Welcome to the Dollhouse

We don’t get to act surprised that a chokepoint choked.

New York was boiling. I was dripping with sweat when I arrived at a certain Flatiron establishment with a whiskey library more than a few bookcases deep. I had just left a role I cared about deeply and was questioning whether I’d have the opportunity to do impact-driven work again. So when Ed Wise approached me about joining his scrappy young renewables project, I knew before dessert that I was in.

Two weeks after that initial meeting I became employee number four.

Ed is a visionary business leader who had earned the respect of his peers, the admiration of his mentees, and was gritty enough to ensure that whatever predictable or otherwise adversarial situations we found ourselves in, he was going to fight his way through to the other side. For me it was as much about the founder as it was the project itself. So I dove in, carrying a burnout I’d convinced myself was behind me. It wasn’t behind me. It was just quiet enough to ignore, the way a fractured instep feels fine until you take your first step.

I joined PositivEnergy as Vice President of Communications & Public Policy because I’d spent enough time following geopolitics to know that the calm in the Middle East was on borrowed time. Regardless of government incentives, renewable technology was going to provide resilience that fossil fuel dependency never could. That conviction wasn’t popular. Most of us were still riding the wave of the Green Revolution. That is to say, we were approaching renewable technology through the lens of environmental altruism instead of the lens of national security. Capital was reluctant. The urgency wasn’t felt.

Borrowed time has a way of coming due all at once.

For most of my adult life, America operated under a kind of ambient invincibility. Oil shocks were something that happened in our parents’ generation. Amazon and UPS had made just-in-time delivery table stakes. Supply chain was a term for logistics people, not a household anxiety. We had built an economy so dominant, so insulated by military reach and reserve currency status and sheer geographic luck, that we confused resilience with imperviousness.

We were not impervious. We were dependent. We just couldn’t see the dependency because no one had tested it in a generation.

The Middle East had been, by its own standards, remarkably stable in the last decade. The Abraham Accords. The Saudi modernization push. Iran contained, if not quiet. And in that calm, a consensus formed: this is the new normal. We stopped war-gaming disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz the way previous generations had. We stopped treating energy independence as a security imperative and started treating it as a culture war talking point.

Trump articulated something some more mainstream characters probably agree with: that nations need to be self-reliant. America’s dependence on global supply chains, on foreign energy, on the assumption that trade routes would remain open forever, is a genuine strategic weakness. He gave language to an anxiety that millions of people already felt in their bones.

He’s just so catastrophically wrong about how to get there, and that has clouded the entire conversation around solving the problem. Tariffs don’t build energy independence. Pulling out of climate agreements doesn’t reduce our exposure to a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf. Gutting the agencies that fund storage and grid modernization doesn’t make us more resilient. It makes us more fragile.

And the Democrats have spent so long running against Trump that they’ve forgotten how to run toward solutions. The opposition became the identity. The result is that one of the most important strategic questions facing this country, how do we build genuine energy sovereignty, has been reduced to a proxy war between two parties more interested in defeating each other than solving the problem.

Meanwhile, the problem solved itself. In the worst possible way.

The Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed. And we should be prepared for it to stay that way.

A single drone can spook an insurance underwriter in London into pulling war-risk coverage for every tanker in the Gulf. That’s all it takes. One drone. One underwriter. And suddenly the economics of transit collapse, regardless of whether the waterway is physically blocked. Reopening the strait would require the most powerful military on earth to guarantee safe passage for every vessel, every mile, every day, indefinitely. And the drones that can shut a waterway down are now off-the-shelf technology, cheaper than the fuel in the tankers they’re threatening.

One side needs a speedboat, or a drone. The other side needs omnipresence.

That’s asymmetry. It’s how wars are won and lost. And it’s why this isn’t a disruption. It’s a new reality.

Twenty percent of the world’s oil moves through that strait. A fifth of its liquefied natural gas. Right now, tankers are stranded. Refineries are shuttered. Brent crude has blown past $100. Analysts are calling it the largest disruption to global energy supply since the 1973 oil embargo. Nations across South Asia are staring down power-sector collapse because they built their entire energy architecture around a 21-mile-wide chokepoint between Iran and Oman. Europe’s natural gas prices doubled in a week. Fertilizer costs are spiking during planting season in the American Midwest. The cascading effects will take months, possibly years, to unwind.

And that’s if this war ends now.

It won’t.

While energy resilience was being ignored, here’s where the money was going. The US government deprioritized renewables. Venture capital flowed toward ChatGPT wrappers as fast as founders could get their slides on Product Hunt. Crypto speculation (gambling). Actual gambling. AI infrastructure. Protein bars.

Battery storage and grid resilience sat in the waiting room while Silicon Valley funded the future of content generation. The companies building the actual physical infrastructure of energy independence couldn’t get a meeting.

The thesis was patient. The world was not.

This catastrophe was never an “if.” It was a “when.” And “when” is now.

I left PositivEnergy's day-to-day operations a while back. The burnout I carried in the door eventually did what burnout does. But I never left the conviction that pulled me in. What Ed and that team continue to build is the infrastructure of self-reliance. Battery storage. Microgrids. EV charging systems. The unsexy, essential plumbing of a country that can power itself without asking permission from a strait, a regime, or a market it doesn’t control.

The policy prescription is straightforward: stop treating energy storage and distributed power as an alternative and start treating them as critical infrastructure. The same way we treat roads. Bridges. Water. This isn’t a left idea or a right idea. It’s an American idea. And it’s the only version of self-reliance that actually works.

We don’t get to act surprised that a chokepoint choked. We had the tools to build redundancy. We chose not to prioritize them because the need didn’t feel urgent.

Does it feel urgent now?