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Page added on October 26, 2022
U.S. Officials Had a Secret Oil Deal With the Saudis. Or So They Thought.
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As President Joe Biden was planning a politically risky trip to Saudi Arabia this summer, his top aides thought they had struck a secret deal to boost oil production through the end of the year — an arrangement that could have helped justify breaking a campaign pledge to shun the kingdom and its crown prince.
It didn’t work out that way.
Biden went through with the trip. But earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and Russia steered a group of oil-producing countries in voting to slash oil production by 2 million barrels per day, the opposite of the outcome the administration thought it had secured as the Democratic Party struggles to deal with inflation and high gas prices heading into the November elections.
The move led angry Biden administration officials to reassess America’s relationship with the kingdom and produced a flurry of accusatory statements between the two governments — including a charge by the White House that Saudi Arabia was helping Russia in its war in Ukraine.
Lawmakers who had been told about the trip’s benefits in classified briefings and other conversations that included details of the oil deal — which has not been previously disclosed and was supposed to lead to a surge in production between September and December — have been left fuming that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman duped the administration.
This account is based on interviews with American officials and officials from Gulf Arab nations, as well as Middle East experts with knowledge of discussions between the two nations.
What happened over the last half-year is a story of handshake agreements, wishful thinking, missed signals and finger-pointing over broken promises. Far from rebuilding a relationship with a leader Biden had once pledged to treat as a “pariah” after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the outcome has been another low point in America’s tumultuous ties with Saudi Arabia.
The episode is also a revealing example of how Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of its ambitious and often ruthless crown prince, appears eager to shed some of its longtime reliance on the United States, with Crown Prince Mohammed trying to position Saudi Arabia as a powerhouse of its own.
American officials said that, even days before the OPEC+ decision, they had received assurances from the crown prince there would be no production cuts — and when they learned of the Saudi reversal, they made a futile last-ditch push to change minds in the royal court.
The Saudi Energy Ministry said in a statement that “the kingdom rejects these allegations and stresses that such mischaracterizations made by anonymous sources are entirely false.”
The ministry added, “The decisions of OPEC Plus are reached by the consensus of all members and determined solely by market fundamentals, not politics.”
White House officials admit they were angered and surprised by what they said was a Saudi about-face, but insist their overall strategy to lower energy costs is working.
At the same time, U.S. officials are bracing for another potential price surge in December, if a European embargo on Russian oil goes into effect and the Saudis refuse to increase oil production to make up for the anticipated reduction in supply. The officials say that would be a sure sign that the Saudis were helping the Russians by undermining the American and European-led plan.
“While we clearly disagreed with the OPEC Plus decision in early October, we recognize the importance of continuing to work and communicate with Saudi Arabia and other producers to ensure a stable and fair global energy market,” said Amos Hochstein, Biden’s energy envoy.
Even some of the president’s staunchest supporters have called the episode an example of the administration sacrificing principles for political expediency — and having little to show for it.
“There’s now a level of embarrassment as the Saudis merrily go on their way,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Biden administration officials began planning in the spring for the president to make a summit stop in Saudi Arabia while also visiting Israel over the summer. They knew such a trip would bring criticism.
But some of the president’s aides saw both short- and long-term benefits for the trip and had quietly tried to repair the relationship. They said it was important to work with the kingdom on the Yemen war and Iran, and to expand Israel’s acceptance in the region. More immediately, they believed, the trip could shore up a Saudi commitment to convince OPEC to increase oil production as Russia’s war in Ukraine had led to surging global fuel prices.
Leading proponents of the visit, including Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the top National Security Council official for Middle East policy, met during the spring with Crown Prince Mohammed and his advisers. American officials said that in May, they reached a private oil deal with the Saudis that had two parts.
First, the Saudis would accelerate an OPEC+ production increase of 400,000 barrels per day already planned for September, moving it to July and August. Then the Saudis would get the cartel to announce a further production increase of 200,000 barrels per day for each month from September to December of this year.
