Our friends, the Saudis, appear to be playing geopolitical Keep Away with Presidentish Joe Biden and America’s energy security — with an assist from Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
You remember how to play Keep Away, don’t you? Two or more kids toss a ball back and forth, with a third kid in the middle trying to intercept the ball. Oftentimes, the kid in the middle didn’t actually want to play. Two bigger kids would come along, snatch his ball, and force the smaller kid into a game he couldn’t win.
Biden is the smaller kid. The ball is oil prices. The bigger kids are Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Putin.
Last month I reported that I’d been thinking of Biden while “filling my Jeep’s smallish 15-gallon gas tank to the tune of $50 when it still had a couple of gallons left.” Prices were way back up (and up more since then), despite Biden “emptying our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to force down gas prices in time for the midterms,” with the promise to “fill ‘er back up once prices dropped low enough.”
“Yeah, about that,” I concluded, “The SPR is probably never going to be refilled.”
What I didn’t know until this morning is that’s true in part because of actions taken by Riyadh and Moscow.
Biden released oil from the SPR at record rates in 2022. He ordered so much oil released (some of which ended up in China) that he cut our strategic reserves in half. It hasn’t been so low since 1983.
The White House plan, such as it was, was to replace the 250+ million barrels that Biden siphoned off once oil prices were “at or below $67 to $72 per barrel.”
ASIDE: President Trump asked Congress for money to top off the SPR in 2020, when COVID lockdowns forced oil prices down to about $24. “We’re going to fill it right up to the top — saving the American taxpayer billions and billions of dollars, helping our oil industry,” Trump said at the time. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused. Oil now costs more than triple what it did then.
Here’s where it gets funny, assuming you’re in a dark enough mood to laugh at our misfortune.
On Tuesday, the White House announced that they would not, after all, buy six million barrels to replace a tiny fraction of what Biden pissed away — because prices mysteriously shot up too far above his $72 target.
Recommended: Well, Biden Screwed Us Forever on Another Damn Thing
Guess what researchers at The Kobeissi Letter noticed.
“On June 9th,” they tweeted, “the US refilled 6 million barrels of the SPR, still well below the 250 million+ that have been drained. At the time, oil prices were right around $70 which is in the price zone that the US wants to refilled [sic] the SPR.”
“Promptly thereafter… Saudi Arabia and Russia extended recent crude oil production cuts,” they wrote, and this “is the 6th time that OPEC has taken action when oil prices hit the $67 to $72 zone this year. Could this be a coincidence?”
No, because “Every single time oil prices fell to $67-$72,” according to Kobeissi, “OPEC took action. Most recently, on July 3rd, Saudi Arabia and Russia agreed to voluntarily extend production cuts. Now, the US can no longer fill the reserve, AGAIN.”
The real kicker is that as recently as this May — that’s the most current data available — Biden was still tapping the SPR. Reserves were down about another nine million barrels from April.
Just like the cruel kids picking on the smaller one, bin Salman’s game of Keep Away might be personal. Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned last year: “Biden calling Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ state is an ‘enormous mistake.’” And indeed, when Biden went hat-in-hand last year to beg the Saudis to pump more oil and reduce prices, they laughed and laughed — all the way to the bank.
The irony is that the Saudis were our silent Cold War partners in toppling the Soviet Union.
While the ’80s triumvirate of Western leadership — Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II — deservedly get most of the credit for ending detente and winning the Cold War, the Saudis did their bit, too. They led OPEC into dropping oil prices below the USSR’s much higher production costs. Oil was (and still is) Moscow’s major source of income, and Riyadh helped us break the Evil Empire’s bank.
Now we’re in Cold War II but the Middle East is realigning away from the West and towards Moscow and Beijing. That’s because they see Biden — vain, feckless, and shortsighted — as the weak kid they get to torment in the world’s biggest game of Keep Away.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member