Commentary
Those waggish stickers we’ve been seeing at gas pumps, with President Joe Biden pointing to the inflated price and saying “I did that” won’t be going away any time soon now that OPEC is cutting global oil supplies by two million barrels a day. But too few realize that this White House’s foreign policy is as responsible for consumer pain at the pump as its big-spending domestic policies are.
Is it likely that if asked, John Q. Public would think that the right man to send to Saudi Arabia to conduct aggressive oil diplomacy is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, who last year was being talked up as a possible U.S. ambassador to Israel, and who, working in Barack Obama’s State Department, had failed in negotiations between Israel and Lebanon on the issue of access to Mediterranean natural gas reserves? And would Mr. Public be surprised to hear that two weeks after meeting with the Saudis, this aide—Biden energy security adviser Amos Hochstein—would tell Bloomberg News, “I did not walk away with that understanding” that the Saudis would impose such a large oil export reduction, then grinningly add, “but that’s two weeks ago.”
October surprises during election years have come in many guises in American history, but this year it comes clothed in a ghutrah, as young Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gives Joe Biden and his Democratic Party some well-timed payback for accusing the Saudi royal family of “murdering children” during the 2020 presidential campaign and promising he would “make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.” Gasoline at the pump will now be on a sizable upswing on Election Day a month from now as Americans vote for members of Congress.
Unbeknownst to the public until now, Biden officials spent weeks intensely lobbying OPEC countries, in person on their turf, hat in hand, not to cut oil supplies; in retrospect, this pathetic begging further exposes to the world the impotency to which U.S. influence has been reduced. One OPEC diplomat described Hochstein and his colleagues’ efforts as “desperate.” And it cannot be forgotten that the whole point of Biden visiting Saudi Arabia in the summer and meeting with the crown prince was to convince the pre-eminent OPEC nation to boost oil production in order to bring down prices for American consumers. By contrast, during the pandemic in 2020, President Donald Trump’s forceful phone negotiations with the crown prince to protect a then-revitalized U.S. oil industry from OPEC saturation amid a COVID-ravaged global collapse in demand was described as “an extraordinary display of U.S. influence over global oil output.”
Some congressional Democrats have actually reacted to the oil supply cut by explicitly calling for the insane idea of completely ceasing our military engagement with Saudi Arabia and propelling the kingdom into the arms of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And we’re not talking about “Squad” members but House members from swing districts, like Tom Malinowski of north-central New Jersey and self-styled “pro-business” moderate Susan Wild of Allentown and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
But maintaining engagement with the cradle of Islam, which for many years has been an invaluable ally to the United States against potential nuclear-armed terrorist state Iran, and encouraging the far-from-free and often morally objectionable Riyadh regime to continue on its slow if not dubious path of domestic moderation, is vital to the security of America and the free world. Just as we joined with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, we have to live in the real world and work with disreputable powers in opposing greater evils and real threats, particularly Iran.
That the crown prince would thumb his nose at Biden so flagrantly illustrates the impotency and ineptitude of the former longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As Robert Gates, secretary of defense for both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has famously quipped, Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” And he was wrong once again—fatally so—in last year’s debacle yanking U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, in which 11 Marines, a soldier, and a Navy corpsman were killed in a terrorist bombing during the evacuation at Kabul airport, the Taliban returned to power, and al-Qaeda now once more enjoy carte blanche within the country.
The ripples of that display to the world of weakness and incompetence enticed Putin to invade Ukraine, emboldened China’s Xi Jinping to launch what may be the prelude to an invasion of free Taiwan, and has now shown Saudi Arabia that it has little to fear from such a feckless U.S. administration.
The Biden administration recently swapped two high-level Venezuelan drug traffickers, both nephews of regime ruler Nicolás Maduro’s wife who were convicted in New York, for five American Citgo executives lured to Caracas and then arrested and convicted on phony embezzlement charges, a Marine arrested at a roadblock and held on flimsy firearms violations, as well as a kidnapped 24-year-old Florida man who says he was being waterboarded and electrocuted by Venezuelan intelligence officers while in confinement. The president apparently now hopes the oil-rich, anti-American socialist regime will make up for some of the Saudis’ cuts.
Funny how Democrats, who seek to render fossil fuels obsolete, right now will apparently do anything for an ample supply of evil, filthy oil in the final weeks before mid-term elections that threaten to end their majority in the House of Representatives.
That is not the story here, however. The United States, which defied the experts and became energy independent under Trump, has under Biden shown friend and foe in the world alike just how weak its international hand is. A presumed superpower that is at ideological war with its own domestic energy industry is in no position to negotiate anything with the world’s major oil suppliers. This president, upon taking office last year, scrapped the Keystone XL pipeline that was a few months away from transporting 800,000 barrels of oil a day into the United States. Soon thereafter he issued a series of executive orders obstructing all new oil and natural gas leases on government-held land. This administration has the ignoble distinction of having provided the fewest oil leases of any in the post-war period. It has abused the Defense Production Act of 1950, enacted to support the Korean War effort, to subsidize the production of solar panels.
We are already experiencing the highest inflation in four decades, with a recession already happening or about to. After pleading with and being rebuffed by an ally we called a murderer, we may now pivot and implore an outright enemy in South America to supply us with the U.S. economy’s lifeblood, which we could and should be supplying for ourselves. Biden has already depleted our emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve by about 40 percent, down to 416 million barrels, its lowest level since 1984.
We have been led out onto thin economic ice, which could collapse beneath us given the wrong combination of conditions—say, a serious global oil shock raising the price-per-gallon into double digits, compounded by deep recession, the spread of Europe’s double-digit inflation to our shores, and some unforeseen military aggression abroad.
Experiencing that magnitude of disaster, few among the hordes of unemployed will find much mirth in the Biden gas pump stickers reminding them, “I did that.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