On June 2, OPEC+ announced they would move up the production increase scheduled for September — fulfilling the first part of the secret deal.
That same day, the White House announced Biden would soon make a trip to Saudi Arabia.
The price of oil was slowly dropping by the time Biden arrived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on July 15 for his meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed and other Arab leaders. The image of the American president bumping fists with the Saudi crown prince he once vilified endures from the trip, but behind the scenes, White House officials believed they had at least shored up Saudi commitments on a number of fronts.
Saudis officials seemed eager to demonstrate to the Americans that they had delivered on their commitments — during the summit, they gave members of Biden’s delegation a chart showing oil prices had fallen to $101 per barrel, down from more than $120 per barrel after the war in Ukraine began.
The Americans came away from the summit with the belief that the agreement was on track and that Crown Prince Mohammed was satisfied. But in Riyadh, top Saudi officials were privately telling others that they had no plans for further meaningful oil production increases.
American officials say they believe that Crown Prince Mohammed was particularly influenced by a high-level Sept. 27 meeting in which Prince Abdulaziz, the energy minister, argued that cuts were needed to keep prices from plummeting. The U.S. officials said they learned Prince Abdulaziz asserted that the Saudi government would lack the resources to fund economic diversification projects at the heart of Prince Mohammed’s domestic agenda.
Some U.S. officials believe that the Russians influenced the Saudi about-face, pointing to Prince Abdulaziz’s strong working ties with top Russian officials close to Putin.
Saudi officials vehemently denied marching in lock step with Russia and said they have viewed themselves as a neutral mediator in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Some American officials said that an answer to whether Riyadh has truly cast its lot with Moscow will come on Dec. 4, when OPEC+ is scheduled to meet again.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
10 Comments on "U.S. Officials Had a Secret Oil Deal With the Saudis. Or So They Thought."
makati1 on Wed, 26th Oct 2022 11:02 pm
I love it when another US “partner” gives the finger to Amerika. The Saudis have had enough of Uncle Sam’s lies and abuse. They realize that Amerika is going down and they are shifting to the growing part of the world, the East.
Duncan Idaho on Thu, 27th Oct 2022 6:48 pm
Some good news:
Conservative Policies Are Associated with Early Death, Study Finds
Getting these idiots out of the gene pool will help homo sapiens have a higher IQ.
https://truthout.org/articles/conservative-policies-are-associated-with-early-death-study-finds/
makati1 on Thu, 27th Oct 2022 7:36 pm
Truthout: “These media sources are moderate to strongly biased toward liberal causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information that may damage liberal causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. See all Left Bias sources.
Overall, we rate Truthout strongly Left Biased based on story selection and political positions that favor the left. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to publishing a false story and promoting anti-GMO propaganda.”
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/truth-out/
Try a more realistic, unbiased source if you want intelligent people to believe your assertions, Duncan.
Theedrich on Fri, 28th Oct 2022 9:31 am
The Washington crime syndicate is a murder cult. Its high god is the god of death and annihilation who promises global dominance masked as virtue. It has been so successful in destroying and plundering the rest of the world, that it is now seeking to make the entire planet its own private death camp, run by zillionaire psychopaths with freaks, perverts, clowns and mental defectives as their well-paid tools.
The millions of people crushed, killed, impoverished and othewise devastated by the U.S. in the name of goody-goodness mean nothing to the church of mendacity ruling America and are never mentioned in the U.S. media. Its current proxy war against Russia is an excuse to kill Germany and western Europe in a different manner than the way that it destroyed Serbia, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. (Never mind slaughtering Syrians while robbing them of their wheat and oil, or genociding Vietnam and North Korea earlier.)
Due to the syndicate’s blind blood lust, we are now nearing nuclear war to prove the regime’s “moral superiority” over the rest of humanity. The American masses could not care less about their impending extinction, since the regime’s media organs smother them with assurances that they enjoy divine favor. Cognitive dissonance is not allowed, and is prevented by cancel culture — that is, banning all forms of politically disfavored facts and opinions on social media.
