REMEMBER BUSH BIG OIL AND THE SAUDI REGIME'S INVASION OF AMERICA SEPT 11
FUK THE PIG!
Prince Abdulaziz also aggressively condemned a piece of legislation in the U.S. Congress known as the “NOPEC” bill that would strip sovereign immunity from OPEC+ member nations to allow for antitrust law prosecution or lawsuits against OPEC+ member state oil companies in America.
Saudi Arabia: We Will Not Sell Oil to Countries that Impose a Price Cap
Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman enthusiastically opposed policies to cap oil prices – apparently in reference to Western price caps on Russian oil – in an interview on Tuesday and asserted that Riyadh would not sell oil to any country that capped its oil’s price.
Prince Abdulaziz also aggressively condemned a piece of legislation in the U.S. Congress known as the “NOPEC” bill that would strip sovereign immunity from OPEC+ member nations to allow for antitrust law prosecution or lawsuits against OPEC+ member state oil companies in America.
The NOPEC bill resurfaced following OPEC+ – a Saudi-led coalition of OPEC member nations plus Russia – deciding to dramatically cut production by 2 million barrels a day last year. The production cut followed a visit by far-left President Joe Biden to Saudi Arabia to meet with de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a visit many believed was an attempt to convince Saudi Arabia to increase, not cut, its oil production.
In his interview on Tuesday, with the outlet Energy Intelligence, Prince Abdulaziz insisted that the oil production cut would remain in place through 2023.
Energy Intelligence asked the energy minister for his opinion on the NOPEC bill and a cap on the price of Russian oil imposed by the European Union in December. The EU, alongside the G7 economic coalition, agreed to limit Russian oil prices to $60 a barrel and under. The member nations to the agreement vowed to ban imports of Russian oil above that price. Oil prices are currently hovering above $70 a barrel for most common crude supplies.
In February, Russia announced it would cut its oil production by 300,000 barrels per day in response to the policy to maintain profits, spiking global crude oil prices.
The price cap is an attempt to pressure the Russian government to cease its ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine. The Russian government first invaded Ukraine in 2014, colonizing its Crimean peninsula, to little global response. Nearly a decade later, in February 2022, leader Vladimir Putin announced a “special operation” to oust democratically elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the grounds that he was allegedly a “Nazi” and, thanks to the ouster of pro-Russian former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Zelensky was benefitting from a “coup” and not duly elected. Zelensky, the “pro-Russian” candidate in the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election, defeated incumbent Petro Poroshenko, who succeeded Yanukovych. Poroshenko did not contest the results of the election.
File/Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud to the G20 Summit on September 4, 2016 in Hangzhou, China. (Getty)
“NOPEC legislation and extending the price cap are very different, but their potential impacts on the oil market are similar. Such policies add new layers of risk and uncertainty at a time when clarity and stability are most needed,” Prince Abdulaziz, the energy minister, told Energy Intelligence.
The NOPEC bill, if passed, would “cause global supply to fall severely short of future demand,” the prince predicted. “The same holds for price caps, whether imposed on a country or a group of countries, on oil or any other commodity.”
“This will lead to individual or collective counter-responses with intolerable consequences in the form of massive volatility and instability,” he continued. “So if a price cap were to be imposed on Saudi oil exports, we will not sell oil to any country that imposes a price cap on our supply, and we will reduce oil production, and I would not be surprised if others do the same.”
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IN) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) returned the NOPEC bill to committee debate last week, arguing that the global oil cartel was exploiting its control over the market to keep oil product prices high.
“The oil cartel and its member countries need to know that we are committed to stopping their anti-competitive behavior,” Grassley said.
The return of the NOPEC bill followed the historic announcement by OPEC+ in October to cut production by 2 million barrels a day, sending oil product prices soaring. The move followed a visit by Biden to Riyadh in June and conversations with the crown prince. While Biden insisted that he was visiting Saudi Arabia – which he promised to turn into a “pariah” while running for president – for reasons beyond asking the country to increase oil production and potentially bringing down skyrocketing gasoline and diesel prices in America, Biden never clarified what this mystery alternative reason for the visit was.
