During the Cold War, American defense planners did not assume that the future threat environment would resemble the present. The adversary was known but its capabilities were not, and the technological dynamism of the nuclear age meant that the balance of power could shift faster than procurement cycles could respond. Even those within the defense establishment who argued for restraint were arguing about how much excess was prudent, not whether excess itself was necessary. The result was a defense posture that built capacity in excess of immediate need, maintained redundancy across systems, and treated uncertainty as a reason to expand capabilities rather than constrain them.
Our present moment shares many parallels with the Cold War era. Of course, today’s technological race has less to do with nuclear arms and more with AI, reindustrialization, and supply chain competition. And if there is one key input that success in these sectors calls for, it is a more dynamic and responsive American energy system. Indeed, the United States faces a generational surge in electricity demand that will require the rapid deployment of every class of energy infrastructure: generation, pipelines, transmission, storage, and the downstream assets they enable.
In a healthy system, such demand would be viewed as a sign of a growing economy. Yet our political and administrative reality is not up to the challenge. Over decades, our policies and political debates have evolved to treat energy infrastructure as a presumptive imposition rather than as a presumptive good, something to be litigated, delayed, and conditioned on the approval of whichever coalition holds the relevant veto. If U.S. hegemony is to survive the twenty-first century, the status quo cannot stand. In its place, Americans need a new animating principle: energy addition, a governing commitment to building projects at the scale our ambitions demand, disciplined by markets and environmental substance rather than ideological veto. If we want to build anything, we must be able to build everything.
