DONNIE’S BEEN WATCHING NETFLIX AGAIN

Here’s how we ended up in the Iran War, I betcha…

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I came across a clip from W.—Oliver Stone’s dramatization of the Bush administration.

There’s a scene often called “Why Iraq,” where the president’s cabinet sits around the table and talks through the logic of taking Iraq—and by extension, Iran—not in the language of defense, but in the language of positioning, dominance, and control.

It’s a film. I don’t know how much of it reflects what was actually said behind closed doors, but I recognized the thinking. It sounded like doctrine.

It sounded like the version of strategy I was taught while I was in uniform, the abstraction of territory into assets, the reduction of entire nations into points on a board, and the quiet absence of the people who would be sent to take that ground, hold it, and die in the process while others grew fabulously wealthy by their sacrifice.

Not because those lives didn’t matter, but because in that room, they weren’t the point. The strange part is what happened when I watched it again. I couldn’t keep it in the past, because now, when I hear Donald Trump speak, when he drifts into language about power, dominance, and positioning himself as something approaching a “Supreme Leader” in relation to Iran, I hear echoes of that same logic. Not identical. Not scripted. But familiar. A chill ran up my spine when the scene really hits its stride.

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EMPIRE

There’s a line in that scene that stuck with me. It’s delivered by Dick Cheney, played with unsettling calm by Richard Dreyfuss, who was clearly enjoying himself in the role: “Control Iran, control Eurasia, control the world. Empire. Real empire. Nobody would fuck with us again.”

Right there, Iran is in the center of the screen. The Strait of Hormuz sits dead center in the presentation. That’s when it clicked, not because it’s shocking, but because it’s coherent. It is a complete strategic worldview in a single paragraph, one that has been shaping decisions for decades. One that is challenged in the scene by Colin Powell, brought to life by Jeffrey Wright with a force that makes you wish the real Powell had been allowed the same latitude. I always had the sense Powell was not a man you wanted to find yourself opposing lightly.

The longer I listened, the more I realized I don’t hate this idea because it’s aggressive. I hate it because it’s obsolete. Because while we were thinking like that, while we were preparing to spend blood and treasure securing oil fields and supply lines, we were also standing at the edge of a different future.

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WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?

We had electric vehicles in the 1970s. The documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? is well worth your time. We had the beginnings of alternative energy research. We had, during the oil crisis, a clear warning about what dependence would cost us. We also had scientists who would have been more than willing to push the boundaries of solar and wind technologies if they had been subsidized the way Big Oil was.

Instead, we did nothing. Not nothing in the literal sense; we studied, we experimented, we talked, but we did not commit, even when the math on pollution was available. Big Oil understood the environmental risk as early as the 1970s, and that is also when the misinformation campaigns began. They benefited from the subsidies and saw no reason to change.

So we didn’t build a new system. We doubled down on the old one, power facilities running on some version of dead dinosaur juice, and we never made the decision that mattered most: that the answer to resource vulnerability is not to fight over the resource, but to eliminate the dependency.

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REINVESTING IN AMERICA

The idea that power comes from proximity to scarce resources, especially oil, has defined American foreign policy for decades. It has shaped alliances, justified interventions, and sustained a permanent state of readiness that quietly assumes conflict is not an aberration but a requirement.

That logic made sense in a world where energy scarcity was real, alternatives were immature, and industrial economies ran on a single dominant fuel. It makes far less sense now.

Oil is no longer the irreplaceable foundation of modern power. It is a legacy resource — still useful, still embedded in global systems, but no longer singular. The mistake is not that policymakers recognize its importance. The mistake is that they continue to treat it as destiny.

The reflex to “go where the resource is” assumes that control over supply defines strategic advantage. But in a world where energy generation can be distributed, diversified, and increasingly localized, the more durable advantage comes from reducing dependence altogether. You do not secure your future by competing over a diminishing asset. You secure it by rendering that competition unnecessary.

This is where the conversation should shift from geopolitics to infrastructure.

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EVOLUTION

A modern energy strategy for the United States would not begin with military positioning or resource acquisition. It would begin with the grid.

Not the grid as it exists, a patchwork of aging systems designed for a different century, but a rebuilt, intelligently managed, resilient network capable of integrating multiple energy sources at scale.

Nuclear power would serve as the backbone. Not as a controversial afterthought, but as a stable, high-output baseline that provides continuity regardless of weather or time of day. A small number of strategically placed reactors, six as an initial framework, not a final limit, could anchor regional stability and reduce the volatility that comes with intermittent sources.

Layered onto that foundation would be a distributed renewable network. Solar generation in regions where it is most efficient. Wind in corridors where it is naturally sustained. Aquatic energy along both coasts, capturing the constant motion of tidal systems. These are not speculative technologies. They are operational, scalable, and increasingly cost-competitive. We could blanket this nation in renewable energy and no one would be excluded nor left in the dark when their resource of choice was not necessarily available.

The missing piece is coordination. Energy storage systems would absorb surplus generation and release it during periods of peak demand.

Advanced grid management, augmented by machine learning systems, a job they would be perfect for, designed for optimization, would route energy dynamically, reducing waste and increasing efficiency. The result is not just cleaner power, but a system that is more stable, more responsive, and less vulnerable to disruption.

We would have to rebuild it from scratch but our knowledge base and construction technology are more than adequate to building a scalable energy grid which could be adapted as needed.

If built correctly, such a system alters the strategic landscape in ways that no military intervention can.

Supply lines lose their centrality when supply is local. Chokepoints lose their leverage when dependency is reduced. Regions defined by resource extraction lose their gravitational pull over policy decisions.

This is not isolationism. It is strategic independence.

The frustration, and it is a justified one, comes from how rarely this perspective is treated as serious policy. American politics has long been willing to invest extraordinary resources into weapons systems, force projection, and short-term geopolitical maneuvering, while treating large-scale scientific and infrastructural advancement as optional, secondary, or politically inconvenient.

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CHOICE

Yet it is precisely this kind of advancement that defines long-term power.

The US had a clear inflection point during the oil crises of the 1970s. That moment exposed the fragility of dependence and offered an opportunity to pivot toward diversification and resilience. Instead, the response was partial, inconsistent, and ultimately subordinated to the return of cheaper oil and the inertia of existing systems.

Fifty years later, the cost of that decision is visible. Not just visible but palpable. With the Strait of Hormuz cut off, the entire world is shuddering as to what might be the future of their nation’s energy supply if it does not reopen.

Already we see coal powerplants coming back online in China and India, both affected by the Strait’s blockade. This means any gains we may have made against climate change will be vanishing if the chokepoint stays closed for a prolonged period.

We remain entangled in regions where our primary interest is stability for the sake of energy markets. We continue to expend lives, capital, and political will maintaining a system that could have been redesigned. And we frame these choices as necessities rather than consequences.

The alternative is not utopian. It does not eliminate conflict or erase complexity. What it does is remove one of the most persistent drivers of both.

An energy-independent, or at least energy-resilient, United States would approach the world differently. It would have greater flexibility in its alliances, less incentive to intervene in resource-driven conflicts, and a stronger domestic foundation capable of absorbing shocks rather than amplifying them.

Oil would not disappear. It would be repositioned. Reserved for industrial uses where its chemical properties remain valuable, rather than burned as the default fuel for transportation and power generation. Emissions would decline not through restriction alone, but through obsolescence of the underlying dependence.

And most importantly, the national conversation would shift.

From acquisition to innovation. From control to design. From reaction to intention.

What we are doing now is repeating the same strategic patterns in a changing world. That’s not strength. It is habit. Breaking that habit requires a different kind of ambition.