The Geopolitics of Energy

Energy sources shape power between nations; fusion could shift some dependencies while creating new ones, and honesty requires naming both.

Energy has always been geopolitical

Who controls fuel, who controls the technology to use it, and who controls the materials to build it have shaped alliances and conflicts for over a century. Oil and gas geography drew borders and toppled governments. Any new energy source enters this history, and it would be naive to imagine fusion floats above it.

Fusion's most cited geopolitical promise is fuel: deuterium is abundant and widely distributed, and a source that runs on it is less exposed to fuel-supply coercion than one running on traded hydrocarbons. That promise is real for the deuterium side. It is incomplete, because the machines depend on more than deuterium.

New dependencies fusion would create

• Tritium and lithium for breeding (the breeder addresses part of this by breeding tritium)
• Helium-3 for the burner — scarce terrestrially, ~400x short of demand per unit
• High-temperature superconductors (REBCO) and specialty materials with concentrated supply
• The engineering and workforce base to build and operate the machines

So the honest picture is a shift in dependencies, not their elimination. Fusion could reduce exposure to hydrocarbon geopolitics while introducing exposure to superconductor, lithium, and — for the burner — helium-3 supply. Whether that is a net improvement depends on how those new chains are governed.

The honest caveat

This is a discussion of an energy source that is not yet built. Geopolitical effects arrive only if fusion is deployed at scale, which is years away at best. We describe plausible dynamics, not predictions. See energy security and sovereignty and fuel supply and sovereignty.