Versus being quite literally held hostage by a non-cooperating foreign power for political gain?

Things like energy independence sound cute and quaint until you find yourself being taken advantage of at best, or ground to a halt during armed conflict at worst.

Yeah, and then we'll enter a cycle of repatriation when it gets painful enough. Generally speaking, it's precisely the bean-counter mentality of aggressive cost reduction (with a narrow definition of "cost") that gets us into this position to begin with.

Robust systems need some overhead.