>If fuel prices are still at the whim of global markets, does it matter if the country is a net importer or not?
But they are not completely at the whim.
With a nontrivial lag time, as prices raise, local (especially North America as a whole) production will go up and NA will become a significant net exporter. The shale and tar sands production is considerably more expensive than other production methods and requires high prices (and predictions of long term high prices) to operate successfully.
We are coupled, but not entirely dependent. The local price will be progressively lower compared to global price as global price rises. Being able to overproduce our requirements enables this.
If high prices significantly (for some sufficiently high level of significance) threatened our local economy or supply actually limited people's ability to buy at any price, controls can and would be enacted to decouple the local price and economy from the global market.
