Prairie Cold War: How North Dakota vs. Montana Became the Planet’s Quietest Geopolitical Meltdown

North Dakota vs. Montana: A Prairie Cold War the World Pretends Not to Notice
By “Marcel Dufresne,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker

PARIS—While the rest of the planet obsesses over which septuagenarian will control the nuclear football, a quieter, far more existential struggle has broken out on the high plains of the United States: North Dakota versus Montana, two rectangular afterthoughts now auditioning for the role of “Last Place Civilization Will Remember.”

To the casual observer, the quarrel looks like a county-fair dispute—oil rigs versus cattle, lignite versus libertarianism—but strip away the wheat chaff and you’ll find a geopolitical parable in which the entire globe is complicit. For if the American interior collapses into self-parody, the rest of us will have to find somewhere else to store our excess grain, ballistic missiles, and delusions of exceptionalism.

A War of Metrics
North Dakota leads with numbers so absurd they sound like a prank on the IMF: highest COVID-19 mortality rate in the union, highest percentage of males named “Dwayne,” and (until recently) the fastest-growing GDP on the continent thanks to fracking. The state’s economy now produces more carbon per capita than Qatar, a feat roughly equivalent to Monaco fielding an Olympic bobsled team that wins gold by cheating gravity itself.

Montana counters with its own superlatives: lowest population density in the Lower 48, highest number of billionaires per antelope, and a governor who once body-slammed a reporter for asking about healthcare—an incident that earned him a seat in the U.S. House and, naturally, a 24-point bump in the polls. Montanans have weaponized wide-open space the way Switzerland weaponized chocolate: as a soothing distraction from the fact that their water rights are quietly being siphoned off by hedge funds based in Luxembourg.

The Global Supply-Chain Ballet
Both states sit atop the Bakken shale formation, which means every time a North Dakotan lights a cigarette near an oil derrick, a Bavarian environmentalist sprouts a migraine. Meanwhile, Montana’s grasslands feed the Wagyu fantasies of Tokyo steakhouses, ensuring that a cow raised within sight of the Little Bighorn may end its days as ¥10,000 sushi in Ginza.

The resulting supply chain is so tangled that a rail strike in either state would ripple outward like a whiskey fart in a cathedral. Within 48 hours, German factories would idle for lack of specialty lubricants, Chinese electric buses would roll to a halt, and Instagram influencers from Mykonos to Malibu would discover that “farm-to-table” was never meant to be literal.

Soft-Power Theater
North Dakota markets itself with the slogan “Legendary,” which is true if your legends involve frostbite and existential dread. It has begun courting Norwegian wind-turbine engineers—people who know a thing or two about bleak beauty—by offering free lutefisk and subsidized saunas. Montana, not to be outdone, has rebranded as “The Last Best Place,” a phrase that manages to sound both triumphant and vaguely apologetic, like a eulogy delivered by the deceased.

International investors, always eager to monetize the apocalypse, have taken note. A consortium of Emirati princes recently purchased 100,000 acres near Glasgow, Montana, to offset the carbon footprint of their Falcon 8Xs. Locals now refer to the sheikhs’ compound as “Dubai on the Prairie,” though the camels remain conspicuously absent—too polite, presumably, to upstage the bison.

Weapons of Mass Distraction
Unbeknownst to most foreigners, North Dakota hosts a full third of America’s land-based nuclear arsenal. Montanans like to joke that this makes their eastern neighbor “the world’s largest self-storage unit for Armageddon,” a quip that plays better in Missoula than in Minot. Of course, Montana isn’t exactly demilitarized; it just prefers its WMDs artisanal—namely, the silo-based missiles buried beneath wheat fields so photogenic they double as Windows screen savers.

The Takeaway for the Rest of Us
In the grand scheme, the Dakota-Montana rivalry is less a clash of civilizations than a slow-motion merger of their failure modes. One state sells the future by the barrel; the other sells the past by the acre. Between them, they offer the world a master class in how to monetize decline while pretending it’s a growth story.

So when the next G-20 summit convenes to fret about food security, energy transition, and democratic backsliding, delegates would do well to remember the rectangle states quietly sliding into irrelevance on the other side of the globe. If North Dakota and Montana can’t resolve their contradictions—rapacious extraction versus romantic pastoralism—then neither can the rest of us. And should that day come, the planet will discover what the prairie has always known: there’s nothing quite so flat as a horizon once hope has been fracked out of it.