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Josh Marshall thinks it's time to consider dumping the Saudi-US alliance; Biden on National Security [1]
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Date: 2022-10-12
Well, it's not like we didn't try to make nice.
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall weighs in on the Biden administration’s signaling that it is re-evaluating U.S. — Saudi ties in light of the clear signal OPEC has sent by cutting back production of oil.
Yesterday Rep. Ro Khanna (D) said we should send a message to the Saudis that they change their oil quota decision or face a cut in the military spare parts their U.S.-manufactured army requires to function. This is in the context of new hardball from the White House, which is apparently sending a comparable message. Just a moment ago I saw a tweet from Sen. Dick Durbin (D) saying that it’s time for the U.S. to ditch the U.S.-Saudi alliance. These are things we’ve heard for ages from backbenchers in the House or others distant from the centers of power. They’re close to unheard of for people at the center of power.
emphasis added
Republicans will loudly proclaim that Trump made the U.S. energy independent, and that Democrats have crippled our domestic oil production — just another day at the GOP Big Lie factory. As Marshall notes, Saudi ruler MBS loves him some Trump — and vice versa.
The other wrinkle in the equation, perhaps far more than a wrinkle, is that the Saudi Royal family, which always generally preferred Republican government in the U.S., is now all in for the Trumpite GOP and to some great degree with the Trump family. The royal family literally invested $2 billion in Trump’s son-in-laws new investment fund, even though no one thinks his experience or credibility merited anything like that. I’ve always been cautious about basing big decisions about Saudi Arabia around the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It was an awful, awful thing. But the centrality of that event has been vastly amplified by how integrated Khashoggi was in the D.C. policy world and at The Washington Post. But the Saudis, under current management, don’t act like friends. They also play favorites in internal U.S. politics. There are lots of reasons entirely apart from the Khashoggi story to reconsider things.
Marshall concludes with a really good question:
Alliances have a long half life to them. It’s all deeply embedded in relationships, assumptions about various U.S. interests in the region. Nothing changes overnight. But there are still watersheds. And this may be one of them. The U.S. should act accordingly. What, Saudi Arabia, have you done for us lately?
Some additional thoughts
The Saudis loved us and our Patriot missiles when Saddam Hussein was tossing SCUD missiles around. But… once Hussein was gone, it was a different story. Now the Saudis are lining up with Vladimir Putin.
Republicans make a big deal about energy independence — which in Fox Newsspeak means staying addicted to fossil fuels and just cranking up domestic production. It’s a fool’s game and one that is killing us and the planet. We need to get off fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia has given us a pretty good reason to speed up the transition. Will we make use of it?
There’s still a chance we could get a national rail strike. Would that be the other shock we’d need to get moving? We could do a tremendous amount to change the energy picture if we got serious about making railroads work for Main Street instead of Wall Street. Solutionary Rail is a blue print for getting carbon out of transportation while harnessing the untapped wind and solar potential that could power the whole country — if we also use rail corridors for the backbone of a true national grid. The technology is there — all we need is the political will to get started.
The oil embargo of 1973 was a clear warning about the dangers of relying Saudia Arabia to protect U.S. interests. Fifty years later we have just gotten our noses rubbed in it again. Without the weapons they get from us, they’d have a hard time continuing the war in Yemen. If Russian actions in Ukraine seem pointlessly brutal, it’s not all that different from the way the Saudis are pursuing their war.
To point out the absurdities of realpolitick, which has underlain U.S.-Saudi ties for decades, Saudi Arabia is pursuing war in Yemen for fear it would become an Iranian ally on their border. Saudi Arabia is lining up with Russia because authoritarian oil oligarchs like to stick together, not to mention raking in more oil profits. But rising oil prices also help Iran — up to a point. Russia is cozying up to Iran for drones even while it competes with it for oil sales. And if Iran ever gets nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will come running back to the U.S. — and Cthulhu only knows what Israel will do.
