U.S. Energy Strategy: Prioritizing Peace Through Strength
Energy policy is national security—America must act accordingly.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It’s an oft-referenced quote, particularly when issues become sufficiently complex and entangled, and direct, simple solutions are out of reach and inappropriate. But it speaks of a highly-valued, if not requisite, cognitive capacity for someone engaged in geopolitics, diplomacy, and statecraft—particularly when it impacts a country’s energy security.
Post-WWII U.S. strategists exhibited this unique cognitive capacity. While the world’s other major powers had been decimated in economic and military power, America occupied a commanding position economically, militarily, and industrially. Rather than retreat to isolationism, the United States made the strategic decision to project its national power globally and promote democratic values, human rights, individual liberty, and free market trade. A strategic objective was to contain the spread of communism by maintaining U.S. competitive advantage as a deterrent to illiberal designs the USSR might have for the world.
It was a strategy of peace through strength.
America’s great power competition with the USSR has given way to a twenty-first-century competition with China—a strategic competition with different challenges and broader international entanglements than its twentieth-century predecessor. It’s only speculation as to what counsel those post-WWII U.S. strategists would offer today’s policymakers. However, given the fundamental differences in national power between twentieth-century USSR and twenty-first-century China, it’s hard to imagine their response being: “Re-cast global climate change as a climate crisis, elevate it as the greatest existential threat to humanity and re-center U.S. foreign policy and national security around it. Then pursue an industrial strategy to transition the U.S. industrial base away from the fossil fuels on which it was built, and currently stands, to a greater dependency on renewable energy.”
Yet, that has been the proposed U.S. policy and so-named industrial strategy for the past four years. A climate-centric framing that either dismisses the implications of such an approach on the U.S. industrial base or doesn’t comprehend those implications with respect to U.S. national security.
Natural resources, geography, infrastructure, and a nation’s industrial base are foundational elements of its capacity to project national power and ensure national security through strategic action. Central to this capacity are energy resources, which fuel a country’s industrial capacity. Given the current state of science and engineering for energy resources and energy technologies, America cannot extract from renewable resources an equivalent quantity or quality of industrial might as it can, and as it has for decades, from fossil fuels and nuclear power. To pretend otherwise is conjecture that, if acted upon, will put the United States at a competitive disadvantage relative to its pacing threat, China. Moreover, given the continued upward trajectory of global carbon emissions from the developing world, a zero-carbon U.S. economy, even if technologically and economically possible, will not translate to U.S. climate security, as climate change is a global phenomenon that won’t stop at U.S. borders simply because the United States has met self-imposed political targets for CO2 reduction.
The argument for the proposed climate-centric U.S. energy transition has been that the global climate crisis is the single greatest existential threat to humanity—greater even than the threat of nuclear war. This has been accompanied by warnings that we must listen to the scientists and follow what the science is telling us. However, the science of climate change doesn’t speak the language of geopolitical realities and pacing threats to U.S. national security. Scientists have identified a global issue—climate change—the implications of which shouldn’t be dismissed. However, climate scientists aren’t inherently experts on the integral role of reliable energy resources for industrialization and global economic development. And they aren’t strategists on the national security implications of energy resources and technologies within the arena of the twenty-first-century great power competition. Identifying a problem, regardless of its threat level, does not endow the identifier of the problem with the priority to dictate the response. It also doesn’t endow them with the first-rate intelligence to offer solutions to an issue embedded in a complex solution space entangled in geopolitics, statecraft, and, perhaps above all else, the human spirit. Issues of this magnitude and global complexity aren’t new to the United States. Scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project had a clear understanding of the humanitarian impact of the atomic bomb. Some even petitioned President Harry Truman as to how he should use it. Nonetheless, the decision to deploy it remained at the state level as a strategic action in the interest of national security. As the United States debated how to control the international use of atomic energy following WWII, policymakers remained clear-eyed and geopolitically realistic as to what was at stake. They understood they were “not dealing simply with a military or scientific problem but with a problem in statecraft and the ways of the human spirit.” Science is critical, and what scientists think is certainly relevant. But scientists should acknowledge and remain within their limits of expertise. And proposing to transition the world’s most strategically important superpower and steward of international security away from the energy resources on which its industrial base was built and currently stands under the hypothesis that America can retain its posture as a global superpower is hubris.
While a second Trump administration will reorient the U.S. energy policy needle toward energy dominance, the fundamental ideology underlying a climate-centric U.S. energy transition isn’t unique to the Biden administration. It’s an ideology and, consequently, will remain in the national debate for some time. If the Trump administration represents only an election-cycle swing of the U.S. energy policy pendulum, and a subsequent administration redirects back to climate-centric policies, China will have that much more time to advance its own energy dominance strategy and pursuit of competitive advantage in four critical areas.
