An America Under Pressure: Energy, Regulatory Power, and the European Illusion

An America Under Pressure: Energy, Regulatory Power, and the European Illusion

By Paolo Falconio

Over the past decades, the United States has built a significant part of its economic and geopolitical strength on its ability to govern the major global systemic variables: finance, security, and, increasingly, energy. This is not merely a matter of production or self‑sufficiency, but of regulatory power—the ability to influence prices, flows, expectations, and the stability of global markets.

It is within this framework that the growing tensions of the American economy and the transformations of the international order must be understood. An America under pressure is not an America in immediate decline, but a power forced to confront new structural limits in a system that can no longer be governed through exclusion.

Energy as a Systemic Lever of the American Economy

Energy today represents one of the fundamental pillars supporting the economic resilience of the United States. Not only because Washington has become one of the world’s leading hydrocarbon producers, but because energy directly affects inflation, monetary policy, industrial competitiveness, and social stability.

In a highly financialized economy, the ability to maintain predictable energy prices and functioning markets is a central macroeconomic factor. Global energy shocks translate into inflationary pressures, interest‑rate hikes, and financial instability. For this reason, energy is not a sectoral variable but an infrastructure of the global economic order.

Global Energy Rules and the Limits of Exclusion

Setting the rules of a system does not mean controlling every resource, but incorporating systemically relevant actors within the regulatory perimeter. And this is where the central issue emerges: Russia.

Moscow is not simply a major energy producer. It is one of the actors without which the global energy market loses coherence, stability, and governability. Oil, gas, uranium, and fertilizers make Russia a structural component of global supply. Excluding it entirely does not merely weaken it—it fragments the system.

An energy market without Russia does not become more orderly or more moral; it becomes bifurcated, with parallel circuits, divergent prices, and growing instability. In such a scenario, the ability of the United States to exercise a regulatory role is drastically reduced.

Why Rules Cannot Be Set Without Russia

The issue is not American energy dependence—now limited—but the governability of the global system. If energy is used as a lever of macroeconomic stabilization, then one of the world’s main producers must be incorporated, directly or indirectly, into the regulatory framework.

Without Russia:

- OPEC+ loses a fundamental anchor and becomes more politicized  

- markets regionalize, weakening the disciplining function of price  

- China gains greater capacity to write alternative rules, absorbing energy flows on its own terms  

In other words, rules cannot be imposed on a system missing one of its pillars. They can only be endured.

American Energy Realism

U.S. choices in recent years reflect this awareness. Energy sanctions against Russia have never aimed at total exclusion, but at calibrated risk management: price caps, selective exemptions, tolerance toward certain flows. This is not political inconsistency but systemic realism.

Washington cannot allow Russia to exit the global market entirely and merge into an alternative energy ecosystem dominated by Beijing. The goal is not Moscow’s political integration, but its functional permanence within a system that remains governable.

Europe and the Illusion of Moral Energy

In this context, Europe appears as the most exposed actor. Unlike the United States, the continent has often confused the normative dimension with the structural one, imagining that the energy market could be regulated through exclusion and total sanctions.

The result has been a loss of regulatory power without the construction of a credible alternative: higher prices, greater technological dependence, and reduced capacity to influence global rules. Europe has moralized energy without governing it.

Conclusion

This is not about defending Russia or minimizing geopolitical conflicts. It is about recognizing a structural fact: if energy is a fundamental lever for sustaining the economy and the global macro‑financial order, then excluding one of the world’s main producers makes any claim to regulate the system impossible.

America has understood this, even if it cannot state it openly. Europe, instead, risks remaining trapped in an illusion: that global rules can be set without including the actors that make the system possible.

In a multipolar world, power does not belong to those who proclaim universal values, but to those who can still govern the fundamental structures of the system—energy included.

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