Specifically, the White House denounced OPEC+’s announcement of their intention to cut their production of crude oil by 2 million barrels per day (bpd). The petulant rebuke of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats and their accompanying threats of retaliatory action against OPEC are stunning—stunning in their supercilious arrogance, stunning in their hypocrisy, and stunning in their short-sightedness.
The member states of OPEC+ are, to the best of my knowledge, sovereign nation-states. They also have nationwide monopolies on oil production within their territories. As sovereign states, their leaders have a right to increase or decrease the production of crude as they wish. To hear the president and his minions chastising the decision by Saudi Arabia et al. to cut production reeks of colonialist attitudes. Apparently, Team Biden believes that countries that receive U.S. military aid are bought and paid for, and therefore must do our bidding. That’s not exactly an endearing or winsome attitude. It’s reminiscent of President Jimmy Carter’s bizarre tendency to bully governments with whom there had been cooperation, if not friendship, while treating hostile governments with gentleness and conciliation.
Sorry, Mr. President, but those sovereign nation-states are free to do whatever they want in regard to oil production. They are under no obligation—legal, moral, or economic—to take actions that will reduce American energy costs and so give your party a boost in the approaching midterm election. Truly, the White House’s implied presumption that sovereign nations should adopt policies to suit American preferences is disrespectful, insulting, arrogant, and obscene. It could take years to repair the unnecessary diplomatic damage that the Biden administration’s haughty and intemperate outburst has caused.
Whatever shortage of oil there is in this country is more the fault of the Biden administration than of any foreign power.
Finally, for Team Biden to label OPEC’s decision “short-sighted” is the ultimate hypocrisy. According to the Wall Street Journal article, Biden’s congressional allies “are pitching bills that would potentially seize the assets that OPEC member countries own in the U.S., or mandate the removal of U.S. armed forces from Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.” Either measure would be extremely short-sighted.
U.S. policy since the end of World War II has been to uphold a world order in which the property rights of each country are to be protected and upheld. For our congress to threaten to seize the property of sovereign nations when they chart an independent path and exercise their right to develop their resources at a pace of their own choosing is to undermine confidence in U.S. law and justice. U.S. bullying and rapacity could possibly drive erstwhile friendly or semi-friendly governments away into alliances with American enemies like Russia and China.
As for threatening to remove U.S. armed forces from Saudi Arabia, let’s not forget the reason why those forces are deployed there. It hasn’t been because we approve of the Saudi monarchy and all its policies and actions; rather, it has been because if Saudi oil production were drastically reduced, there would be massive economic pain in many countries around the world and, in some cases, wrenching political convulsions. The Biden/Democratic threat to withdraw American military forces raises the specter of the destabilization of Saudi Arabia, or worse, that a hostile power in the Russia-China axis like Iran might attack, cripple, and even destroy Saudi Arabia’s oil production infrastructure. It’s hard to think of a more short-sighted policy than taking actions that could destabilize the Arabian Peninsula.
What about the moral aspect of our relationship with Saudi Arabia? Team Biden is engaging in moralizing of a peculiarly selective nature. The White House is vehemently denouncing a country in which government policies are enabling its population to prosper and thrive, while at the same time overlooking the gross privations and devastation inflicted on the Venezuelan people by the Venezuelan government. Biden is willing to withhold criticisms of and retaliation against the inhumane Venezuelan regime in the craven hope that dictator Nicolas Maduro will increase oil production. In a world in which governments are far from perfect, what ethical principle would impel our president to threaten a relatively benign government while adopting a conciliatory policy toward a relatively brutal government?
Instead of reacting with temper tantrums to OPEC’s announcement, the president and his congressional allies should have kept their mouths shut and opted for a cooling-off period. I heard one geopolitical analyst say that OPEC may be currently producing as much as 2.8 million bpd less than their stated quota. If that’s so, then reducing the quota by 2 million bpd may be a non-event. I wrote “may be ... producing” because it’s hard to trust OPEC’s published production figures completely. It’s also hard for OPEC to guarantee the compliance of all its members with the cartel’s quotas, because national self-interest often leads individual members to cheat by producing more than their agreed-to quota.
Whether OPEC does or does not reduce its production of crude oil, the obvious need remains for the United States to increase domestic production. Unfortunately, given the hostility of the dominant party in Washington to domestic oil production, that need will likely remain unfilled.
