One Connected Country

The Constitution was signed on this day in 1787. Then the arguing began. Hamilton opened the case for ratification in the newspapers on October 27 with a general introduction. 4 days later, on October 31, John Jay published the second paper: Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence.

Jay is the least remembered of the 3 men behind Publius, and the only one whose day job was foreign policy. He helped negotiate peace with Britain and was the Confederation’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs when he wrote the paper. His contribution got interrupted by illness after just 4 essays, writing only 5 of the 85 in the end. But it tells you something that once Hamilton had done the introductions, the first real argument for the Constitution was made by the man who dealt with foreign powers for a living. The first paper in our Fusionist Papers series was an introduction too. This one starts the argument.

Jay’s case was simple: America was one connected country, given to one united people, and it had better stay that way. 13 states acting together would be difficult to push around. 13 states divided into competing confederacies would each be small enough to court and turn against each other, even if influenced from abroad without a shot ever fired.

For about 30 years after the Cold War, the world moved in Jay’s direction. Research and trade opened up. For a while, we had one internet. Much of the connective tissue of that world was American-made. ARPANET came out of the Department of Defense. The satellites that tell every ship and phone where it is were put there by the U.S. Air Force. America was the strongest when the world was the most connected, because so many of those connections ran on American infrastructure and, more importantly, on American norms: say what you think and sell to whoever wants to buy.

That world has been breaking apart for years, mostly without anyone noticing. The satellites actually went first. GPS was American, and for a time it was effectively the only global system that mattered. Then Europe built Galileo and China BeiDou. Russia also did everything to keep GLONASS alive. The most universal American utility on the planet had gained 3 competitors, and nobody thought it was a crisis at all.

The internet followed, but faster. Behind China’s Great Firewall is a curated web where the state decides what a search returns and what citizens may say about it. Russia passed a “sovereign internet” law and periodically tests unplugging from the rest of us. Europe is a friend and a different case entirely. Its split came through privacy law, regulation, and digital sovereignty rather than censorship, mostly for reasons I agree with. But the network divided all the same. The rest of the world now largely sits between these blocs, choosing which one to join or align with. We call it the splinternet, although nobody declared it. There was no single moment when the open internet ended. Enough countries simply decided that it cost them something.

Information split first because it is cheap. Energy is next, but the cost will be much higher. An information network dividing means you lose access to somebody’s content. An energy system breaking up may claim the ability to keep the lights on without someone else’s permission entirely.

We know what energy dependence costs because we have seen it before. In 1973, an oil embargo roughly quadrupled the price of oil in months, and the strongest economy on Earth printed ration coupons along with lowering the national speed limit to save fuel. In 2022, Russia, which had supplied roughly 40% of EU pipeline imports, cut most of its pipeline gas to Europe, and a generation of German industrial strategy was repriced in a single winter. But there are quieter plays happening. Russia’s state nuclear company sells much more than a reactor. It builds, finances, fuels the plant, and holds the service contract. And of course the customer’s grid answers partly to Moscow then for many decades. China spent 2 decades building its position in solar and now holds more than 80% of global manufacturing capacity across every major stage of the chain. None of this is conspiracy. It’s strategy, carried out in the open, very effectively. When a critical supply chain becomes concentrated, it becomes a hold over the customer whether it was planned or not. Jay would recognize the board either way.

The same board is already being set for fusion. China’s position needs to be taken very seriously. The Special Competitive Studies Project estimates at least 6.5 billion dollars of Chinese money moved into commercial fusion since the beginning of 2023, almost 3 times what the United States allocated over the same period, and apparently even that figure is most likely an undercount. In Hefei, a tokamak called BEST is getting built at a pace many Western megaprojects wouldn’t even dream of, with the goal of putting fusion electricity onto the grid. In 2025, Beijing established a national fusion company with registered capital of 2.1 billion dollars, which is more than 2 years of the entire U.S. federal fusion budget sitting in one company. The current Five-Year Plan names fusion as one of 8 frontier technologies targeted for focused development through 2030. The physicists doing this work are excellent and their results are real. My argument has never been with the scientists. It is about what the system funding them will do if they win.

Run the supply chain play on solar panels and you distort a market. Run it on the first practical fusion plant and you shape the terms of the world’s energy supply for a century: technical standards, finance terms, critical components, service relationships, and the politics that come bundled with the machine. The oil states of the 20th century may end up looking like a rehearsal.

The free world needs a fusion plant you can buy without also buying a patron.

That sentence is why Liberty Fusion exists. We are an American company, unapologetically. Our machine descends from Los Alamos science, and our chamber will be built by American hands. I believe the United States should treat first commercial fusion the way it once treated the Atlantic sea lanes: as a matter of national survival, defended with the full weight of the nation.

But Jay’s argument cuts both ways: connection is the strength. Energy independence for America cannot mean energy dependence for everybody else, because that only rebuilds the client-state world with a different patron collecting the rent. Around 655 million people live with no electricity at all, and billions more with too little to run a hospital or a factory. Most of the world’s new generating capacity this century will be built outside the G7. If the only fusion plants available to those countries are with political strings attached, many of them will take the deal anyway. Nobody stays poor on principle. The world will get fusion either way. The question is: whose terms come with it.

We engineered the terms into the machine. Our guns sit outside the chamber, at a standoff distance from the burn. A shot destroys nothing expensive, and the machine fires again, up to once per second. We chose that geometry because cost and repetition are what turn a physics result into a power plant.

The same geometry gives us another opportunity. I want to be careful though, because “nonproliferation by architecture” is exactly the kind of phrase that sounds impressive on a slide while explaining very little. We are not claiming that fusion is impossible to misuse. A fusion plant contains no fissile fuel, which is a large and real advantage over fission. But a powerful neutron source is still a powerful neutron source, and the tritium cycle still has to be monitored and accounted for. What we are designing is a plant where misuse is hard to attempt and hard to hide, with safeguards built into the architecture instead of added later on top. We are designing the supply chain and the operator ecosystem the same way: diverse by default, so the economic benefit of a fusion plant stays with the people who build and operate it rather than flowing back to a single capital. A future paper will go into both claims properly, because claims like these need engineering behind them.

A power plant that answers only to its owner is independence you can point at, and we intend to sell that by the kilowatt-hour on every continent that wants it.

Jay warned that division invites foreign force and influence. The reverse is also true. Connection, on free terms, defeats them. The world is splitting into networks, and it will power itself from one of two kinds of plant: one that comes with a patron, or one that comes with a warranty. Our mission is to make sure the second one ships first, and ships in numbers.