What’s Really Behind the OPEC+ Price Hike?

A great deal of politics, domestic and international, is theater, meant to elicit responses from the public more than to advance specific goals. By no means does that describe all politics and diplomacy; often that theater is mixed in with the actual policy or tactical decisions being made. But the point of the theater is to allow decision-makers to divorce political consequences from their policy decisions.

It is that performative quality that is driving the current news cycle about Saudi Arabia and OPEC+. The framing of the issue — that the Saudis have decided to side with Russia in its fight with the West — is backward and misleading. It is a sad mark of where we are in the United States that the discourse among liberals and, indeed, even much of the harder left is accepting this framing unquestioningly, despite its obvious incompatibility with the facts.

The Biden administration is presenting the recent decision by the OPEC+ cartel as a Saudi decision to support Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. That mischaracterizes the action. Of course, OPEC+’s decision to cut production of oil by 2 million barrels per day (bpd) is going to be a boon to Russia at a time when it is suffering serious setbacks in its war on Ukraine.

But that’s not why the Saudis are doing this. While they are surely aware that this will help…