Reports following the OPEC+ announcement claimed the Saudis decided to support the production cut in part because Biden’s trip went so poorly. The Wall Street Journal claimed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman openly mocked Biden for being elderly and confused. The Biden administration later admitted that Biden had attempted to convince the Saudi government to at least oppose oil production cuts until after the American midterm elections in November 2022.
The White House responded to the OPEC+ production cut by accusing Saudi Arabia of attempting to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an accusation the Saudis expressed great offense to.
“The Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would first like to express its total rejection of these statements that are not based on facts, and which are based on portraying the OPEC+ decision out of its purely economic context,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asserted at the time. “Any attempts to distort the facts about the Kingdom’s position regarding the crisis in Ukraine are unfortunate, and will not change the Kingdom’s principled position, including its vote to support UN resolutions regarding the Russian-Ukrainian crisis.”
Zelensky issued a statement thanking Saudi Arabia for its support in the war shortly after the White House’s comments.
In his interview on Tuesday, Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz once again defended the 2-million-barrel-a-day production cut and warned the world not to expect any production increases from OPEC+ anytime soon.
“China has just started to rebound after extended [coronavirus] lockdowns, but the duration for recovery is still unclear. Economic recovery is generating inflationary pressures, and this could prompt central banks to intensify their efforts to tame inflation,” the prince said. “The interplay of these and other factors limits clarity, and the sensible and only course of action in such an uncertain environment is to maintain the agreement we struck last October for the rest of this year and that is what we intend to do. We need to ascertain that the positive indicators are sustainable.”
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The Sobering Significance of the Saudi-Iran Rapprochement
At a certain point, even Netanyahu will have to recognize the harsh reality.
At a certain point, one has to recognize reality. That includes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In Israel on March 11, 250,000 Israelis came out to protest the judicial overhaul that the new government has proposed. The total population of Israel is only nine million; at least 250,000 Israelis — and on other days other Israelis may have shown up to protest — constitute one-thirty-sixth of that population. In America an equivalent number of protesters would be ten million. Yet the Prime Minister continues to reject all pleas for a compromise; he seems to believe that if he just holds on, the listing ship of state will somehow right itself, even as the protests rage. He may think that those opposed to the judicial overhaul will, despite having turned out in such astonishing numbers, and having convincingly demonstrated that they represent what might be called the noisy majority, will simply decide to stop their protesting. He’s wrong. The sooner he persuades, or more likely threatens, his rightest coalition partners Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir into accepting a compromise, the faster the domestic wounds can heal.
Israel simply cannot afford more domestic conflict on this scale. The country has to deal with the murderers of such terror groups as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, and the Lion’s Den. It has to worry about the 140,000 rockets and missiles that the terror group Hezbollah has stored in hideouts all over southern Lebanon, ready to be launched at Israel whenever Iran gives the go-ahead. It has to worry about Iran racing toward the finish line of being able to manufacture nuclear weapons. If it decides to do so, according to Western experts, Tehran can manufacture up to three bombs “within 12 days.” The IDF has not been left untouched. Hundreds of Israeli reservists have announced that they will not show up for training as long as “judicial reform” is still being considered. A total of 37 reserve pilots out of the 40 members of an elite Israel Air Force (IAF) unit announced that they will absent themselves from a scheduled training the first week in March in protest of the government’s judicial overhaul.
On March 6, all living former Israeli Air Force Commanders signed an urgent letter to the Prime Minister and Defense Minister. The ten retired Major-Generals, from Dan Tolkovsky (1953-1958) to Amikam Norkin (2017-2022), warned Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that the “political and constitutional crisis” may develop into a “clear and present danger to Israel’s national security.” They asked Netanyahu “stop and find a solution.” When he comes back from Italy, he must at once start negotiations with the center parties that, in the past, had formed coalition governments with Netanyahu’s Likud. He has to distance himself from Ben Gvir and Smotrich and be prepared, in good faith, to compromise on judicial overhaul. The protests have now entered their tenth week. At this time of maximum peril, with Iranian threats to annihilate the Jewish state, and the possibility of Tehran being able to manufacture the weapons to do so, Israel cannot afford such violence and disunity.
