I think this explains a lot of our current problems pretty well:
In general, I feel like there’s huge denial around the role of petroleum in America’s trade deficit. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, US firms had a dominant position in the automobile industry and the USA was a major oil exporter. And we’ve never switched away from industrial policy oriented around suburbanization, auto dependency, and high per capita levels of oil consumption even though nowadays it’s an industrial policy only Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Norway could love.