fist <\/a>bump, in the hope of increased production and lower oil prices, despite US intelligence findings that the kingdom\u2019s de facto ruler was behind the 2018 murder of the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist\u00a0Jamal Khashoggi.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhite House spokesperson Karin Jean-Pierre said: \u201cIt\u2019s clear that Opec+ is aligning with Russia with today\u2019s announcement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A statement from the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, said the president was \u201cdisappointed by the shortsighted decision \u2026 while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think it is a mistake on their part. And I think it\u2019s time for a wholesale re-revaluation of the US alliance with Saudi Arabia,\u201d the Democratic senator Chris Murphy told CNBC. \u201cI just don\u2019t know what the point of the current alliance is, if we have to work so hard to get the Saudis to do the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Khalid Aljabri, whose father, Saad, is an exiled senior Saudi intelligence official, argued that whatever the impact, part of the intention behind Riyadh\u2019s participation in the Opec+ decision was about US politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPrevious monarchs were able to optimise between maximising Saudi oil revenue while aligning production policy with the interests of their western security guarantors, mainly the US,\u201d Aljabri said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c[Prince Mohammed] is different. Unlike his predecessors, he is an astute observer of domestic US politics and completely understands that high gas prices and inflation can swing the result of an election away from an incumbent president and his party.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He described the move \u201cas an assault on democracy and election interference while allowing Putin to perpetuate his assault on Ukraine\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the anger in Washington, experts on Saudi Arabia and the oil market questioned how much impact the decision would have on a bilateral relationship that has already become threadbare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think the Saudis think there\u2019s much that the US administration can do to register their discontent in a meaningful way, and I don\u2019t think the US expects that Saudi is going to go against Opec discussions for their interests,\u201d said Kirsten Fontenrose, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. \u201cSo I think the Saudis know that the US isn\u2019t going to be pleased with this, but they don\u2019t much care.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As part of his overtures to Riyadh over the summer, Biden had approved significant arms sales to Saudi Arabia but after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, Nato allies that have provided arms to Kyiv and hope to replenish their arsenals have jumped ahead in the queue under alliance rules. So Biden\u2019s promise of arms sales has not been fulfilled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ed Hirs, an energy expert at the department of economics at the University of Houston, also said that the west did not provide the vaccines that Saudi Arabia was seeking at the height of the pandemic and the country suffered a high death rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf you step back, the United States does not have much to offer at this point and the Saudis don\u2019t see any reason to provide any help,\u201d Hirs said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is possible that the production cut will not have a big impact on prices. Despite surpassing predictions earlier in the week of cuts of 1m to 1.5m barrels, several Opec producers are already producing below their quotas, so the actual cut could be closer to 900,000 barrels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Opec nations do not want to be in a position of providing too many barrels to a global economy that goes soft on them,\u201d Hirs added. \u201cIt\u2019s not a break with the west because relations were broken already. We didn\u2019t help them very much through very difficult times.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Biden administration and its supporters have reacted angrily to the Opec+ decision to cut oil production, seeing it as a rebuff to the US president\u2019s efforts to improve relations with Saudi Arabia. The White House made clear that it viewed\u00a0the deci by the production cartel,in which the plus sign represents the inclusion of Russia, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":26289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,12],"tags":[6728,5522,183,5178,11967,8700,5262,7234,11606,913,5196,911,5494,5491,10483,6546,5910,5252,5205,7458,5342,10742,8719,5382,7693,12085,4802,5441,1761,8159,5485,10381,5424,3805,12103,10390,71,8383,3457,5217,8160,1364,5655,6082,7333,5180,9262,214,6348,11331,2354,6571,2982,3954,10415,594],"class_list":["post-26288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-world-news","tag-alliance","tag-arms","tag-assault","tag-biden","tag-bilateral","tag-cartel","tag-cut","tag-death","tag-democracy","tag-democratic","tag-economy","tag-election","tag-energy","tag-gas","tag-houston","tag-inflation","tag-initiative","tag-invasion","tag-july","tag-khashoggi","tag-kyiv","tag-market","tag-middle-east","tag-murder","tag-national-security","tag-nations","tag-nato","tag-oil","tag-oil-prices","tag-opec","tag-pandemic","tag-petrol","tag-politics","tag-president","tag-price","tag-prices","tag-putin","tag-revenue","tag-russia","tag-russian","tag-saudi","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-security","tag-senator","tag-summer","tag-ukraine","tag-united-states","tag-university","tag-us","tag-us-president","tag-washington","tag-white","tag-white-house","tag-will","tag-work","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52254,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26288\/revisions\/52254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}