Washington Drained One Stockpile and Built Another

In August, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve held 293.4 million barrels, the lowest level since 1982 ^[1]. The country's emergency stockpile of fuel was nearly spent. On September 30, a month before the midterms, the Pentagon stood up FORTRESS America, a domestic stockpile of fuel, minerals and munitions ^[2]. The name was engineered to fit the acronym — Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability — and so was the idea: while the public's reserve drained, the state built its own. Trump drew the pairing himself in February, launching Project Vault, a $12 billion reserve of lithium, cobalt, gallium and nickel ^[3].

Just as we have long had a strategic petroleum reserve and a stockpile of critical minerals for national defense, we're now creating this reserve for American industry, so we don't have any problems. — Donald Trump

The two doctrines ran all year, one filling, one emptying. The fortress went up quickly: Vault's billions in February; in July, an executive order banning defense sourcing of critical minerals from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as of January 1, which trade adviser Peter Navarro called preparation for a battlefield ^[4]; the same month, an FCC ban on new foreign-made advanced robots and power inverters, on the blanket finding that all of them pose an unacceptable risk ^[5]; FORTRESS America in September; and this month, bases ordered to run 90 days without civilian power ^[6]. The price doctrine ran on the other gauge. In May the administration still meant to refill the reserve, floating plans to buy Venezuelan crude and even drill under military bases ^[7]. The energy secretary put it plainly.

We need creative ways to fill the strategic petroleum reserve all the way up. — Alfie Moon

The barrels never came back. The reserve sits against a practical floor of 250 to 300 million barrels that limits further emergency withdrawals, and it has been refilling six times slower than it drains ^[1]. A June release drew only 500,000 barrels because repayment premiums had reached 24 percent ^[8]. By October the department was dribbling out 400,000 barrels to a single refinery, bending the rule that the reserve is a last resort ^[9]. The price doctrine did not lose a debate. It ran out of room. What survives it is paper. The administration is still readying Jones Act waivers that industry experts price at "a few pennies per gallon" ^[10]. The incoming Democratic majority's flagship answer is a windfall tax on oil companies, which moves money rather than barrels ^[11]. The rest of the old toolkit — releases from the petroleum reserve, a diesel export ban it weighed in September ^[12], anything that could move the number at the pump — adds no supply either. The two doctrines were never about the same people. This fall, as Britain, Japan and Sweden told their households to keep a week of essentials on hand, the Pentagon ordered its bases to hold 90 days without civilian power ^[6]. The rationale was blunt.

There’s no sugarcoating the fact that we do live in a more dangerous and turbulent world. — Wes Streeting

Washington has told its citizens nothing of the kind. Beijing was building its own wall in the same window. In October it revised its export catalogue to control 40 technologies — artificial intelligence, solar, biotech — on national-security grounds, including the finding that solar technology now shows up in aerospace and defense ^[13]. The move followed Xi Jinping's directive to develop "trump card" technologies that make Chinese factories indispensable to anyone trying to isolate them ^[14]. The rare-earth curbs are already pushing prices outside China to multiples of their domestic value ^[15]. Reporting this week describes both adversaries reading the election the same way — as proof of a low American tolerance for economic hardship ^[16]: Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the reporting says, worked to keep oil prices high through the vote to shape it, and four days after the results, Xi Jinping said Taiwan's reunification is a mission that "the tide of history" cannot stop ^[17]. And Washington's fortress still depends on the supplier it bans. The Pentagon removed the biotech firm WuXi AppTec from its Chinese-military blacklist this week, after a judge called the designation arbitrary ^[18]. The Defense Logistics Agency has awarded a $2 billion tungsten contract to restart Nevada production, even as the trade representative presses China to honor its mineral commitments. Analysts say the buildout needs years and hundreds of billions of dollars, and the sourcing ban takes effect January 1 ^[2]. The December defense budget now carries the fortress's stockpile requests — missiles, submarines, stealth aircraft, space defense — in the same vehicle the incoming Democratic majority is using to press for an exit from the Iran war ^[19]. The walls are going up for a war the voters just chose to end, and each side's fortress names the other as its reason.