First, China has monopolized the global supply chain of rare earth minerals and metals, many of which are critical to national defense. And while China is a dominant player in the manufacturing and deployment of solar PV, wind turbines, EVs, and batteries, it is naïve to believe the CCP is doing this to provide leadership in the global climate fight. Yet, since the 2024 U.S. election and COP29, China has been elevated as the world’s unofficial climate leader. This is a naivete the CCP welcomes and will leverage for geopolitical advantage as they deploy the strategy of lure them onto the roof, then take away the ladder.
Second, China is shoring up access to oil and natural gas via its strategic alignment and partnership with Russia and its developing relationships with Gulf states. It’s also the global leader in existing coal plant capacity following a surge of new coal projects during 2022-2023. The bottom line is that China isn’t proposing to jeopardize its industrial capacity by transitioning away from fossil fuels. Rather, it is following “the principle of building the new before discarding the old.”
Third, the coming wave of artificial intelligence (AI) will put unprecedented upward pressure on new power generation capacity. While the impact of this technology on great power competition is unfolding, the competition for AI dominance is already underway, as both the United States and China have declared intentions to be the global leader. This will require a dominant U.S. position in primary energy production to sustain increased demand for electric power—in fossil fuels and nuclear power—which is emerging as a preferred energy source for data centers. While China faces obstacles in AI technology development, the CCP, with its all-hands-on-deck energy posture, will not allow carbon reduction or climate considerations to impede its pursuit of AI dominance. However, a climate-centric U.S. policy to transition away from fossil fuels, with a preference for renewable energy over nuclear, will create additional constraints that would hinder U.S. efforts to outcompete China in AI deployment.
Lastly, the CCP has leveraged state-owned enterprises to position China as the twenty-first-century global leader in domestic nuclear power construction starts and grid connections. Arguments have been made regarding the national security implications of the United States ceding global leadership in civilian nuclear power to China, with recommendations offered for how the United States can leverage advanced nuclear reactors in its efforts to move forward. However, China currently has the advantage as it has demonstrated to the world that it has both the technological capacity and the political will to follow words with actions and is capable of assuming global leadership in the civilian nuclear industry. Those post-WWII U.S. civilian nuclear power policymakers would have never envisioned a communist country outpacing the United States in nuclear technology.
The Trump administration has an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a national security-centric energy strategy that prioritizes U.S. competitive advantage relative to China in all energy resources and technologies—fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewables. To that end, the administration should consider conducting a net assessment of the proposed U.S. transition away from fossil fuels, led by the Department of Defense in liaison with the president’s proposed National Energy Council. The objective is to evaluate the potential competitive advantages and disadvantages of a U.S. energy transition away from fossil fuels relative to China—particularly with respect to the U.S. industrial base and the second-order impacts it would have on the defense industrial base. Billions of dollars have been expended evaluating and predicting the impacts of global climate change, with billions more spent on how to accelerate an energy transition. Yet, no comparable analysis has been conducted on the impacts of a climate-centric transition that will fundamentally restructure the U.S. economy and industrial base. While a net assessment may not eliminate future Green New Deal-like proposals, it would provide rigorous support for restraining future climate-centric proposals and redirecting them into the national security lane where energy policy belongs.
This net assessment should include an industrial base review of the U.S. civilian nuclear power sector to evaluate the U.S. capacity to spin up an industry that has been dormant for over thirty years and has struggled to deliver on the nuclear renaissance originally promoted in 2009. While nuclear power has a level of bipartisan support, that support has not been operationalized by a comprehensive strategy that can achieve a production scale that rivals China’s and demonstrate to emerging economies that the United States is prepared to re-engage in global nuclear leadership.
For the past four years, U.S. energy policy has been subjected to a narrow ideology that cannot hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time. This climate-centric ideology, which prioritizes decarbonization and renewable energy, would have the United States competing in the twenty-first-century arena of great power competition as an organic garden in a global jungle of industrial might. The election of Donald Trump won’t end attempts by some to restructure the U.S. economy around carbon reduction. Nor will it trigger an overnight reversal of China’s current energy strategy in critical areas. However, an energy dominance platform is a principled foundation on which to initiate a national security-centric energy strategy that increases domestic energy production rather than demonizes fossil fuels, positions nuclear power ahead of renewables, and prioritizes competitive advantage over China and its authoritarian acolytes as the strategic objective.
America needs a peace-through-strength energy strategy, not an energy transition, to compete and win in the arena of the twenty-first-century great power competition.
David Gattie is an Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) College of Engineering and a Senior Fellow at UGA’s Center for International Trade and Security. He has provided testimony on energy, climate, and nuclear power policy before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.
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