Recent reports in the UK’s Telegraph and Financial Times suggest that Biden is demanding that Ukraine stop attacking Russia’s energy infrastructure because he’s afraid of the impact of high energy prices on the presidential election.
“Mr Biden reportedly raised concerns with Kyiv that the bid to damage Russia’s oil production capacity could have repercussions for his re-election campaign,” The Telegraph reported.
“Nothing terrifies a sitting American president more than a surge in pump prices during an election year,” The Financial Times quoted a former White House energy adviser as saying.
Similar reports have started to appear in other European media outlets including Politico.
Whatever one thinks of the Russia-Ukraine War, Joe Biden’s re-election prospects are an illegitimate and impeachable reason to be conducting a war or any foreign policy.
And this is not a unique event.
Many suspect that Biden’s turn against Israel was driven by a threat to his election prospects from Hamas supporting voters in Dearborn, Michigan, as well as radical leftists in his party.
And this is part of a pattern that has weakened America.
Biden emptied the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) ahead of the midterms to buy support for his party in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine war and ahead of what would become the Hamas war. Those actions left America vulnerable and potentially changed the course of both wars.
The decision to empty the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was not done for national reasons, but personal political ones, and while politicians routinely bribe voters with public money, this particular bribe could end up losing several wars while sending America into an energy crisis.
Biden’s obsession with the impact of oil prices on his time in office led him to provide sanctions relief to Iran even while suppressing domestic energy production. By propping up energy production in enemy nations like Iran and Russia, Biden was able to give his leftist environmentalist base what it wanted, crushing domestic energy production, while ensuring what he thought would be a cheap supply abroad that he could always rely on for elections.
But the Saudis responded to Biden’s sellout on Iran by goosing energy prices, and Russia and Iran took the influx of cash and used it to launch their own wars with disastrous results.
Biden’s support for Ukraine was premised on protecting the flow of Russian oil and gas. Russians and Ukrainians could die in large numbers on both sides, but energy prices couldn’t spiral too far out of control because that might actually affect Biden’s reelection campaign. But as Ukraine struggled on the battlefield, Russia’s energy infrastructure became an easy and obvious target, and Biden’s obvious political agenda became more easily apparent.
Now the European press is talking about it even if it’s still too explosive for the American media.
Democrats widely support both the Ukraine war and ending oil production which when taken together lead to high energy prices. Unable to find a way to combine low domestic production, low energy prices and the Russia-Ukraine war, Biden turned to an easier target: Israel.
Unlike Ukraine, Israel is less popular with Biden’s base. And the Biden administration may be hoping that forcing an end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas will also convince Iran to step down its regional attacks, including by the Houthis in Yemen, and simplify the process of talking the Iranians and even the Saudis into a nuclear deal that will lower energy prices.
Biden has already been negotiating to trade the Saudis nuclear capability for cheap oil.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that “Saudi Arabia has told the White House it would be willing to boost oil production early next year if crude prices are high”.
This was not just a Saudi proposal, but an explicit request from the Biden administration.
“Two top White House officials, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, flew late last month to Saudi Arabia, where they emphasized that soaring petroleum prices would make it harder to win support in Washington, the officials said,” the Journal reported.
Biden had previously demanded that the Saudis postpone a production cut ahead of the midterms. The Wall Street Journal had reported that, “the one-month delay requested by Washington would have meant a production cut made in the days before the election, too late to have much effect on consumers’ wallets ahead of the vote.”
And Biden had even tried to bribe the Saudis with a fortune in taxpayer money, promising to “buy oil on the market to replenish Washington’s strategic stockpiles if the price of Brent, the main international benchmark, fell to $75 a barrel”.
“There’s going to be some consequences for what they’ve done,” Biden had threatened Saudi Arabia on CNN for failing to go along with his demand for election day oil price rigging.
Biden’s foreign policy of bribing enemies is unnecessary because he has a simple and straightforward way to lower oil prices: restart domestic production.
Instead, Biden broke the law and illegally tried to block domestic energy production. When that failed, his administration deliberately sabotaged oil and gas lease auctions. After putting a former eco-terrorist in charge of the Bureau of Land Management, he tried to restrict offshore drilling to only three sites and his administration was then sued by the energy industry for using “every tool at its disposal” to stop drilling.
How do we square Biden’s militant campaign against domestic drilling with his obsession with low energy prices abroad? There’s no environmental argument for such an incoherent policy.
Biden isn’t acting out of any consistent set of political principles, but personal election needs.
“I can guarantee you if I am president, there will be no offshore drilling,” Biden promised during his presidential campaign. His leftist backers demand an end to domestic energy production.
And yet he also knows that if energy prices are high, American voters will turn on him.
Biden sold out the American energy industry to win over environmentalists and then sold out our national security to get cheap oil. Rather than just a single ‘quid-pro-quo’, Biden’s foreign policy has been one long string of ‘quid-pro-quos’ that have led to international wars and terrorism.
Once Biden had given away our best leverage in the energy market, domestic production, Iran, Russia, the Saudis and other players used that to their advantage to create the crisis we’re in.
This mess is not simply the result of “misguided idealism”, “incompetence” “naivete” or any of the other excuses used to downwardly define this foreign policy deviancy, but the personal political calculations of a corrupt and greedy president who wanted to lie to everyone.
Biden thought that he could trick, appease and use everyone all at the same time. That he could have his energy cake and eat it too. Instead, Americans are stuck with high energy prices, low reserves and two wars that are not likely to end any time soon. All of this happened because the man who wanted to be president lacked the courage to tell his party that they couldn’t have it all.
The Biden presidential campaign was a contradictory mess. It promised Democrats that they could have a version of Obama who would appeal to older white moderate Democrats. It claimed that two incompatible versions of the party could be fused together uniting traditional Democrats and leftist socialists in one man who would combine the best of FDR and JFK.
Biden’s hypocritical corrupt energy policy shows how he tried to make that work and the price that America and the world are paying for it.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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