Last week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called his country’s nuclear phase-out a “serious strategic mistake.” This is an extraordinary admission that decades of Berlin’s energy—and broader geostrategic—policy had been catastrophically wrong.
This has been clear to many for years now, though perhaps less so for the German delegation to the UN, who famously laughed at President Donald Trump while he warned them about the dangers of outsourcing their energy dependence to Russia. Their failure on energy policy was one largely of cascading mistakes: they shut down nuclear reactors, assumed renewables would be able to fill the gap, and viewed Russian gas as a largely harmless bridge in the meantime. By 2021, Russia supplied 55 percent of Germany’s gas imports. We all know how that went after the invasion of Ukraine the following year.
Yet even after this, Germany continued its failed approach, shutting down its very last nuclear reactors in April of 2023, fresh off the heels of an energy crisis because environmental ideology had triumphed so completely over reality that reversal became unthinkable.
Last week’s U-turn matters in Berlin because of the sheer scale of admission of failure, and in the US, because America is currently facing its own version of the same choice—admittedly with slightly less extreme prospects than German politicians had pushed for.
The federal government under President Trump seems to see the issue clearly: his May 2025 executive order aimed at quadrupling nuclear output to 400 gigawatts by 2050 was a groundbreaking overhaul after more than a decade of stagnant energy output that has been one of the US’s largest barriers in competition with China on the AI race.
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Meanwhile, the Department of Energy has poured $800 million into small modular reactor deployments—an emerging technology that offers considerable upside, especially for AI data centers, which can largely function off the grid if properly equipped with one.
Not everyone is onboard, though. Eleven state governments have drawn the opposite conclusion, maintaining moratoriums on new nuclear construction and pursuing renewable-only mandates that treat reliable, clean power as the enemy rather than the foundation.
New York’s climate law, for example, demands 70 percent clean electricity by 2030—while refusing to classify nuclear power as one of the options. California, meanwhile, has spent decades blocking new nuclear development—and now pays more than double the national average and over 250 percent higher than Texas for its energy, which goes a long way to help explain why so many businesses are relocating out of the state. Data centers powering the AI boom consumed just 4 percent of US electricity last year, but this figure is set to more than double by 2030, and not slow down after that.
Stanford researchers are openly warning that California risks losing its AI leadership entirely because permitting and grid constraints cannot deliver power on the timelines these facilities demand. We are now in an electricity-demanding age. The winners of tomorrow will be those who can offer the cheapest, most reliable energy. Not, as some may believe, those who believe they have the moral imperative to lead.
The tragedy of all of this is that none of this needed to happen in Germany, or the rest of Europe, for that matter. Berlin had long been a center of industry and innovation on the continent. Rather, this is the logical consequence of suffering from extreme delusions surrounding climate action that end up crippling their domestic economy—and thus its ability to innovate for the future.
The German delegates at the UN who laughed at Trump back in 2018 were prime examples of this: they were so convinced of the importance of multilateral agreements to tackle climate change that they completely missed the otherwise obvious implications of crippling their domestic energy production.
The question is whether American policymakers will learn from our counterparts’ mistakes across the pond or insist on experiencing it firsthand.
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