they are vulnerable but there’s a social contract here that they don’t take advantage of my grace as a human being and my professionalism as a nurse.

But still, while I don’t think everyone are born or live equally, I think maybe their situations would have been better off if you could have provided education at the right time and maybe not money at the wrong time. I wonder how many generations will be lost again during Trumps hack-a-thon approach to federal spending.

But, everything will probably come full circle again in the future, nothing lasts forever. Thanks for your story, gives more insight as always.

BH - Super insightful and I agree with most of the Note. One area I see differently relates to:

“. . . adjust to the new global regime where the US is just another country, albeit the most powerful of those countries.”

During the Great Ravine, I don’t think it’s a given that the US will always be the most powerful nation. (As I give voice to that, it is not lost on me that that’s probably an unpopular take.)

For every Ph.D. that the US graduates, China graduates ten. Something like 70% of the EV batteries ever made have been made in China. When it comes to AI and quantum computing, they’re running neck and neck with America.

I’m not saying that China will be the most powerful nation during the Great Ravine. Simply, that it might be too close to call. While I hope the US keeps its pole position, my sense is that it could go either way, including slipping into a draw that lasts a couple decades.

Nuclear fusion, AGI, or some other black swan event (e.g. coronal mass ejection) likely tips the scales definitively in one super power’s favor (with the former being more likely to occur in the US).