Recently on a hot mic during his visit to Florida, President Joe Biden told Fort Myers Mayor Ray Murphy, “Nobody F***s with a Biden.” As PJ Media’s Kevin Downey Jr. pointed out, even inanimate objects f*** with Joe Biden. Now, Saudi Arabia is taking their shot.
Last week, OPEC+ agreed to reduce oil production by two million barrels a day at the behest of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This outcome is the opposite of what was reported following President Biden’s visit to the kingdom in July. The Biden administration said he left with an agreement from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) that OPEC would increase production by 1%, about one million barrels, after the group met. The current production cut is twice as large as the agreed-upon increase touted by Team Biden.
Additionally, state-run Saudi Aramco raised its selling price for oil to the United States, lowered it for Europe, and kept them the same for Asia. It is the second time in the past few months the selling price increased for the U.S. while Europe got a break. The Saudis and the UAE are sending a message, and the Biden administration refuses to pick up what they are putting down. So you will pay even higher prices at the pump and just about everywhere else as raw material and transportation costs rise.
The Biden administration called the production cuts a hostile act. Then, of course, Team Biden accused the Saudis of “aligning with Russia” following the pricing announcement. However, it was Russia, part of OPEC+, that aligned with the Saudis and the UAE when they pushed for cuts. It is not at all clear that Saudi Arabia has any particular interest in the goals of Vladimir Putin. They control OPEC+, along with the UAE.
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Hostility between the Biden administration and the Saudis is not new. Ahead of the July visit, the U.S. media attributed the tensions between Biden and MBS to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a “journalist” and Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer who had a relationship with Osama bin Laden. After his inauguration, Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah regime” and was under tremendous pressure to punish MBS based on intelligence reports that he had ordered Khashoggi’s murder.
The obvious goal of Biden’s visit was to beg for more oil production. The administration wanted to continue the same not-in-my-backyard policy that has failed so miserably in Europe following the war in Ukraine. Even then, relations were tense. A former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, said Biden was arriving for his visit as a “much-diminished president.” He also called out the administration’s hypocrisy on fossil fuels:
As an example, on energy issues, he [Biden] came in with a policy to stop completely fossil fuel usage not only in the United States, but worldwide, and now he is finding himself having to rely on fossil fuels as a means of meeting the energy shortage that has come about, not only because of the Ukraine war, but also because of U.S. policy itself that shut down pipelines and stopped issuing … discovery of oil on U.S. soil.
Ahead of the trip, Biden said he would not meet with MBS. However, the crown prince made it his business to be the president’s escort nearly everywhere he went. There was even a fist bump between the two men that left the staffs at the New York Times and MSNBC positively bereft. Team Biden also stated that the president directly blamed MBS for Khashoggi’s murder during their meetings. The Saudis denied it happened.
Could the conflict over Khasshogi add personal animus to the relationship? Sure. But the UAE has no dog in the fight over Khashoggi’s murder. The Sunni Muslim world’s beef is with Biden’s foreign policy. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the most influential nations in that sphere. They are doing their best to punish Joe Biden politically for the Biden administration’s obsession with sucking up to the regime in Iran and offering the mullahs the moon and the sun to sign an ineffective nuclear deal. It is no secret that rising gas prices will hurt Democrats electorally, and OPEC+ has all the power to make them go up.
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There were reports that Team Biden made a full-court press ahead of the OPEC+ meeting. The Biden administration was in a panic ahead of the meeting because of the proximity to the midterms. The problem is obvious, and anyone who has taken Negotiations 101 can explain it. The Saudis have all the leverage. The Biden administration needs oil. Team Biden has no backup plan if OPEC+ won’t provide it because they want to maintain their ridiculous energy policy.
Biden could do one of two things to stop getting played by petro dictators. First, he could put an end to the negotiations with Iran and support the current widespread protests against the regime. He would not be negotiating with Iran if he were honestly concerned with human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and Ukraine, as he claims. Ending the farce of the nuclear deal would improve relations across the Middle East and allow the expansion of the peace deals started under President Trump.
However, in half a century, Joe Biden has not gotten a single foreign policy decision correct. So, if he insists on negotiating with the world’s largest state sponsor of terror and wants gas prices to go down, he will need to unleash American energy, as Trump did. Of course, he won’t do that either since his domestic policy batting average is only slightly better than the zero he gets on foreign policy.
So the Saudis will keep f***cking with Joe Biden because his foreign and domestic policy portfolio allows them to. And while it may hurt Democrats at the ballot box, it will come out of your bank account too.
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