America's Last Train Home: In the Longest View, Balance Was Always the Destination

### Part I — Arrival at the Mirror## **Prologue: The Great Recycling of Empire** ♻️It was never war. Not in the traditional sense. Not bullets, not bombs, not boots-on-the-ground. **China recycled the United States like it was a bundle of aluminum cans.** The symbols were always there. The ubiquitous green triangle of “recycling”—the modern glyph of waste management—was never about environmentalism alone. It was a civilizational signal. Waste is not only what is discarded; it is what bec...