From the linked article:
[D]eterrence still works when it is credible, and that credible force still reorganizes the thinking of rivals who have spent too long mistaking American restraint for American decline. Epic Fury is not occupation. It is not nation-building. It is peace through strength in action.
And the moment the Hormuz shock hit, the larger lesson came into view.
Europe and Britain … regulated and outsourced their way into dependency. They constrained domestic supply, moralized about energy production, and assumed that open sea lanes and reliable imports were a permanent feature of modern life. They are not.
Hormuz was a reminder that access is not control, and interdependence is not security. … Size is not resilience. Dependency dressed up as globalization is still dependency. … [T]he old energy order is cracking. …
Trump deserves credit here. “Energy dominance” was mocked by the usual classes as crude rhetoric. In reality it was strategic common sense. Expanding hydrocarbons, building LNG capacity, and treating domestic production as national power rather than moral embarrassment put the United States in a stronger position for precisely this kind of world. …
The Western Hemisphere is resource-secure. Europe and Asia are not. …
This crisis did not weaken that position. It clarified it. And that takes us to the point that too many analysts still insist on treating as a separate subject: Hard resource power and monetary power are mutually reinforcing. …
Energy is priced in dollars, commodities are traded in dollars, and global balance sheets are saturated with dollar liabilities. That is why every supposed age of “de-dollarization” evaporates the moment a real shock arrives. When energy flows are threatened and trade routes seize up, the world does not run from the dollar. It runs toward it. Then comes the swap line. Federal Reserve swap lines are not mere technical plumbing. They are instruments of hierarchy. In a dollar shortage, the Fed can extend emergency liquidity to allied central banks and withhold it from others, effectively deciding who gets access to the world’s most important funding source in a crisis. That is not neutral market management. It is power, exercised quietly but unmistakably.
This is Epic Fury’s real significance. It shows both layers of American strength at once. The United States can still shape physical risk in the world’s key energy corridors, and it still sits at the center of the financial architecture that prices and distributes those resources. Hard resource power below, monetary power above. …
For Europe and Britain, it means dependency remains dependency, no matter how elegantly it is described. For the United States … it means something simpler: The commanding heights of power are still occupied by those who control resources, routes, and money.
You can read it all here: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/05/07/lesson_of_epic_fury_china_and_europe_are_exposed.html