The sooner the U.S. can get off fossil fuels, the sooner we can get out of the trap realpoliticks has us caught up in. Between this, the war in Ukraine, and the climate crisis in general, it just might be time to give up on politics as usual (which it hasn’t been since 2016 and even earlier) and start acting like we are in a war for the future.
Speaking of which...
The Biden Administration has put out a National Security strategy which, according to The NY Times,
Biden’s National Security Strategy Focuses on China, Russia and Democracy at Home President Biden declared on Wednesday that the overwhelming challenge for the United States in the coming years would be “outcompeting China and restraining Russia” while focusing on restoring a damaged democracy at home. In his 48-page national security strategy, which every new administration is required to issue, Mr. Biden made clear that over the long term he was more worried about China’s moves to “layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy” than he was about a declining, battered Russia. More than six months after the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military appears less fearsome than it did when the first drafts of the document circulated in the White House in December. “Russia and the P.R.C. pose different challenges,” Mr. Biden wrote, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China. “Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown.”
So much for foreign enemies; what about domestic?
President Donald J. Trump declared that the era of counterterrorism was being replaced by a revival of superpower competition against what he called “revisionist” powers, though he usually ignored his document’s declarations about the value of NATO and other alliances. Mr. Biden’s strategy is notable for its erasure of the distinctions between domestic and foreign policy; it argues that the source of U.S. strength will come from a reaffirmation of the nation’s democratic traditions. “As Americans, we must all agree that the people’s verdict, as expressed in elections, must be respected and protected,” the document says, a delving into the workings of American democracy that is absent from previous strategies. It then discusses moves against “domestic terrorism” and says “America will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections.”
emphasis added
Read the full National Security Strategy here. (PDF file) While The NY Times article hardly mentions climate, the actual strategy document references the word climate 63 times, including this section starting on page 27:
Climate and Energy Security The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time. A warming planet endangers Americans and people around the world—risking food and water supplies, public health, and infrastructure and our national security. Without immediate global action to reduce emissions, scientists tell us we will soon exceed 1.5 degrees of warming, locking in further extreme heat and weather, rising sea levels, and catastrophic biodiversity loss. Global action begins at home, where we are making unprecedented generational investments in the clean energy transition through the IRA, simultaneously creating millions of good paying jobs and strengthening American industries. We are enhancing Federal, state, and local preparedness against and resilience to growing extreme weather threats, and we’re integrating climate change into our national security planning and policies. This domestic work is key to our international credibility, and to getting other countries to up their own ambition and action. The United States is galvanizing the world and incentivizing further action. Building on the Leaders’ Summit on Climate, Major Economies Forum, and Paris Agreement process, we are helping countries meet and strengthen their nationally determined contributions, reduce emissions, tackle methane and other super pollutants, promote carbon dioxide removals, adapt to the most severe impacts of climate change, and end deforestation over the next decade. We’re also using our economic heft to drive decarbonization. Our steel agreement with the EU, the first-ever arrangement on steel and aluminum to address both carbon intensity and global overcapacity, is a model for future climate-focused trade mechanisms. And we are ending public finance for unabated coal power, and mobilizing financing to speed investments in adaptation and the energy transition. Events like Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine have made clear the urgent need to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. We know that long-term energy security depends on clean energy. Recognizing this transition will not happen overnight, we will work with partners and allies to ensure energy security and affordability, secure access to critical mineral supply chains, and create a just transition for impacted workers. Through collaborative work in the International Energy Agency, the U.S.-EU Task Force on European Energy Security, the Clean Energy Ministerial and Mission Innovation, Power Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy and Climate Cooperation, and other critical fora, we will drive concrete action to achieve an energy secure future. Many low-income and lower-middle income countries need assistance, especially for mitigation and adaptation efforts. That is why we are aiming to provide over $11 billion in annual climate funding, and are pressing partners to increase their own contributions. We are embedding climate change into the investment strategies of our development finance institutions, including through PGII, and working with international organizations like the World Bank and regional development banks to do the same.
Damn it’s good to have adults running things again. Let’s keep that going on.
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