The way to solve the Middle East problem is to leave the Middle East problem. From the madness, a pattern is emerging: barrels are being rounded up in the Americas and the United States is quietly assembling the pieces of a new energy isolationism.
It started with “Drill, Baby, Drill,” the long-in-the-tooth bit of campaign rhetoric. Then came the January 2025 National Energy Emergency proclamation. Then the Big Beautiful Bill and rolled-back regs for oil and gas producers and consumers. Then Venezuela and its enormous reserves. And now the lessons of playing with fire in the Strait of Hormuz. The collective result is a reshuffling of U.S. energy access.
“Let them all do it. What the hell are we doing it for?” President Donald Trump recently declared, suggesting Europe, China, Korea and Japan should be the ones to open and police the Strait of Hormuz. “We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil they so desperately depend on.” Whatever one’s regard for Trump, the argument that the U.S. goes it alone might just be a reasonable one.
Oil markets are a confusing network of alliances, logistics, seaborne routes, pipelines and refining needs. But in the simplest terms: the U.S. consumes 20 million barrels of crude per day and produces 13.6 million. Analysts will say we’re energy independent, but that’s a BTU calculation, not actual barrels. We need more physical barrels to make up the difference, and we’re almost there.
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Canada exports 4.0 million barrels per day to the U.S., Mexico adds 0.3 million, and Venezuela adds 0.44 million. Combined, that’s 18 million barrels a day. As Venezuelan exports rise with the work Energy Secretary Chris Wright is doing there, and Mexican exports return to historic norms, with newly favorable federal leasing in Alaska, the Lower 48, and the offshore Gulf, we’re knocking on the door of actual rather than rhetorical energy independence. Tier One shale acreage may be disappearing, but drilling efficiencies continue to improve, and there’s no shortage of BTU-rich natural gas liquids coming out of the major basins.
There are two wild cards: California and New York. Both are oil- and gas-rich, yet, both irrationally flawed in their use-it-but-don’t-produce-it mantra. Stuck in their cognitive dissonance, where they trade policy for poverty, maybe the day will come when ideology finally gets traded in for pragmatism.
Rub #1: The floor on oil price profitability isn’t the $50s or $60s per barrel, as pushed by the Trump administration. It’s in the middle to upper $70s. No amount of regulation-off or cutting unnecessary regulations can fix that.
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Rub #2: Trump and Chris Wright term out in January 2029. Should another pairing like former President Joe Biden and former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm take place, the gains made will likely be repealed, canceled, or litigated, as happened with Biden’s illegal suspension of federal lease sales on Day One of his administration. That was Day One of the war on fossil fuels. Don’t think it’s not coming again.
Given that much of the production in Western states is on federal acreage, a hard left turn in policy will tank the energy independence we’re building toward. A second push into renewables won’t add the energy we need, surely not with the coming strain of data center demands.
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The left doesn’t see energy as an all-of-the-above choice, as it needs to be. It agitates against fossil fuels, which, aside from nuclear, are the only means of universal efficiency. Should another Biden take charge, the renewal of state-sponsored climate activism will return us to the same Middle East mayhem we now have a chance to leave behind.
Trump and his secretaries are running out of time. Accomplishing true U.S. energy independence has to be done now — meaning more leasing on federal lands and water, a higher rig count, and completing proposed pipelines and refinery expansions. Politicizing low oil prices, as Trump is prone to do, won’t get us there.
Reasonable oil prices are neither inflationary nor recessionary. The damage comes when prices go too low, as they were earlier this year, or too high, as they are now. As both the owner of a fracking company and an oil and gas production company, I’ll take the middle every time. Reg-off is good, but it’s negligible compared to necessary prices.
The window is open. It won’t stay that way.