What have we learned from the Bush administration so far this week?
First: Holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah down on the ranch while pleading for more crude production won't get oil prices down:
"There is no shortage of crude oil," said Adel Aljubeir, foreign affairs advisor to Prince Abdullah. " . . . It would not make a difference if we put an extra 1.5 to 2 million barrels of oil on the market." The price hikes, he said, are a result of a confluence of factors, including: increased demand, limited refinery capacity, a lack of spare production capacity and the fear permeating the market because of the ongoing violence in Iraq. Some oil policy experts agreed there is relatively little Saudi Arabia can do in the short run to lower
oil prices. The country is producing about 9.5 million barrels of oil a day -- close to its nearly 11 million-barrel capacity.
Second: hard-lining Venezuela is about as effective at chest thumping in Cuba's general direction, only Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is sitting on 15 percent of our oil diet... (That means Venezuela, like Saudi Arabia (and for that matter, Russia), holds a whip hand over the U.S. economy, by virtue of the same black gold that built the Bush family fortune.)
American officials, who had chosen to ignore Mr. Chávez through much of last year, now recognize the need for a longer-term strategy to deal with a leader who is poised to win a second six-year term in elections next year.
A multiagency task force in Washington has been working on shaping a new approach, one that high-ranking American policy makers say would most likely veer toward a harder line. United States support for groups that Chávez supporters say oppose the government has been a source of tension in the past. Under the plans being considered, American officials said, that support may increase.
...
"What's happening here is they realize this thing is deteriorating rapidly and it's going to require some more attention," said a high-ranking Republican aide on Capitol Hill who works on Latin America policy. "The current look-the-other-way policy is not working."The United States, he said, is particularly concerned because Venezuela is one of four top providers of foreign oil to the United States. "You can't write him off," the aide said of Mr. Chávez. "He's sitting on an energy source that's critical to us."
A main problem for the United States is that Washington has little, if any, influence
over Caracas. The high price of oil has left Venezuela with no need for the loans or other aid that the United States could use as leverage. Nor does the Bush administration have much support in Latin America, where left-leaning leaders now govern two-thirds of the continent. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to raise concerns about Venezuela in a four-country tour through the region this week. Political analysts say she will have a hard time finding support. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on a recent trip to Brazil, publicly raised concerns about Mr. Chávez. Days later, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, in a meeting in Venezuela with Mr. Chávez and the leaders of Colombia and Argentina, pointedly said, "We don't accept defamation and insinuations against a compañero," meaning a close friend.
Bottom line: the Bush administration appears to have friends only where they are useless to us, and no friends where we badly need them. |
