If we are more interested in results than politics, then reviving the Energyia program makes a lot of sense. It's a very powerful booster with unique flexibility for hanging large payloads. Most of the hard parts are still in production, such as the RD-170 engines (the same as used in the Zenit booster, which is actually the strap-ons). All they'd need to do is resume producing the external tank and the instrumention modules. That's pretty simple.

Unfortunately, politics will always be a factor. It's pretty common and reasonable for American taxpayers to expect that the majority of our budget goes to employ Americans in American companies. If we need an Energyia class booster, it seems reasonable to extend the current license that Lockheed Martin has for a derivative of the RD-170 engine (the RD-180 used in new Atlas boosters) and to build the external tank here. I see no good reason to spend billions on R&D to reinvent the wheel.

The question the original article raises is whether we need heavy lift boosters to return to the moon or Mars. As I mentioned here, just because we used a honking big Saturn V booster for Apollo, that doesn't necessarily mean that we (or the Chinese) need to do the same thing for future missions. Using multiple expendable boosters might be more expensive per mission than using a single heavy lift booster, but if we factor in the R&D costs of developing the big booster, that may no longer be the case.