Last week, we were wondering: What could be more pathetic than the sight of President Joe Biden begging OPEC to increase oil production, just to make up for the U.S. and Canadian oil production that he had gone out of his way to impede from the moment he took office?
Believe it or not, that was not a hypothetical question. There is, in fact, something even more pathetic than Biden’s desperate request for a foreign oil cartel to spare him motorists’ anger and a political backlash.
That would be the oil producers’ response to Biden, which roughly translates to “drop dead.”
At the very moment Biden’s administration was being convulsed by its humiliating strategic failure in Afghanistan, the international oil cartel and the adjacent producers known as “OPEC-plus” added insult to injury with their defiant answer. As Reuters reported it, the major oil producers (including Russia) let word slip that they “believe oil markets do not need more oil than they already plan to release in the coming months.”
On the day Biden was elected, Brent crude oil was under $40 per barrel. Today, it is nearly $75 per barrel. Likewise, average gasoline prices are currently 48% higher than they were the day Biden squeaked out his narrow, no-coattails win over former President Donald Trump.
Biden’s request of OPEC, as we noted previously, evinced a belief that environmentalists in the United States are easily fooled — that he can placate them by restricting domestic production while simultaneously calling for more imported oil that releases exactly the same amount of carbon dioxide when burnt.
But the oil-producing nations’ response to Biden is also evidence of how much respect and diplomatic prestige he has cost the U.S. in the last week.
Biden’s gross bungling in Afghanistan, followed by his appalling attempt on national television Monday to blame everyone but himself, points to a president who has apparently lost touch with reality.
Why should oil-producing countries fear or respect a president who reassured the public that he had everything under control, only to turn around and, through sheer incompetence and lack of basic planning, strand more than 10,000 U.S. citizens behind enemy lines in Afghanistan?
In many ways, Trump set a low bar for presidential conduct. His intemperate social media presence was a constant source of irritation for many people, both during his 2016 presidential campaign and his four years in office.
But it has taken the feckless Biden administration just seven months to make Trump seem like a steady leader who, for all his faults, at least had a clue about how to advance American interests.
Perhaps Democrats will remain in denial about just how weak Biden has become, but the reality has not been lost on OPEC.