Netanyahu has another reason for worry. For two years he has repeatedly held out the promise of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. He has intimated that when this happens, it will have been the fruit of his personal connection to the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Now his claim has been undermined by the announcement that Saudi Arabia and Iran have agreed to resume the diplomatic relations that were ended seven years ago, when the Saudis executed a prominent Shi’a cleric, Nimr al-Nimr. “Iran-Saudi ties won’t hurt Israeli normalisation bid, official says,” Reuters, March 10, 2023:
Israel’s bid to normalize ties with Saudi Arabia will not be hurt by Riyadh’s rapprochement with arch-foe Iran, a senior Israeli official was quoted as saying on Friday.
There has been no official response from the Israeli government on the Chinese-brokered restoration of ties announced Friday.
The senior Israeli official was quoted by Israeli diplomatic journalists traveling with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Rome, as saying that the rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran began about a year ago and included reciprocal visits.
That “senior Israeli official” who was “traveling with Prime Minister Netanyahu” to Rome was, I am sure, none other than Netanyahu himself. After his years of predicting that Saudi Arabia was close to deciding to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel, he now finds Saudi Arabia heralding closer ties not with Israel, but with Israel’s mortal enemy, Iran.
Netanyahu wanted to downplay for the reporters the significance of the event, assuring them that Israel had known that Saudi Arabia and Iran had been holding secret talks over the past year. And he refused to admit that his predictions about the Kingdom moving closer to Israel had been wrong. He lay the blame on the Bidenites, claiming that the Saudis had now responded to Iran because they had concluded that the West’s position towards Iran had weakened.
Nonetheless, it would not impact Israel’s bid to establish diplomatic ties with Riyadh, the official said.
Really? This rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran will have no bearing on whether the Saudis normalize ties with the Jewish state? That seems most unlikely. I’d call that whistling in the dark.
The determining factor for Israel was not the formal nature of Saudi-Iran ties but rather the West’s position toward Tehran, the official was quoted by public broadcaster Kan and Reshet 13 News as saying.
Netanyahu has said he wants full diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia, expanding on normalization deals reached with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain on 2020 under US brokership.
Israel and Sunni Muslim Gulf monarchies share concern over Shi’ite Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and its proxy network. But while Saudi Arabia blessed the UAE and Bahrain pacts, it has stopped short of formally recognizing Israel in the absence of a resolution to Palestinian statehood goals.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called the restoration of ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran an “utter and dangerous failure of the Israeli government’s foreign policy.”
Lapid is right in one important sense. Netanyahu allowed Israeli hopes to soar too high, by his constant suggestions about Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. But Netanyahu is not wrong to claim that the West’s “weakening” stance toward Iran led the Saudis to hedge their bets – just in case Iran becomes a nuclear power – by agreeing to improve ties with Iran. It remains to be seen just how this renewal of Saudi-Iranian ties affects the behavior of both in Yemen. Will the Saudis stop bombing Houthi forces? Or will Iran stop sending aid to the Houthis? It’s hard to see what an end to the country’s long civil war would look like.
After beating centrist Lapid in a Nov. 1 election, Netanyahu returned to power in December at the head of a hard-right government. Lapid had briefly headed a ruling coalition that ousted Netanyahu in a previous election.
Whistling in the dark, Netanyahu downplays the significance of the Saudi-Iran rapprochement, and makes no mention of his disappointment – which must have been considerable – at this volte-face by Saudi Arabia. He told reporters that the Saudi change reflected Riyadh’s unease at the West’s failure to confront Iran, which may well be true. Biden has said repeatedly that Iran will not acquire nuclear weapons “on my watch,” but has yet to make a credible threat of violence, which is what both the Saudi Crown Prince and Netanyahu have been hoping for. Netanyahu brushes off the Iran-Saudi announcement, claiming that all that really matters is how the West chooses to deal with Iran. That’s not quite true; Netanyahu had been hoping for ever closer security ties with Saudi Arabia as the time for an attack on Iran inexorably draws near. Perhaps he had even hoped for Saudi permission to pre-position Israeli bombers on Saudi soil. That seems most unlikely now.
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