And now on to the main event…

Meanwhile, another significant bottleneck is the availability of copper. Energy alternatives, such as wind and solar and the batteries that power E.V.s, use lots of copper. So do data centers. Defense contractors, too. As defense spending in both the U.S. and Europe ratchets up, the copper supply is challenged. So far this year, the price of copper has risen 41 percent.

In Washington, where Dan lives with his wife, Angela Stent, a leading Russian foreign policy expert, there is near-panic about the surging demand for copper and the lack of supply. “That’s where all these energy issues intersect with geopolitics,” Dan noted. “It’s the competition, and rivalry, and tension with China—because China has a dominant role in the supply chains for minerals.” The U.S. has two copper projects underway, he said, both of which are years away from being operational. One has received an indication of interest, for financing, from the Export-Import Bank. The other, which moved ahead in May after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe—who consider the Arizona site to be sacred—is being developed by Resolution Copper.

It’s not just a mining problem, it’s also a processing problem. The U.S. once had more than 19 copper smelters, Dan said. Now, there are only two in operation. China, meanwhile, has more than 50. “The processing of minerals is also where the Chinese have a very dominant position,” he said. “It’s very hard to build anything in the United States because of permitting and judicial delays,” Dan said. “It would be impossible to build the Interstate Highway System today, given our current system.”

Fortunately, the U.S. has become the world’s dominant producer and exporter of liquified natural gas. In fact, L.N.G. represents about half the value of our exports of semiconductors, and twice the value of the Hollywood exports of film and TV shows. “It’s become a very strategic business,” Dan said. Without it, Putin might have prevailed more easily in his invasion of Ukraine after he cut off Russian L.N.G. supplies to Europe. Instead, the U.S. was able to supply Europe with the needed L.N.G. Anyway, L.N.G. can also be used to power the electric turbines that will be coming online to supply the needed electricity. That business is obviously doing very well, Dan said.

As for the oil business, Dan explained that the U.S. has gone from producing some 5 million barrels a day in 2008 to 13.5 million in 2025. There are also 6 million barrels a day of what are called “petroleum liquids.” It was thought, at one point, that the U.S. oil production might reach 15 million barrels a day. “Now,” he said, “there is a sense that the U.S. may have reached its peak in terms of oil production. It’s a very large peak. It’s more than Saudi Arabia. It’s more than Russia.”

Of course, oil supply is also a function of the price of oil, now around $70 per barrel. But if Trump succeeds in jawboning that down to where the price of a gallon of gas at the pump is under $2, oil production will fall off. Oil demand has been generally flat for decades in the U.S., with most of the growth during the last 20 years coming from China. But with China shifting to electric cars in a big way, the country’s demand for oil has fallen dramatically. “There’s a huge debate,” Dan said. “OPEC sees buoyant growth for decades to come. The International Energy Agency sees it flattening out. I would still have the view that I had in The New Map”—his 2020 bestseller—“that, probably by the early 2030s, we’ll see oil demand flatten. Not a sharp decline, but plateau.” Regardless, he said, the U.S. is “still the dominant player in world oil and natural gas.”

In the past, Dan and I talked about hydrogen’s potential as a new, viable, and massive source of energy. This time around, though, he was less sanguine. “There was a lot of excitement about hydrogen two or three years ago,” he told me. “But the air has pretty much gone out of that. It won’t be anywhere near the scale that was anticipated.”

Then there’s the matter of the ongoing competition with China for economic supremacy. Dan described it as “The Art of the Deal versus the Long March.” He was in Beijing in December when he came to the realization that the Chinese are focused on self-sufficiency, and reorienting their trade away from the United States to other parts of the world. Only 15 percent of Chinese exports go to the United States, Dan said. “They don’t need to buy soybeans from the United States. They can buy it from Brazil. If you look at their pattern of exports, you can see that they clearly are reorientable.”

Before we wrapped things up, Dan told me about a conversation he had with a senior official in Asia. “He talked about how China looks at the U.S. as a disordered society, as dysfunctional, and they’re not,” Dan said, “They have their own way of operating—as a very controlled society. The Chinese really do see the U.S., in some ways, in decline, even as we have what is actually the most successful large economy in the world.”

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