Commentary
Those waggish stickers we’ve been seeing at gas pumps, with President Joe Biden pointing to the inflated price, saying “I did that,” won’t be going away any time soon now that OPEC is cutting global oil supplies by two million barrels a day. But too few realize that this White House’s foreign policy is as responsible for consumer pain at the pump as its big-spending domestic policies are.
Is it likely that if asked, John Q. Public would think that the right man to send to Saudi Arabia to conduct aggressive oil diplomacy is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, who last year was being talked up as a possible U.S. ambassador to Israel, and who, working in Barack Obama’s State Department, had failed in negotiations between Israel and Lebanon on the issue of access to Mediterranean natural gas reserves? And would Mr. Public be surprised to hear that two weeks after meeting with the Saudis, this aide—Biden energy security adviser Amos Hochstein—would tell Bloomberg News, “I did not walk away with that understanding” that the Saudis would impose such a large oil export reduction, then grinningly add, “but that’s two weeks ago.”…