Trump, the accidental green president - Ian Bremmer - GZero Daily

Donald Trump’s war in Iran has been an unmitigated disaster. The conflict has killed thousands, disrupted the lives of millions more, imposed enormous (and rising) economic costs, and yielded no discernible strategic gains. It is, not surprisingly, deeply unpopular in the United States, in the Middle East, and around the world – by far Trump’s biggest foreign policy mistake of either term.

There is, however, one silver lining to this catastrophe, and it’s a big one. By exposing the dangers of relying on oil and gas imports, Trump’s war may be the single greatest accelerant of the global transition to post-carbon energy. This was not the intention of the most fossil-fuel-friendly president in American history, a man who declared war on the “green new scam,” pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement (twice), and went all in on “drill, baby, drill.” But that’s exactly what’s happening, and it’s worth celebrating.

For the best part of the last half-century, depending on fossil fuel imports for most of your energy needs was a rational bet. The Carter Doctrine, Washington’s 1980 commitment to defend Gulf energy flows by force, meant that whatever else was going on in the world, you could always count on the US Navy to keep the sea lanes open and the global economy running on Gulf oil and gas. When supply shocks hit, prices spiked and countries scrambled to adjust (by buying more from non-OPEC sources, improving efficiency … or else they just went into recession). But the backstop always held, prices eventually normalized, and demand for fossil fuels proved resilient. After all, there was no compelling alternative.

That backstop is gone now, for good. The Carter Doctrine was a product of a bygone era, when US hegemony was undisputed, Washington was a net energy importer, and America’s core strategic interests ran through the Gulf. Today we live in a G-Zero world, where no country is both willing and able to provide global public goods such as energy security and freedom of navigation. If the two-decade-long “war on terror” sapped American public appetite for spilling blood and treasure in the Middle East, Washington’s strategic incentive to defend Gulf supply chains has been eroding ever since the US became a net energy exporter in 2019.

Technological advances have altered the calculus. Shutting down 15-20% of the global energy supply no longer requires a naval confrontation between nation-state militaries. A small number of committed individuals armed with easy-to-make, $20,000 drones can stop tankers worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and there’s nothing that anyone – not shippers, not Lloyd’s of London, not even the mighty US Navy – can do about it.

Countries can build additional pipelines and diversify trading routes to try to bypass the vulnerability. But that doesn’t solve the chokepoint issue. The Houthis shut down the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in 2023; traffic through that waterway remains nearly two-thirds below pre-campaign averages almost three years later, even though they stopped shooting last year. Today it’s Hormuz, tomorrow it could be Malacca or Good Hope or Gibraltar. In a world of increasingly cheap precision weaponry, any of the dozen maritime chokepoints through which the global fossil-fuel system flows every day will be one asymmetric attack away from a crisis. The question every serious government is now asking is not, “how do we secure this chokepoint?” but, “how do we reduce our dependence on chokepoints altogether?”

The answer, increasingly, is by shifting from molecules to electrons. Unlike during the 1970s shocks, when the alternatives to hydrocarbons were too expensive, unreliable, or slow to deploy, today renewables are the most cost-competitive form of electricity generation in most of the world. Solar plus battery storage now costs less, in most markets, than running a gas-fired plant. Building a utility-scale solar farm takes 18 months versus five to seven years for a gas plant; rooftop solar takes only two weeks to install. Electric vehicles cost about a third as much per mile to operate as gasoline-powered cars – a gap that’s only widened since Hormuz closed.

The world was already moving in this direction before the war. As I wrote when Trump returned to office last year, technological innovation, learning curves, and falling costs have made the energy transition self-sustaining, reaching escape velocity regardless of the policy environment. Renewables accounted for 86% of new power capacity added globally last year, EVs made up a quarter of new car sales (up from 1% when Trump first took office in 2017), and last month solar overtook coal in US power generation for the first time despite the Trump administration’s efforts to slow it down.

What the Iran war has done is turn an economic argument into a strategic imperative, making fossil fuel dependency feel not just expensive but dangerous – and the alternative not just cheaper but safer. As Bill McKibben put it, sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the Earth but none of them go through the Strait of Hormuz. Once you’ve deployed the clean energy infrastructure, no erratic hegemon or rogue with a drone can cut off your power. This also means the shift is likely to be permanent: the marginal cost of electricity from an existing solar farm or wind turbine is effectively zero, so once the infrastructure is in place, no future collapse in oil prices makes reverting to fossil fuels economically rational.

Even Gulf producers are reading the writing on the wall. The UAE’s decision to leave OPEC in the middle of the war – at the precise moment it couldn’t produce or export much of anything – was a signal that Abu Dhabi knows it’s sitting on a stranded asset. A producer cartel only functions if its members believe the underlying commodity has a future worth managing collectively. The Emiratis want to get out as much oil as they can, as fast as they can, and get on with building a modern economy that doesn’t depend on it. As others follow, OPEC’s ability to manage prices will collapse – bad news for producers, good news for everyone else.

None of this means the transition away from fossil fuels will be smooth or even. Countries with existing renewable momentum will accelerate; others will move more piecemeal, constrained by fiscal space, grid infrastructure, or politics. Yet some will even double down on fossil fuels in the near term. China will maintain excess coal capacity to buffer against future import shocks, even as it accelerates electrification. India, the world’s fastest-growing consumer of imported fossil fuels, is electrifying fast but may burn more domestic coal as it’s the cheapest short-term option available. However, no major government is betting on coal as the terminal source for power generation at scale – only as a bridge to hedge their immediate import exposure. After Europe lost access to Russian gas following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many predicted the continent would reverse its decarbonization trajectory; instead, renewables grew faster.

As we said in Eurasia Group’s Top Risks this year, China is better positioned to take advantage of this shift than the United States. Not only is China by far the largest consumer of clean power, but it dominates global production of every component of the “electric stack”: solar panels, wind turbines, EVs, batteries, next-generation nuclear, grid equipment, magnets, motors, and critical minerals supply chains. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has doubled down on hydrocarbons at home and abroad, tilting the playing field against renewables domestically while pushing 20th-century energy on the world as Beijing offers 21st-century infrastructure.

China’s exports of clean energy technology had already surpassed US exports of oil and gas last year. That gap is now set to widen faster still. While the Gulf supply disruptions and related price spikes may be temporarily boosting US exports, the Iran war has turbocharged structural demand for products in which China leads. True, depending on Beijing for your solar panels and batteries carries its own risks, from supply chain concentration and cybersecurity vulnerabilities to new forms of strategic leverage (did anyone say rare earths?). But if the choice is between relying on infrastructure that gets cheaper every year, needs no daily resupply, and is yours to keep once installed … or relying on daily deliveries of volatile fuels that must transit chokepoints any adversary can close, from a government that has shown it will weaponize energy access on a whim … well, it doesn’t take Greta Thunberg to pick the former.

China will reap a commercial and geopolitical windfall in a world increasingly powered by electrons, with implications for economic growth, AI dominance, and national security. By the time Washington tries to compete seriously, they'll have those second-order consequences to account for as well.

As for our still-warming planet? In five years’ time, I believe we’ll look back and conclude that no American president did more to ramp up the energy transition than Trump. Maybe he deserves his Nobel Peace Prize after all.