Unnecessary Evil

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 14, 2022

 

Joe Biden was faced with a multiple-choice question about Mohammed bin Salman:

 

A. Son of a bitch

B. Our son of a bitch

C. Son of a bitch we don’t really need

 

President Biden seems to think that the answer is “B,” that the Saudi potentate is a necessary evil — a reliable partner, at least in the short term, in a world distressed by high energy prices that are contributing to (but that are by no means the sole cause of) destructive inflation. That inflation rate in the United States is now just a little bit north of 9 percent, and while Joe Biden is about as sharp as a doorknob these days, the fog isn’t quite thick enough that he doesn’t know how bad all those “double-digit inflation” headlines are going to be for him if the rate ticks up nine-tenths of one percentage point.

 

There is a long and rich history of foreign-policy “realism” in the United States, one that was a bedrock of intelligent thinking on the right during the Cold War, the simplest version of which goes something like this: You don’t get to choose your friends, only your enemies. During the Cold War, we would have preferred a world full of Washingtons and Hamiltons, but we had a world with Francos, Pinochets, and Batistas on one side and the Soviet-led worldwide communist enterprise on the other, and we generally cast our lot in with the right-wing strongmen over Moscow’s marionettes — with the Contras over the Sandinistas, and with the mujahideen over the Soviets themselves. We did this with varying degrees of moral and political enthusiasm and with varying degrees of transparency. Many decisions and alliances that would be nearly impossible to defend on a case-by-case basis added up, strange though it may seem, to a defensible strategy — to the thinking of many realists, the only defensible strategy.

 

Over the years, the United States has done horrible things in the pursuit of necessary — and noble — ends. Did you know that our government built replicas of German worker-housing complexes in the Utah desert in order to perfect the art of firebombing them? In isolation, that looks like the worst inhumanity; in the context of a war against Nazi Germany, it looks like cold-eyed prudence.

 

One necessarily makes allowances for necessary evil.

 

But who is to say that an alliance with the Saudi regime — a groveling alliance at that — is, in fact, necessary?

 

If you want to make a case for a grand strategy of using the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs as a cat’s paw against the ambitious ayatollahs in Tehran, then that might be something worth considering; it is, in fact, a strategy that Washington has pursued in a desultory fashion for years, and the Biden administration has, in its halting and tepid way, continued pursuing it, trying to persuade our Gulf allies to work toward more integrated cooperation against the Iranian nuclear threat.

 

But the Biden administration is not really orchestrating a grand alliance against Iran. President Biden has, in fact, just voiced his personal re-endorsement of the nuclear-weapons agreement negotiated by the Obama administration with Tehran — a deal that empowered the Iranian regime rather than constraining it. In the process, he’s blasted the Trump administration for walking away from the deal, calling the decision a “gigantic mistake.” Joe Biden’s focus is not on the Middle East but on gasoline prices in the United States, one of the most painful expressions of the destructive inflation that threatens the electoral prospects of Biden’s party in this winter’s midterm elections and beyond. Biden had, in fact, promised to isolate the Saudi regime back when he was running for president, and turned tail on that promise only in the face of domestic political pressure. He now hopes to persuade MBS to increase Saudi oil production, being too much of an economic illiterate to appreciate that the Saudis do not actually have much capacity to increase output and that their doing so would be likely to have only a very small effect on U.S. gasoline prices.

 

There is a country that has the ability to ramp up petroleum production in a way that would be significant for the United States: the United States.

 

The United States is, in fact, already the world’s largest petroleum producer. For perspective, if the United States were to increase its oil output by 10 percent, Saudi Arabia would have to increase its output by 28 percent to match the increase — and would have to increase its output by about 35 percent to match the total U.S. output. That’s simple-enough arithmetic: A relatively small change to a bigger industry may have a larger total impact than a relatively large change to a smaller industry.

 

But the United States also has serious constraints. It does not have very much “spare capacity” as the industry typically defines it — untapped resources that can be brought online within 30 days and sustained for at least 90 days. And its total refining capacity has been declining for years, for a variety of reasons: Expensive and cumbrous regulations have made some U.S. refineries unprofitable, Democratic talk about eradicating fossil fuels in toto has scared off capital, and subsidies for biofuels have encouraged some refineries to convert to those subsidized fuels in search of better profit margins.

