Thomas McArdle
THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com.
Deflated Diplomacy
Inflation is the least of the repercussions of Biden’s incompetent diplomacy
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hen President Barack Obama received his Nobel Peace Prize less than 11 months after his inauguration in 2009, the young, new president with close to zero foreign policy experience correctly made a point of defending the practice of dealing with thuggish regimes. Human rights, Obama said in Oslo, “must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach—condemnation without discussion—can carry forward only a crippling status quo.” The first example Obama chose to cite: “In light of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors, Nixon’s meeting with Mao [in 1972] appeared inexcusable.” Not only has President Joe Biden selectively defied his former boss’s exhortation, but his administration’s diplomatic ham-handedness toward a less-than-pristine U.S. ally has helped that same communist China’s aims toward global domination. Inflation months ago became much worse than the Biden administration, in its wishful thinking, believed possible. One way to lessen inflation might be to get the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase production. But how do you do that when you’ve diplomatically dissed OPEC’s dominant member, Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest, most profitable oil exporter, for the brutal 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, carried out within the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul and conducted by Saudi agents? The sight of 36-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his shorts at his palace by the sea was a signal to keep things mellow. Yet, at this inaugural meeting with the de facto Saudi ruler last September, Biden
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national security adviser Jake Sullivan, boy-faced at 45, proceeded to practice the ill-advised “satisfying purity of indignation” and bring up Khashoggi. Not surprisingly, he got shouted at by the youthful crown prince—who also told him that the United States’ wishes that OPEC boost its oil production wouldn’t be happening.
Just how much ‘satisfying purity’ will Biden and his band of diplomatic blunderers feel when they realize that, with global dominance at stake, they’ve been shooting in the wrong direction? During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he was “not going to, in fact, sell more weapons” or provide “subsidies” and “material” to Saudi Arabia, and that he would “make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.” Not content with that, Biden accused the Saudi royal family of “murdering children.” We can be sure that no Beijing or Moscow diplomat has ever botched private meetings with Salman by scolding him regarding Khashoggi; their regimes both have their own Khashoggis. First of all, Biden is reviving a significantly worse version of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which Saudi Arabia knows will fast-track a nuclear-armed Iran. Demonstrating the devastating ripple effects that U.S. ineptitude can inadvertently set in motion, Saudi Arabia earlier this year began active talks with communist China to shift to conducting, at least partially, its oil sales to China in yuan instead of U.S. dollars, a change that could cause other oil-producing countries to follow suit, China now boasting the world’s largest economy.
Saudi Arabia, whose biggest trading partner is China, is a key player in Beijing’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which seeks to extend China’s economic dominance throughout the world, often through debt-trap diplomacy. Nineteen Arab countries have now agreed to BRI construction projects. China has long been selling weapons to Saudi and is apparently helping the kingdom build its own ballistic missiles. In the wake of the European Union imposing a phased oil embargo on Russia over its aggression against Ukraine, boosting the global price of oil even further, “OPEC+,” which includes Russia, will increase production by only 432,000 barrels per day in June, despite repeated pleas from the Biden administration for more. Is it any wonder amid all this that the leader of the free world could not even arrange a phone call with Salman, or with United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan? Now, Biden is reportedly seriously mulling a visit to Saudi Arabia in hopes of securing a face-to-face meeting with the crown prince he called a child murderer. It’s more likely that such a trip will be used to humiliate Biden and America, with Salman gleefully standing him up. Real leadership by the world’s lone superpower recognizes that evil is to be found in corridors of power all over the world. In defense of liberty, it weighs and evaluates the evils, in the end unavoidably dealing with, even sometimes allying with, thugs. With China, Russia, and Iran to contend with, Biden ineptly aimed his ire at, as far as American interests go, a lesser evil. Just how much “satisfying purity” will Biden and his band of diplomatic blunderers feel when they realize that, with global dominance at stake, they’ve been shooting in the wrong direction?
