The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

by Daniel Yergin

For four decades, U.S. energy policy was dominated—and its foreign policy hobbled—by the specter of shortage and vulnerability, going back to the 1973 oil embargoes and then the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which toppled the shah and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power. But no longer. The shale revolution “affords Washington,” observed Thomas Donilon, national security advisor to President Obama, “a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing its international security goals.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would subsequently put it differently—that the shale revolution has provided the United States with a flexibility in international affairs that it had not had for decades.