Republican war hawks share blame with Biden for high gas prices
We need a party that will put America first
Joe Biden and congressional Democrats say the Russian invasion of Ukraine is to blame for high gas prices. Republicans in turn blame Biden for hostile actions he has taken against domestic oil production. Neither party is telling the whole truth.
Republicans have a point about the cold water Biden has poured on domestic energy production that made America a net exporter of oil and gas combined during the Trump administration. Biden and his ecowarriors on the Left came into office and cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline and later put a halt to new oil permits on federal land and national waters. They also pressured banks and investment funds to join the Net Zero Banking Alliance—a United Nations vehicle to browbeat financiers into not funding new oil, gas, and coal production. American oil production is 1.4 million barrels per day less than it was at the Trump peak.
But that is not the reason that Americans according to AAA were paying an average of $4.24 for a gallon of regular as of Tuesday, up from $3.53 a month ago and $2.88 a year ago. The reason for that is sanctions the Biden administration has placed on Russia with eager Republican support.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine has not disrupted any real oil production or distribution facilities. Ukraine produces very little oil and gas, and Russia is still capable of producing just as much as it did before the war.
The price of oil was already high at $93 per barrel when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. It closed the next day—a Friday—at $92. However, that weekend the Biden administration announced the most sweeping and sloppily designed financial sanctions in history. They included seizing about $400 billion in U.S. securities the Russian central bank held—an unprecedented expropriation against a country with which we are not at war. The price of oil spiked.
While the sanctions against Russian banks supposedly exempted the purchase of oil and gas, the scope of the sanctions scared most banks and governments from touching products from the third-largest producer of oil on Earth. Oil peaked at a closing price of $124 on March 8. It has declined a smidge since then as some Russian oil has reached the market to consumers in places like India and China. But oil remains elevated at a price well above $100—a level all but certain to cause a recession in America.
Is this the price we must pay for defending Ukraine? If it is, I say it isn’t worth it.
Why is our foreign policy elite once again saddling Americans with the cost of policing the world while putting us at ever-greater risk? The European Union has a population of 400 million and a $21 trillion economy. Russia has a population of just 144 million and a $1.5 trillion economy. Clearly Europe can afford to defend itself and should take the lead in defending Ukraine if it feels such a step is critical.
But undaunted from costly failures in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the bipartisan foreign policy elite in Washington is trying again to place America in harm’s way. Congress even put another $14 billion on the national credit card—money we don’t have—to aid Ukraine without any real debate of the risks of war with Russia. That amount could have bought us a whole new aircraft carrier, 180 additional F-35 fighter jets, or four new Virginia-class attack submarines that could be stationed in the Pacific to deter China, which actually threatens America.
Some Republican hawks want to go much further by sneaking into a war with Russia through a no-fly zone over Ukraine. They are now trying to force the provision of fighter jets to Kiev—a step that might convince nuclear-armed Russia that it is in fact at war with the United States.
Many Americans are sympathetic to the suffering of Ukrainians. However, there are no vital U.S. interests at stake in that country, which was part of Russia mostly for hundreds of years until it became independent in 1991. Why must Americans again shoulder the burden of world policeman for what looks from afar like an internal war among eastern Europeans involving two corrupt, repressive governments?
In an address to the U.S. Congress last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in demanding America sacrifice even more. The obvious difference between those assaults and today’s conflict is that they involved direct foreign attacks on the United States.
Most Americans think the United States should defend itself aggressively in situations like that or when our clear and vital interests are attacked. Absent those situations, we should defend and promote democracy by serving as an example, not as the world police. We need to get our own house in order and refrain from again allowing others to make their problems into our problems.
It’s too bad that neither political party seems to believe this, and that both are complicit in today’s high gasoline prices and inflation.
Simon & Whiton
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Jimmy Lai
Jimmy is perhaps the most prominent Catholic layman in the world and is rotting in a Hong Kong prison for being the publisher of an independent newspaper that the communist authorities shut down. If you are in the swamp next Tuesday, come to the new America First Policy Institute for a screening of The Hong Konger, which tells the story of Jimmy’s life from when his mother put him on a fishing boat for Hong Kong to when he rose to the top of two different industries and took on the Chinese Communist Party. Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee is giving welcoming remarks. The RSVP link is: https://americafirstpolicy.com/20220329
