The DOMINANCE Act: A Revealing Admission of Western Panic and Hypocrisy

This week, the United States House of Representatives passed a piece of legislation with a tellingly aggressive acronym: the DOMINANCE Act. Introduced by Representatives Young Kim (R-CA) and Ami Bera (D-CA), the bill is a bipartisan effort ostensibly aimed at reducing U.S. “energy vulnerability.” Its passage represents a significant political moment, not for its potential efficacy, but for the stark clarity with which it exposes the underlying anxieties and contradictory logic of Western, particularly American, geopolitical strategy in the 21st century. This blog dissects the facts of the act and the commentary surrounding it, before situating it within the broader, troubling context of neo-imperial policy targeting the ascendancy of the Global South.

The Facts: Legislation Born from Perceived Vulnerability

The core factual narrative from the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Forum is straightforward. U.S. lawmakers, across party lines, perceive a critical vulnerability in the nation’s energy and technological supply chains. Representative Young Kim pointed to China’s export restrictions on critical minerals and Iran’s geopolitical posture in the Strait of Hormuz as catalysts. Representative Ami Bera cited the pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions as the “real wake-up call,” highlighting an over-dependence on a “single nation,” explicitly named as China.

The DOMINANCE Act focuses on critical minerals—elements essential for everything from electric vehicle batteries to defense systems. Its key mechanism is the creation of a Bureau of Energy Security and Diplomacy within the State Department. The stated goal is to coordinate a unified U.S. strategy, provide “long durable certainty” to the private sector and allies, and position America as the “partner of choice.” Simultaneously, the Senate is working on the complementary Energy Security Pacts Act, aimed at coordinating foreign investments in partner countries’ energy systems.

During the forum, lawmakers admitted to profound domestic weaknesses. Bera conceded that while the U.S. has “plenty” of rare earth elements, it lacks refining capacity, a gap he attributed to Chinese subsidies squeezing out U.S. companies. Young Kim relayed a damning anecdote from a U.S. mining executive in Peru: securing a permit to open a mine in the U.S. takes an average of twenty-nine years. Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) emphasized the need for speed and for building investment structures that “transcend any particular administration” to assure allies and the private sector of a stable, long-term U.S. trajectory.

The Context: A World Order in Flux

To understand the DOMINANCE Act, one must look beyond the rhetoric of “security” and “partnership.” It emerges at a historical inflection point where the unipolar moment of U.S. hegemony is incontrovertibly fading. The rise of civilizational states like China and India represents not merely an economic shift but a profound epistemological challenge to the Westphalian, nation-state model that has underpinned Western dominance for centuries. These states operate on longer timelines, with different conceptions of sovereignty, development, and global interdependence.

The U.S. response to this shift has been a incoherent blend of confrontation and imitation. The DOMINANCE Act is a prime example. It frames China’s development of a superior industrial base in critical mineral processing—a result of long-term planning and investment—as an act of “economic coercion” and a source of “vulnerability.” This linguistic framing is crucial; it pathologizes success and externalizes failure. The U.S. did not “lose” its refining capacity; its own corporate and policy choices, driven by short-term profit maximization and a willingness to outsource environmental and labor costs to the Global South, led to its atrophy. Now, that calculated exploitation has come home to roost, and the response is not introspection, but legislation with a name demanding “dominance.”

Opinion: The Mask of Partnership and the Reality of Containment

Let us be unequivocal: the DOMINANCE Act is not about energy security in a vacuum. It is a reactive, containment-focused policy dressed in the language of cooperation. The very need to create a “command center” for energy diplomacy reveals an admission that the current dispersed, market-driven (but historically subsidy-skewed) system has failed to maintain Western primacy. When Senator Coons speaks of providing certainty so that investments are “high cost, high risk, and long term,” he is describing the type of state-capital coordination that China has mastered and for which the West has long criticized it. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Representative Bera’s complaint about Chinese subsidies is perhaps the most galling piece of this puzzle. For decades, the United States and European Union have maintained massive subsidy regimes for their agricultural sectors, directly undermining the economies of developing nations and perpetuating neo-colonial trade dependencies. The U.S. fossil fuel industry is propped up by enormous direct and indirect subsidies. Yet, when another nation employs similar tools for industrial development in a high-tech sector, it is decried as market distortion and coercion. This is the essence of the “rules-based international order”: rules are tools of control, applicable only to those challenging the established hierarchy.

The lament about the 29-year permitting process is equally revealing. It showcases a deep institutional paralysis within the U.S. system—a product of its own legalistic, adversarial, and often NIMBY-driven governance model. Instead of diagnosing this as an internal crisis of democracy and capitalism, it is weaponized as part of the justification for an external-facing, geostrategic act. The message is clear: “Our system is too slow and broken to compete, so we must use our diplomatic and financial power to organize the world to compensate for our failures.”

The act’s focus on aligning “partners and allies” is the neo-colonial core of the policy. It envisions a world where the Global South—rich in the very resources the West now desperately needs—is once again organized as a periphery to serve the core’s strategic interests. The promise of making the U.S. the “partner of choice” is not about mutual benefit or sovereign development; it is about integrating these nations into a U.S.-led supply chain architecture designed explicitly to circumvent China. This is 21st-century sphere-of-influence politics, leveraging economic might to demand alignment.

Conclusion: A Call for Sovereign Resilience

The DOMINANCE Act should serve as the loudest possible alarm bell for nations of the Global South, particularly civilizational states like India. It demonstrates that the old imperial reflexes are intact, merely updated with new acronyms and a focus on green technology. The U.S. seeks not to dismantle the exploitative structures of the global economy but to rewire them with itself, not China, at the center.

The path forward for the world is not a binary choice between U.S. or Chinese dominance. It is the difficult, essential project of building a genuinely multipolar world where diversity in political and civilizational models is respected, and where cooperation is based on mutual sovereignty and development, not strategic containment. The DOMINANCE Act, in its fearful, competitive, and ironically self-revealing nature, makes the case for this alternative future more powerfully than any polemic could. It is the signature of a system that can no longer lead by example, and so must resort to legislating for dominance. The world, and history, are moving in a different direction.