America needs energy dominance

OPINION:

National security requires energy security. American greatness — by which I mean the maintenance of American power second to none in a world where despotic regimes threaten free nations — requires more than that. It requires energy dominance.

To achieve this goal, President Trump has established the National Energy Dominance Council, whose chairman, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and vice chairman, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, also have seats on the National Security Council.

This is a sharp departure from the Biden administration, for which energy policy was subsidiary to climate policy. Former Secretary of State John F. Kerry was the first special presidential envoy for climate, a position since abolished, and also served on the National Security Council.

Based on the dubious assertion that climate change is “the existential challenge of our time,” Mr. Kerry pushed for an “energy transition,” with the government mandating that American hydrocarbons stay in the ground and subsidizing such purportedly “green and clean” energy sources as the sun and the wind.

His mission was not accomplished. When President Biden took office in January 2021, fossil fuels accounted for roughly 79% of U.S. primary energy consumption. By 2024, that percentage had increased to roughly 82%.

Energy dominance is not a new idea. In his 2007 book, “Energy Victory,” Robert Zubrin wrote that for “nearly a century, control of oil has been the decisive factor determining victory or defeat in the struggle for world dominance.”

When World War I began in 1914, the United States was responsible for as much as 70% of global oil production. German U-boats did serious damage to American shipping but ultimately failed to stop American oil from reaching Britain and France.

“The crack German infantry were as tough as they come,” Mr. Zubrin writes, “but there was no way they could cope with a new army equipped with fleets of rampaging gasoline-powered land battleships and assisted by unmatched swarms of fighter aircraft.”

At a victory banquet in London on Nov. 18, 1918, British statesman Lord George Curzon declared that the Allies had “floated to victory upon a wave of oil.”

Next came World War II. In February 1941, Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps landed in Libya. His forces were soon crippled by fuel shortages, and Allied troops prevented them from capturing the underused oil fields of the Middle East.

Four months later, Adolf Hitler’s army invaded Russia with orders to take Baku, the oil capital of the Soviet Union. “Unless we get the Baku oil,” Hitler said, “the war is lost.” They didn’t, and it was.

Similarly, a key goal of Japan’s 1940 invasion of Indochina was to secure access to oil and other raw materials farther south in the East Indies. That effort also failed. You know the result.

The notion that we’ve entered a brave new world of renewable energy is delusional. The United States is not going to deploy electric tanks or plug-in fighter jets anytime soon.

Nor will the People’s Liberation Army, despite frequent and excited reports in the major media claiming, as did The Washington Post in March, that “China now eclipses every other country in the world — including the United States — in the green technologies of the future.”

Seven paragraphs further down, you will find a mention that China is also “the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter by far.”

The article doesn’t explain why, but I will: Fossil fuels, especially coal, remain China’s dominant source of energy.

In 2023, coal-burning power plants alone generated 60% of China’s electricity, and China was responsible for 95% of new coal-burning power plant construction worldwide. Of note, China doesn’t bother with the robust use of scrubbers, which would reduce harmful emissions.

China’s communist rulers are taking an “all of the above” approach to energy production because their goal is to achieve global energy dominance, essential in the competition for preeminence in artificial intelligence. AI will be a key component in military robots, drones and missiles, anti-drone and anti-missile systems — you name it. It’s not hard to imagine armies, navies and air forces with good AI getting beaten by those with better AI.

AI data centers require phenomenal amounts of energy. The electricity must flow “even when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow,” as Mr. Burgum observed during a public event, “Powering U.S. Energy Dominance,” at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on Friday.

To provide that electricity, Americans must get back into the nuclear power business. Small modular nuclear reactors use little land and emit no greenhouse gases, so those who oppose them are not environmentalists.

Also essential for energy dominance are the critical minerals used in military and commercial applications, from fighter jets to cellphones.

China’s rulers now control about 70% of the mining of rare earths — much of it in poor countries whose people they exploit and whose environments they degrade — as well as up to 90% of the processing.

On Oct. 9, Beijing imposed export restrictions on products that contain even small amounts of rare earths processed in China.

The lesson to learn is that “Drill, baby, drill!” is not enough. As Mr. Burgum says, we also need to “Mine, baby, mine!” and I’ll add “Process, baby, process!”

America is in an energy arms race. The mission of the National Energy Dominance Council is to win it, to not come in second to a nation ruled by the strongest communist party in history.

“Energy dominance is about prosperity at home and peace abroad,” Mr. Burgum said, giving this harsh reality a brighter spin.

Previous administrations chose not to develop these essential instruments of American national power. That mistake is being corrected, at least for the next three years.

• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.