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ever more resource-dependent and relegates many other nations to the permanent despair of the Terminal World.
    For nations like Japan and Switzerland, modernized and progressive but resource poor, autarky has never been an option. Either through military dominion over their better-endowed neighbors (Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” as its iron-handed pre—World War II empire was known) or extensive trade and prudent foreign policy (Switzerland’s neutrality is the preferred example), such nations have had to forge relationships with others that made a virtue of their dependency. Japan’s military grip on East Asia was a stern discipline for the Japanese too, requiring a large imperial army, permanent occupation, and constant surveillance. Japan’s postwar economic miracle, while it allowed it to reacquire dominion, has made it even more dependent on its trading partners than it once was on its colonies.
    Nations whose geography is more promising have fared little better. Potential agricultural behemoths like Russia and India sometimes seem hard-pressed to feed themselves: certainly the Soviet Union failed to do so, compounding the circumstances that sealed its doom. Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has. Many nations have almost nothing they need. The erosion of American autarky in natural resources over the last one hundred years stands as an exemplar for dozens of progressive nations, its story more dramatic than most, but finally all too familiar.
    As recently as 1960, the United States imported only a handful of minerals such as aluminum, manganese, nickel, and tin. Today we look abroad for zinc, chromium, tungsten, lead, and of course oil. And soon copper, potassium, sulfur, and even iron will become weighty items in our negative balance of trade. Domestic production of coal and shale will take us into the century after next, and the exhaustion of our agriculture will take even more stupidity and incompetence than the economic managers most amply endowed in these qualities are likely to be able to muster. But in most other respects, America—the eighteenth-century’s second Eden and new found land—is looking more and more like Britain or Switzerland, if not Chad or Bangladesh, importing more and more of what it requires to survive.
    Less than fifty years ago, there was no aggressor, however bold, that could hope to defeat in battle an America whose supply lines originated in such bounty. From the iron ore and bauxite and phosphate and petroleum reserves came an endless supply of airplane engines and battleships and mortar shells and hand grenades; from the aboriginal fertility of the great plains came food and clothing for as many armies as the nation saw fit to field. Yet by the 1980s the vestiges of this prized autarky were gone and America was as dependent on imports as most of its trading partners. America’s success in World War II had in fact endangered the very resource autarky on which victory rested. The United States drew heavily on its resource banks to acquire global leadership, and would draw even more heavily on them to retain it into the heady years following the war when its relations with the Soviet Union were freezing down at the very moment its domestic economic growth was heating up.
    The sharp and sudden deterioration in America’s resource independence produced by this juxtaposition is evident from U.S. bauxite figures. Bauxite is the source of aluminum and a crucial element in industrialization, not least of all in its war-making moment. America was less favorably endowed by nature in bauxite than in other minerals, yet through the end of World War I, America produced nearly 50 percent of the world’s bauxite. 6 More important, through 1920 it imported less than 10 percent of its domestic consumption, and at the end of World War II was still producing 57 percent of what it needed. 7 Yet within five years (by 1950), imports were up to