Meanwhile, the entire Anglo-American economic system (led by the subculture whose name one must never mention) is in serious decline, obscured by all manner of financial gyrations, temporary fixes and official promises to build back better for the deluded herd.
Which is unable to understand why it is facing Armageddon.
𝖁𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖘 𝖛𝖔𝖘 𝖑𝖎𝖇𝖊𝖗𝖆𝖇𝖎𝖙.
makati1 on Fri, 28th Oct 2022 4:28 pm
BTW: It looks like Ursula von der Liar will be the next WEF government whore to go. What is it with all these stupid bitches suddenly in places of power. None even know anything about world events. Put them back in the kitchen!
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 28th Oct 2022 5:11 pm
mak we know Truthout is left biased. We’ve known since 2001. Clearly you have not been paying attention because people have been linking to Truthout here and elsewhere for many years.
Oh and that site you linked to mediabiasfactcheck.com, why should I believe them? Who granted them authority?
Is any site bias free? How many online sites does mediabiasfactcheck.com rate as neutral bias?
Every news organization, brick & mortar or online, has a political bias of one degree or another, so your pointing out that Truthout has a left bias is no big whoop and condemning their reporting because they lean left is one of the oldest and most common logical fallacies there is – Genetic Fallacy:
“An informal fallacy where a claim is accepted or rejected based on the source of the evidence rather than on the quality of the evidence. The fallacy shifts focus onto the origin in an attempt to impugn or bolster the argument instead of analyzing the argument itself. This fallacy is similar to the ad hominem fallacy as both shift attention away from the argument in order to avoid having to evaluate it on its own merit.”
https://www.intelligentspeculation.com/blog/genetic-fallacy
Copy-N-paste garbage from boomer. I’m guessing this lazy copy N paste shit is because you do not posses the intellectual ability to make an argument against the evidence suggesting Conservative Policies Are Associated with Early Death? Or were you just not into it?
What evidence do you have mak that counters the claim that Conservative Policies Are Associated with Early Death? Doo you have anything other than a lame link to the bias ratings site?
I already shared a couple of links last month that are full of data indicating that American life expectancy is going down while in civilized countries it is still increasing (for now). What are the chances that part of the reasons Americans are dying younger is connected to bad policy?
America Was in an Early-Death Crisis Long Before COVID
Even before the pandemic began, more people here were dying at younger ages than in comparably wealthy nations.
“He calls such people “missing Americans.” And he calculates that in 2021 alone, there were 1.1 million of them.”
“For every year from 1933 to 2021, they compared America’s mortality rates with the average of Canada, Japan, and 16 Western European nations (adjusting for age and population). They showed that from the 1980s onward, the U.S. started falling behind its peers. By 2019, the number of missing Americans had grown to 626,000. After COVID arrived, that statistic ballooned even further—to 992,000 in 2020, and to 1.1 million in 2021. Were the U.S. “just average compared to other wealthy countries, not even the best performer, fully a third of all deaths last year would have been prevented,” Bor told me.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/us-life-span-mortality-rates/670591/
Americans die younger in states run by conservatives, study finds
More liberal policies on environment, gun safety, labor, economic taxes and tobacco taxes associated with lower mortality
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/27/life-expectancy-us-conservative-liberal-states
It’s no secret that US republicans hate anything resembling socialism unless it’s handouts & bailouts to their corporate masters or for themselves like FEMA flood subsidies or salary and benefit increases for themselves. In truth the US is as much a welfare state as any country, only repugs find it repugnant of any of the national wealth going to the poorest Americans…cuz they are good Christians-N-stuff. That’s why they always sponsor bills like making it a crime to feed the homeless in certain areas. Areas that are convenient for both the homeless and the volunteers who are trying to feed and cloth them.
Equally mean policies and insults characterize today’s Republican Party
Cruelty has become the defining characteristic of modern Republican policy-making.
