The world is currently entering a volatile new era of energy insecurity. As Russia continues to weaponize its energy resources against its neighbors and conflicts in the Middle East threaten vital shipping routes, nations across Europe and Asia are searching for stable, reliable suppliers. In this environment, the United States has the opportunity to be the guarantor of global energy security, the most reliable energy partner — provided it can overcome its own domestic bureaucratic hurdles.
America is home to an abundance of natural gas and other energy resources. In the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, allies like Germany and Poland made the strategic decision to reduce their dependence on Russian gas, placing their trust in American energy instead. While expanding energy exports is a critical tool for strengthening partners and reducing the leverage of adversarial suppliers, this strategy is only successful if we can actually build the pipelines, export facilities, and transmission lines required to deliver that energy.
Reliability serves as the bedrock of energy security, yet our own domestic policies are currently undermining America’s ability to be a stable partner. The core challenge facing the U.S. is not a lack of resources, but a chronic failure of getting energy where it needs to go — be it Boston or Berlin. Over recent decades, the U.S. permitting system has devolved into a state of bureaucratic dysfunction, where projects that used to take years now take decades to complete. It can currently take 12 to 15 years to permit critical infrastructure like transmission lines or mining projects. Consequently, America has become exceptionally good at producing all types of energy but exceptionally poor at moving it.
These permitting failures have direct, painful consequences for both at home and abroad. Natural gas sitting in the Marcellus Shale does not lower heating bills in Boston, and liquified natural gas trapped behind permitting delays does not help allies in Europe. This challenge is growing more urgent as electricity demand rises for the first time in decades, driven by the needs of advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and data centers. America cannot lead the next generation of economic growth if it lacks the energy infrastructure to power it.
The current system also sends a chilling message to investors. I witnessed this firsthand during my career in the energy industry. My former company spent more than $1 billion building a pipeline that was already operating at 90% capacity and serving customers when a federal court vacated its permit. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ultimately issued an emergency order allowing the project to continue operating, but the episode sent a troubling message to our boardroom and investors. If a fully permitted, fully constructed, and fully operational project can lose its authorization after the fact, the risk of investing in American infrastructure becomes dramatically higher. That doesn’t just delay projects — it drives capital to the sidelines and exacerbates the constraints and drives up the cost to consumers both at home and around the world.
The experience of Germany serves as a cautionary tale. By failing to invest early in LNG import facilities and diversified infrastructure, Germany left its economy exposed to one single pipeline system. In contrast, nations like Poland and the Baltic states invested heavily in energy diversification years ago, leaving them far better positioned to withstand geopolitical coercion. When countries build optionality into their energy infrastructure, that excess capacity reduces vulnerability to monopolistic pressure and ultimately lowers costs for consumers.
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Addressing these challenges must be a top priority. To secure our future, we need to restore predictability to the permitting process, ensuring that courts cannot halt projects that are already built and operating. We must also get Section 401 of the Clean Water Act back to its original intent — protecting water quality — rather than being utilized as an open-ended veto to block nationally significant infrastructure projects.
Ultimately, the defining geopolitical contests of this century will be won by the nations that can deploy their resources, not just those that possess them. America has the energy, the capital, and the technology to lead. The only remaining question is whether we have the political will to build the infrastructure necessary to turn those advantages into sustained global leadership.
Alan Armstrong, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. He served as CEO and executive board chairman of Williams from 2011 to 2025.