Changing the Board, Part 3: The Pivot

There’s a way to read the Strait of Hormuz crisis as a disaster, a superpower caught flat-footed by the consequences of its own military action, scrambling to reopen a waterway it didn’t realize it still needed. That’s the default interpretation and it’s not unreasonable.

But there’s another way to read it: as the controlled demolition of a system the United States no longer wants to maintain, executed simultaneous with the construction of its replacement.

The evidence for the second reading is a series of policy actions, many of them predating the war, that together form the outline of a Western Hemisphere energy order.

California

Start with the most counterintuitive data point.

On January 1, 2026, California Senate Bill 237 took effect. The law exempts Kern County oil drilling from the California Environmental Quality Act and authorizes up to two thousand new wells per year for the next decade.¹

California. The state that has spent a generation building the most restrictive environmental regulatory framework in the country. The state whose governor made climate policy a centerpiece of his national profile. That California just opened the floodgates on domestic oil production.

The numbers tell the story. In all of 2025, California issued seventeen drilling permits total. In the first two months of 2026, under the new law, it issued 128. That’s more permits in eight weeks than in the previous three years combined.²

SB 237 was passed and signed before the war started, before Operation Epic Fury, before Hormuz closed. It was in place before the crisis existed.

You can explain this as coincidence. California needed revenue. Kern County needed jobs. The politics aligned. Maybe. But a state that spent decades making oil drilling harder doesn’t reverse course at this scale and this speed without someone understanding what’s coming.

Venezuela

On January 3, 2026, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured. The circumstances of his removal remain contested, but the outcome is not: the United States moved immediately to secure access to Venezuelan oil.³

Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Three hundred billion barrels - more than Saudi Arabia, more than Iran, more than anyone. Under Maduro, that oil was locked up by sanctions, mismanagement, and political isolation. The country’s production had collapsed from over three million barrels a day in the 1990s to under 800,000.⁴

Trump announced the handover of thirty to fifty million barrels. The first sale, worth $500 million, closed on January 14. By the State of the Union address, Trump claimed the US had received “more than eighty million barrels.” The State Department issued multiple general licenses authorizing US firms to operate in Venezuela.⁵

In March 2026, Energy Secretary Chris Burgum traveled to Caracas and brokered additional deals, including gold extraction agreements.⁶

The scale of what’s being unlocked here is staggering. Venezuela’s reserves dwarf the entire Hormuz throughput. If Venezuelan production can be rebuilt to even half its historical peak, that’s 1.5 million barrels a day from a country that’s a short tanker run from the US Gulf Coast, through waters controlled entirely by the US Navy, with no chokepoint vulnerable to a hostile power.

The timing is what matters. Maduro was removed on January 3. The first oil sale closed January 14. Operation Epic Fury launched February 28. The US secured an alternative oil supply in its own hemisphere seven weeks before it attacked the country that controls the world’s most important oil chokepoint.

Cuba

Cuba’s energy crisis preceded the war but the war made it existential. Cuba had been receiving roughly thirty thousand barrels a day from Venezuela, about forty percent of its total energy needs. That supply was already disrupted by Venezuela’s political upheaval. Then the US imposed an effective fuel blockade in late January 2026. By March, Cuba had gone more than three months without fuel shipments.⁷

On March 13, Cuban President Díaz-Canel confirmed talks with the United States. Trump called it a “friendly takeover,” noting that Cuba has “no money, no oil, no food.” Secretary of State Rubio is leading the negotiations.⁸

The leverage is total. Cuba cannot function without energy imports. The country that has resisted American influence for sixty-seven years is negotiating because the alternative is societal collapse.

There’s an additional dimension worth noting briefly. Starlink satellite internet terminals are already operating inside Cuba through informal channels, sold on the black market for $1,300 to $1,800 and activated from third countries. Elon Musk confirmed today, March 17, that Starlink “works in Cuba, just can’t be sold there.” The Cuban government declared unauthorized Starlink use illegal, but the equipment is already on the island.⁹ If US-Cuba normalization advances, Starlink availability would bypass the state telecommunications monopoly entirely. The information infrastructure is shifting alongside the energy infrastructure.

Greenland

In December 2025, the Trump administration began publicly pressuring Denmark over Greenland. The framing was about critical minerals, and the framing was accurate.

Greenland contains an estimated 36 to 42 million metric tons of rare earth oxides, potentially the second largest deposit on earth after China. Twenty-five of the thirty-four minerals the European Union classifies as critical are present on the island. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz stated explicitly that the push was “about critical minerals.”¹⁰

The US Export-Import Bank issued a $120 million loan letter of interest for the Tanbreez mine, one of Greenland’s most significant rare earth projects.¹¹

Denmark subsidizes Greenland approximately $600 million per year. Trump noted this cost at Davos, framing it as a burden Denmark might prefer to shed.¹²

Rare earths are not about energy in the traditional sense. They’re about the energy transition, about manufacturing, about the industrial inputs that determine which countries can build the technologies of the next fifty years. China currently dominates rare earth processing. Greenland’s deposits, brought under American control or influence, would break that monopoly.

