Chastened by global war, a group of American foreign policymakers in the mid-1940s turned to ideas of rebalancing transnational patterns of resource use more equally to prevent future world wars. Although this vision was ultimately defeated, their story offers lessons for today amid calls for climate reparations to address global inequality, climate crisis, and militarized geopolitics.

The novel has the capacity to encapsulate human existence, enabling us to interrogate our existing modes of being in the world, while imagining alternatives.