Defense, Oil, Energy, the Dollar and When Systems Take the Blame We Should Assign to People

A radiation safety rule most people have never heard of quietly changed this year, and it tells us something about how power actually moves in the world. The change looks technical and small. Follow it far enough, though, and it touches the price of oil, the strength of the dollar, and the story we tell ourselves about why peace in the Middle East never seems to hold. None of those connections are obvious until you go looking for them, which is exactly the point of looking.

For fifty years, nuclear plants and hospitals operated under a principle called ALARA, “as low as reasonably achievable.” Before any decision involving radiation exposure, the rule asked a simple question: could this exposure be reduced further, even below the legal limit, if doing so were reasonable? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s new proposal keeps the numerical dose limits in place but retires that extra layer of judgment, arguing it created uncertainty and burden without a matching safety benefit. Supporters call this a return to what the rule was always meant to do. Critics, including scientists at the Union of Concerned Scientists (and me), worry the change quietly devalues how seriously the public takes low-dose radiation risk, even while regulators insist nothing about safety itself has changed. Both sides may be partly right, and that discomfort is worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly.

The timing is not an accident. Nuclear power is in a genuine renaissance, driven by rising electricity demand, the push to decarbonize, and a hunger for energy security that has little to do with climate politics. Saudi Arabia signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States this year, and the United Arab Emirates already draws roughly a quarter of its electricity from a single nuclear plant. Oil-producing nations are hedging against oil, and a regulatory system built around caution is loosening its grip at the exact moment that hedge accelerates.

That hedge is backed by hard currency. The petrodollar arrangement, in which oil-producing states agreed to price their crude in dollars and recycle the proceeds into American Treasury securities in exchange for military protection, only works as long as oil stays central to the global economy. Several economists now argue that arrangement is not collapsing so much as losing its exclusivity, as nations diversify their energy sources and their reserves at the same time. A single rule-making at the NRC does not cause that shift. It is part of the same current, a world quietly repricing its dependence on oil, its trust in regulators, and its appetite for risk, mostly without asking permission from the people who will feel it first at the gas pump, in a retirement account, or in undetectable health risks from nuclear safety policy shifts.

It is tempting to explain the Middle East’s endless wars as an inevitable collision of oil-hungry world powers and religious fanaticism, two forces too entrenched to ever coexist. History does not support that story as well as the story supports itself. Researchers at the Carnegie Endowment argue that forever wars persist less because conflicts remain unresolved and more because powerful actors on multiple sides continue to benefit from the conflict itself. Historians studying the region note that coexistence has been as ordinary there as anywhere else, and that treating war as the default mode for the region only makes conflict easier to justify. Religion and resources become the explanation the public is handed, while the incentives that actually sustain the conflict stay out of view.

Systems Theory offers a useful discipline here: identify what made a person’s choices possible before rushing to blame the person, since a regulator, a sovereign fund manager, or a wartime leader each acts inside incentives and constraints that existed before they arrived and will outlast them. That discipline should not become a hiding place, though. Some people in positions of power are pursuing nothing more complicated than their own singular benefit; calling that out is not incompatible with also asking what governance structure allowed them to act on it unchecked. Both questions deserve an answer: what this person chose, and what the system permitted.

This is not a call to cynicism about how the world works, and none of it excuses power from scrutiny. I’d be tempted to give up if that was the intent, thinking: “It’s all too big to overcome or change.” Governments and corporations do not reliably agree on what serves humanity well, because very few of them are built to optimize for that question in the first place. What each of us can still choose, in the small decisions that make up an ordinary week, is whether we accept the reduced story or ask what larger, coupled system it might be standing in for, and who inside that system is choosing poorly, as it relates to the good of humanity, on purpose.

That kind of attention will not rewrite a rule-making docket or end a war on its own. Over time, though, it can change what we tolerate, what we vote for, and what we pass on to the people who come after us. Curiosity is not a substitute for policy, but it is often what makes good policy possible. Choosing to see the whole system, and the people inside it who chose their own benefit, may be one of the few forms of care still fully within our reach.



Real convergence is more than oil meeting nuclear power or dollars meeting diplomacy. It is the moment we finally ask hard questions of the systems that surround us, of the leaders who steer them, and of ourselves as participants in the communities those systems touch every single day. We may hold only a small stone, but the ripples it can make in a large pond are not insignificant. Cast it thoughtfully, knowing the secondary effects may prove to be quite consequential.