⚡ Electric America, Electric West

After Hormuz, energy strategy must become grand strategy for liberal democracies everywhere

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world:

May you live in interesting times. The Strait of Hormuz theater in the expanding Iran War has contributed greatly to the predictable (well, predictable to most policymakers) crisis—spiking energy prices,¹ along with raising the risk of higher food costs and industrial bottlenecks. (The second-order potential impact on AI infrastructure funding from the Gulf states wasn’t, admittedly, a thing that popped into my head.)

Also predictable: commentary about how to manage the crisis. Secure the shipping lanes or end the war, basically. To govern is to choose, especially when the clock is ticking. As Bloomberg explains, “Each successive day of the Iran conflict now generates months of impact on the global economy.”

Now, I have my suspicions about which strategic choice will be made by the Trump administration. But I’m something like 100 percent sure about the most important lesson to be learned from this ongoing conflict—one perhaps previously implicit but now clearly explicit: A single chokepoint can badly shake the entire global economy in a matter of days.

But events have also clarified something else. The disruptive power of such a chokepoint depends on how much the world still relies on it—and that reliance can, over time, be reduced

Bring on Electric America and the Electric West!