Our Mistakes Have Made Us Reliant On Bad People For Oil.
But We Are Where We Are.
There are people in many corners who are criticizing the Biden administration’s outreach to unsavory, evil regimes with large petroleum reserves. From sworn adversaries in Iran and Venezuela to frenemy tyrants in Riyadh and Doha, Joe Biden is looking for cheap oil and gas. Commentary magazine’s Noah Rothman said it best: Biden is “rewarding tyrants to fight tyranny.” There are three ways to look at the administration’s strategy to reduce the free world’s reliance on Russian oil and gas, and all three have merits to them. Let’s review.
1. The Ukraine war is an excuse for Biden to do what it has always wanted.
This is not far-fetched. The administration’s outreach to Iran and Venezuela is not a product of the crisis. The first major foreign policy initiative of the new administration was restarting arms control negotiations with Iran, and the administration has not been enforcing oil and gas sanctions on Iran.
The administration also eased pressure on the Nicolas Maduro regime last year and allowed for some energy investments. The administration was hoping to make a breakthrough between the regime and the opposition, but Maduro stopped the talks after the U.S. Department of Justice extradited a Maduro ally to Cape Verde.
The handling of Iran and Venezuela mimics the administration’s approach to Russia before the war: A desire to have a stable and headache-free relationship with them to focus on China. Now that Russia is a new burden on the administration, this desire to avoid additional headaches has only increased in the eyes of the administration, as well as the need to access their resources. So the need to do what they always wanted it more urgent.
2. This is the fault of progressive energy policies.
President Joe Biden’s first act in office was killing the Keystone Pipeline, angering Canada, even though the Obama administration’s Department of State had found that the pipeline would have no effect on emissions and climate change. The administration also has been uncooperative in issuing drilling licenses and quite forthright in its desire to move onto green energy. For only the second time since the Great Recession, 2021 witnessed a reduction in domestic production from a previous year. This has, over the past decade, been the top issue on the progressive wish list and impaired the U.S. capacity to produce fossil fuels which the Russians, as well as other terrible regimes like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have benefited from by making up for the deficit and enriching themselves.
Reflexive anti-nuclear-energy sentiments have also prevented a transition to emission-free nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels. Germany shut down its nuclear reactors after the Fukushima disaster. In return, it delegated the risk to Ukraine, which has twelve nuclear reactors and used to be, until the war, an exporter of energy to Europe.
The United States, as well as many other Western countries, have been reluctant to replace fossil fuels with nuclear energy under progressive pressure. This has slowed down the transition away from fossil fuels. But given that no country has yet even come close to having the necessary solar and wind energies to do away with the alternative, these policies have only increased reliance on foreign fossil energy, mostly possessed by grotesque regimes from Venezuela and Russia to any given Middle Eastern dictatorship.
3. This is a necessary compromise.
Earlier into his political career, Winston Churchill was warning about the uncompromisable evil of the Soviet Union. Yet he made that compromise. When the United Kingdom opted to form a wartime alliance with Josef Stalin, he famously said, “if Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Stalin was a great evil, but Adolf Hitler was the greatest of evils and must have been defeated first.
Similarly, the United States formed partnerships and alliances with many dictatorships during the Cold War and even admitted illiberal regimes in Turkey and Greece were early members of NATO, making them treaty allies of the United States, as well as Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea. But in the face of Hitler’s evil, Stalin was an attractive ally. And looking at Stalin, António Salazar didn’t sound that bad.
Now, today, faced with the evils of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the United States needs to again make moral compromises for the greater good.