I don’t understand what the current crop of political leaders thinks is going to happen in a world where China dominates proven clean energy technology, nobody besides the U.S. is engaging in a trade war with China, and a once-in-several-generations infrastructure buildout is in progress everywhere else that the U.S. is actively trying to shut down at home.

By the time the U.S. figures this out, there will be whole regions of the world currently without a power grid where people will be driving Chinese electric cars powered by Chinese solar and batteries. Those countries will have no incentive to participate in the U.S. financial system, since they won’t need U.S. dollars to purchase oil, and they will be entirely out of the reach of the mechanisms the U.S. uses to police other countries.

The scale of the extremely predictable disruption to the global political order will be huge. I work in the energy industry and I am, let’s say, an 80th percentile SME on this subject, but this is so obvious that I know other people must see this. I don’t understand what the plan is here.