The Bill Comes Due

Oil hit $94 a barrel the morning after the first confirmed strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure. By noon, it was $97. Natural gas futures spiked 12% in European markets. Qatar, which supplies roughly 20% of global LNG, issued a statement so cautious it practically trembled.

I spent twelve years in the Army. I've been in or near every major conflict zone the United States has touched since 2003. And I'll tell you something flat: this is what strategic vulnerability looks like when it finally comes due. You don't see it coming until you can't avoid it. Then it's everywhere at once.

What's happening in the Strait of Hormuz right now is not a surprise to anyone who was paying attention. It was scheduled. The only question was when.

How We Got Here: A Short History of Energy Surrender

In January 2021, the United States was producing 13.1 million barrels of oil per day — more than any nation in human history. We were a net energy exporter. We had leverage. The Permian Basin was humming. The LNG terminals on the Gulf Coast were running full capacity.

Then came the executive orders. Keystone XL canceled on day one. Federal leasing paused. The regulatory apparatus turned hostile to extraction at every level. By 2023, the United States was begging Saudi Arabia to increase production — hat in hand, whispering about human rights while asking for a favor from the same government we'd just condemned for Khashoggi.

That's not a foreign policy. That's a humiliation dressed up as one.

The war between Israel and Iran didn't create this energy vulnerability. American policy did. The war just revealed it to anyone who wasn't already looking.

What This Means for the Guy Filling His Tank

Let's not dress this up. The conflict near the Strait of Hormuz — through which approximately 21 million barrels of oil pass every single day — is going to cost American families real money. Analysts at Goldman were projecting $4.50 national average gas prices before the latest escalation. Those projections are already obsolete.

A trucker friend of mine out of Laredo runs a two-truck operation hauling auto parts between Texas and Illinois. He told me last week that his fuel costs had already eaten his Q1 margin. If gas hits $5, he's done. Not struggling — done. Closed. Finished. Two trucks, a lifetime of work, and a family depending on it.

He's not an abstraction. He's a real person being squeezed by a policy architecture that was designed in faculty lounges and implemented by people who've never driven anything bigger than a Subaru.

The energy establishment — and I mean the green-energy-transition crowd specifically — will tell you this crisis proves we need to accelerate away from fossil fuels. What they won't tell you is that their preferred alternative, European-style energy dependence on intermittent renewables, is precisely how Germany ended up rationing heat in 2022 while Vladimir Putin smiled.

The Hard Truth Nobody in Washington Will Say

American energy dominance was a strategic asset. We gave it away. Not because we had to. Because a certain class of people decided that the symbolic politics of climate leadership was worth more than the material security of working Americans.

That's an opinion. But the $97 oil price is a fact. The LNG disruption is a fact. The spiking heating bills headed toward American households this spring are going to be facts. And the families paying those bills didn't vote for any of this.

The Iran strikes are going to end one way or another. Wars usually do. But the energy vulnerability they've exposed isn't going anywhere until someone in Washington decides that American production, on American soil, for American security, matters more than the applause of people who'll never pump their own gas.

The Strait of Hormuz is chokepoint. We had the power to matter less to it. We chose not to.