“Former President Donald Trump returned to Washington this week for what was billed as “a policy speech” at the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy group friendly to Trump staffed by multiple people who served in his administration. Not surprisingly, the policies he touted are just like the ones he backed when he was president and which Republicans are increasingly embracing in state legislatures around the country: punitive, authoritarian and mean.”
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-s-homelessness-plan-typical-cruel-gop-policy-n1297605
Why It’s Illegal to Feed the Homeless in Cities Across America
https://www.newsweek.com/illegal-feed-criminalizing-homeless-america-782861
If instead of being a lazy & deceitful cunt mak, if you had read the Truthout article and the link to the supporting study within it you would have instantly known that throwing up a link to mediabias web site as your only response would make you look like a world class cunt-face fuck-tard.
Truly you have great stamina. You never tire of making yourself look stupid.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275466
Conservatives all over the western world are not the biggest fans of the poor, but many American Conservatives take it to a different level. It’s a strange burning hate they have for the poor.
My guess is every poor & homeless person is a stark reminder of the failure of their true religion – Capitalism. Thousands of tents filled with American born homeless on the streets of most American cities. Why? Clearly it’s the economy stupid. Failing economy and failing capitalism.
What’s funny is the Soviet propaganda videos claimed all of America looked like a big ghetto, but that was the 60’s 70’s filmed in black ghettos and was clearly a massive overblown propaganda trick – BUT today it’s true. It’s the real.
I’ve obviously long known Truthout is biased and it’s become more so for the last5-6 years, but I still read articles from there from time to time. It all depends on the topic and author, plus I have big boy pants on and I know how to read between the lines.
If I was going to refuse to read any websites because of their bias – Alternet & Zerohedge are two giant turds stinking up the internet. Emotional button pushing trash. Diseased Rage porn.
Biden’s hairplug on Sat, 29th Oct 2022 8:12 am
Oh dear, the British and their geopolitical blunders:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-war-russia-putin-nuclear-weapons-kyiv-latest-b2213261.html
“Russia accuses British Navy of blowing up Nord Stream pipeline”
I believe the Russians.
So, how to retaliate?
Easy. The UK has no gas storage, they rely completely on the goodwill of the EU. The UK now repairs the damage. Until completion, no gas from the EU.
Probably and hopefully they ignore this, so we finally have our desired split between white Euros (Paris-BerlinMoscow) and Anglo-Zionist mongrels. Brexit good for something after all.
In the EU there are everywhere demonstration against the cost of living crisis and demands for lifting sanctions. Note: the weather is still good.
Major geopolitical change is coming, the world of George Orwell:
White Eurosphere
Mongrel Anglosphere-Oceania
China
Islam
FamousDrScanlon on Sat, 29th Oct 2022 2:08 pm
clog, last night a crazed lunatic broke into my house brandishing hand tools & demanding to see Nancy.
OMG just when you think the Americans can’t get any nuttier….
The sub tribe known as the Repugs are so desperate they have enlisted the help of 2 of America’s dumbest niggars, Herschel & Kanye, to represent their ‘values’ & win votes.
Don’t look for things to make sense – you’ll only hurt yourself:(
makati1 on Sun, 30th Oct 2022 4:13 am
Famouse, have you spent 4-5 hour a day, for the last 10+ years following world events? I have. Being retired is a plus. I know most online sites are biased. That is the “1984” world we live in.
If you read enough from different countries and viewpoints, you soon get a fair picture of reality. I trust authors that have life experience or actually live in the locations they write about. Most are my age and have experienced the same events I have. They are not snotty nosed, just out of college, kids writing what they are told by the establishment for a paycheck.
Not living in the Western “box” makes seeing reality much easier. I don’t watch TV or any online “news”. It’s all fluff entertainment for the masses. Nuff said.
FamousDrScanlon on Sun, 30th Oct 2022 3:40 pm
If that’s true, all I can say is you must be the world’s slowest reader.