Thinkin ‘bout Oregon stuff. Namely, how the collapse of the logging industry is so often presented in terms of domestic developments - the environmental/conservationist movement in particular. And how foreign and trade policy aren’t foregrounded, even though with the US Navy controlling the Pacific sea lanes and petroleum infrastructure developed enough in Southeast Asia and South America, it’s not unreasonable to prefer to just import lumber for currency that can come right back for chainsaws and mill blades and Caterpillar machinery.

Especially given that the development of export-oriented resource extraction economies would tie states to the US and draw the rural workforce off the land in environments where the Maoist peasantry-straight-to-industrial-communism path was a major competitor. (With the intact federal forest lands serving as a decent reserve if those sealanes ever were closed*)

* As an aside, one of my hobbyhorses is how everyone with a submarine fleet (the Imperial German Navy in WWI, the Kriegsmarine and USN in WWII) always starts off intending, and failing, to use them against capital ships and then eventually figures out the thing to do is shipping interdiction.

The rumored Chinese contingency plan to take care of carriers with ballistic missiles and flood the Pacific with hundreds of not-cutting-edge subs might prove to be the first time someone got it right.