Ripping up old alliances and turning the post-World War II axis on its head would have been impossible for any previous American president because of the insatiable US thirst for imported energy. But the Trump White House is able to lean on an increasingly critical made-in-America commodity to exert new levels of geopolitical leverage: liquefied natural gas.
The US, which in the span of about seven years transformed itself from an irrelevant supplier of LNG into the world’s largest, is set to expand its production capacity by 60% in the first half of Donald Trump’s second presidency, according to an estimate from BloombergNEF. By the end of the decade, almost 1 in every 3 tankers carrying the superchilled fuel will originate in the US, giving Trump his best chance to attain the energy dominance his campaign promised.