 

Refining capacity matters because our cars, trucks, and electricity plants do not run on crude oil — they run on refined fuels. What consumers need is not lots of crude oil but lots of gasoline, diesel, heating oil, etc. Consumers also need those refined fuels to be close at hand. The Biden administration and the Obama administration before it have put a boot on the neck of pipeline construction and other infrastructure projects necessary to bring fuel from the places where the refineries are to the places where the people are. So great are the disincentives at play that much of the gasoline produced by Gulf Coast refineries ends up being exported to nearby Mexico: There isn’t enough pipeline to get it efficiently to consumers in the Northeast urban centers, and the Jones Act — a protectionist policy meant to serve the purposes of union bosses and politically connected interest groups that were very big a century ago but no longer quite exist — makes it economically impractical to serve coastal cities by means of tankers.

 

In the course of his 50-year political career, Joe Biden has made it clear what he believes in: not much, and nothing that is not subject to immediate renegotiation following the slightest shift in the political currents. Biden presents himself as a moderate and centrist, but he is hearing footsteps on his left and is not about to do anything to encourage ramping up petroleum production in Texas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and other parts of the United States blessed with rich energy supplies — not if doing so puts him at odds with the ideologically narrow environmentalists and the well-connected green-energy grifters who dominate the Democratic Party culturally and financially. The energy endowments of the United States are a gift of nature, and our inability to make full use of them is unnatural — it is artificial scarcity created by bad policy and unrealistic ideology.

 

It was the regime of Mohammed bin Salman that murdered Jamal Khashoggi and that continues to commit other atrocities. And American green ideologues are, with their imbecilic sentimentality, helping to sharpen his knives.

 

So really, the right answer is: C. MBS is a son of a bitch we really don’t need. If he appears at the moment to be a necessary evil, it is only because Washington has, through years of bad choices, made him seem like one.

 

There are real environmental costs to any kind of energy production, whether you are drilling for gas or building dams for hydroelectric power. You wouldn’t believe how much poison — and how much petroleum — it takes to manufacture solar panels. There are always tradeoffs and calculations to be made: If you care about carbon-dioxide emissions, then it is very difficult to conclude that replacing coal-fired electricity with gas-fired electricity is not a marked improvement (we have found it so in the United States), even if gas is not perfect from an emissions point of view. If, on the other hand, you take an ideological view that fossil fuels are wicked per se, then you cannot make that tradeoff — because your calculation is a moral one rather than an empirical one having to do with greenhouse-gas emissions. But if you are making a moral calculation, then you should include the Saudi regime in your equations — because the world still actually runs on fossil fuels, irrespective of what the radical ideologues wish were the case. And if Democrats in 2022 cannot bear the current price of gasoline — if their leading figure is willing to throw over his former moralistic commitment to isolating the Saudi regime — then it is entirely unrealistic to expect Democrats to be willing to bear the real-world costs of meeting the demands of “Green New Deal” ideologues. Politicians who cannot live with $6/gallon gasoline are not going to be able to live with $22/gallon gasoline — much less with power outages, fuel shortages, or rationing.

 

The goal of the environmental movement in the United States vis-à-vis the energy industry should be to see to it that U.S. firms that produce fuels and electricity do so according to the very highest practical environmental standards. That means getting into the nitty-gritty details of recycling wastewater from gas wells and dealing with the artificial financial disincentives to nuclear power, rather than indulging in cheap political grandstanding about the entirely fictitious tradeoff-free energy economy awaiting us in the sunlit uplands of some theoretical green utopia. That means hard policy work sustained over years, not path-of-least-resistance campaign work to be abandoned after the next election.

 

The benefits of taking a more intelligent approach to U.S. energy production would be environmental, economic, and — crucially — geopolitical. One of them would be enjoying the option of treating the Saudi regime as what it is: not a necessary evil, but an unqualified evil, or at least not the kind of evil to which the president of the United States of America must go begging, hat in hand, every time the prices posted at 7-Eleven inconvenience him politically.

 

There may be other reasons to engage in the distasteful business of cooperating with the Saudi caudillo and his henchmen, but a shortage of oil doesn’t have to be one of them. Mohammed bin Salman is not our son of a bitch, and the sooner we recognize that fact, the sooner we’ll be free to deal with our energy problems in a way that is more purposeful and less pathetic.