The Greenland push began before the war, same as everything else. A parallel track, not a response to Hormuz.

The Pattern

Lay these events on a timeline and a picture emerges.

Pre-war (2025-early 2026):

• SB 237 passed, opening California drilling before the first bomb fell
• Greenland mineral push begins
• Venezuela regime change and immediate oil deals
• Cuba energy blockade established

During the war (late February-March 2026):

• Hormuz closes, devastating Asian and European energy supply
• US gas prices rise seventy cents while competitors face existential shortages
• Cuba negotiations begin from a position of total US leverage
• Burgum travels to Caracas for additional extraction deals
• Greenland mine financing moves forward

Every one of these actions moves energy supply, mineral supply, or political leverage into the Western Hemisphere and under American control. Every one of them reduces dependence on the Middle Eastern energy system that the United States just disrupted.

The question from Part 1 was: is this coincidence or strategy? The question refines itself here. If it’s coincidence, it’s the most fortuitous sequence of coincidences in the history of American foreign policy. If it’s strategy, it’s the most ambitious geopolitical realignment since the Marshall Plan, executed in reverse, not building up the global order but deliberately restructuring it around American hemispheric dominance.

The Reshoring Math

There’s a cold economic logic underneath all of this that’s worth making explicit.

For forty years, American manufacturing has been offshored to countries where labor was cheaper. But labor is only one input. Energy is another. And the cost of energy in the countries that absorbed American manufacturing, primarily in Asia, was kept artificially low by the American security guarantee in the Persian Gulf.

If the security guarantee is withdrawn, if Hormuz remains unreliable or closed, and if Gulf energy is permanently repriced for the countries that depend on it, then the total cost of manufacturing in Asia goes up, not as a temporary disruption but as a structural shift.

At the same time, the United States has cheap domestic energy, 13.6 million barrels a day of production with a 2.8-million-barrel surplus. It is adding Venezuelan supply, opening domestic drilling, securing mineral inputs from Greenland, and building the cost structure for domestic manufacturing to become competitive again.

The fundamental input cost that made offshoring profitable was cheap energy guaranteed by American military power. Remove the guarantee, and you remove the economic foundation of the system that deindustrialized the United States.

Call it reshoring by other means - achieved through the deliberate restructuring of global energy flows to make the Western Hemisphere the lowest-cost production zone on earth, rather than through tariffs or subsidies alone (though those are happening too).

What’s Being Built

If this is a strategy - and I am increasingly persuaded that it is - then what we’re watching is the end of American global charity, not the end of American global power. The US is repositioning, not retreating. The new architecture looks like this:

Domestic energy production provides the foundation. Venezuelan oil provides surge capacity and strategic depth. Cuban normalization extends American economic influence to the last holdout in the Caribbean. Greenland minerals secure the industrial inputs for advanced manufacturing. California drilling, which predated the war, suggests this plan was in motion before the public justification existed.

The old system ran through Hormuz, depended on Gulf monarchies, required a permanent military presence in the Middle East, and benefited every major economy on earth at American expense. The new system runs through the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Arctic, depends on hemispheric partners under American influence, and benefits the United States first.

The rest of the world is welcome to secure its own energy supply.

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Next: Part 4: The Influence Machine asks why the old system persisted for so long despite its obvious cost to the United States. The answer involves foreign intelligence operations, financial leverage, and the mechanisms that ensured bipartisan consensus on policies that served foreign interests.

Footnotes

1. Center for Biological Diversity, reporting on SB 237 implementation and Kern County CEQA exemption. ↩

2. Center for Biological Diversity: 128 permits in first two months of 2026 vs. 121 total in 2023-2025 combined; 17 permits in all of 2025. ↩

3. Wikipedia, Maduro capture January 3, 2026. ↩

4. Venezuela holds 300B barrels of proven reserves per EIA and multiple sources. Historical production decline widely documented. ↩

5. Al Jazeera, CNBC (30-50M barrel handover announcement); TIME ($500M first sale, January 14); Wikipedia (State of the Union “more than 80 million barrels”); State.gov (general licenses). ↩

6. Axios, reporting on Burgum’s March 2026 Caracas trip and gold deals. ↩

7. Wikipedia and CNN on Cuba’s Venezuelan supply loss (~30K bbl/day, 40% of energy needs) and US fuel blockade; CNN reporting on 3+ months without shipments. ↩

8. CNBC and CNN (Díaz-Canel confirms talks, March 13); Al Jazeera (Trump “friendly takeover” quote, Cuba “no money, no oil, no food”). ↩

9. CiberCuba and CubaHeadlines, March 17, 2026, reporting Musk’s X statement; El Toque investigation on informal Starlink market in Cuba. ↩

10. CNN and Fortune (36-42M metric tons rare earth oxides); Euronews (25 of 34 EU-critical minerals); CNN (Mike Waltz “about critical minerals” quote). ↩

11. CSIS, reporting on US Ex-Im Bank $120M loan letter of interest for Tanbreez mine. ↩

12. Fortune and CNN (Denmark’s ~$600M annual Greenland subsidy); CNN (Trump Davos remarks). ↩