And his refusal to exhibit any moral fiber by sanctioning Saudi Arabia over the horrific MbS-engineered torture and killing of US resident journalist Jamal Khashoggi is probably just a ruse to fatten his own pockets by way of unconstitutional foreign emoluments.
To wit:
Trump has it ‘totally and completely backwards’ on Saudi arms sales
The US is not dependent on Saudi oil. Just the contrary. Oil production in the US is on course to produce “OPEC's worst nightmare”:
Texas is about to create OPEC's worst nightmare
When the House of Representatives becomes a Democrat-majority body, the US and the world may be able to learn more about Trump's foreign emoluments and thereby his motivations for his devil's pact with Saudi Arabia. Collusion with the Russians during the election? Obstruction of justice? At the moment, there seems to be nothing more important and pressing than discovering exactly the nature and scope of the unconstitutional foreign emoluments that influence Trump.
To wit:
When President Trump argues that the United States can’t halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the Saudis’ alleged murder of journalist and Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, he’s giving up a key piece of leverage over Riyadh for no reason at all. What’s worse, Trump is also turning one of America’s best strategic assets into a liability, a massive unforced error that could weaken the United States worldwide.
Trump has said repeatedly he doesn’t want to halt -- or even threaten to halt -- U.S. arms sales to the Saudi regime because (he says) it would cost U.S. jobs and hand over a sweet contract to Moscow or Beijing.
“They are ordering military equipment. Everybody in the world wanted that order. Russia wanted it, China wanted it, we wanted it. We got it,” Trump said on “60 Minutes” Sunday. “I don’t want to hurt jobs. I don’t want to lose an order like that.”
Set aside that Trump’s claim of $110 billion of arms sales to Saudi Arabia as announced last year is hugely exaggerated, considering that number mostly refers to deals struck during the Obama administration and new deals that haven’t yet materialized. The significant arms-sales relationship we do have with Saudi Arabia gives us enormous leverage over them, leverage Trump should use to pressure King Salman to reveal what his regime knows about Khashoggi’s disappearance.
Saudi Arabia’s military is already built around U.S. and British defense platforms, meaning they can’t easily switch to Russian or Chinese systems. Riyadh is especially dependent on U.S. arms right now because their bloody war in Yemen requires a constant flow of U.S. munitions, not to mention U.S. intelligence, maintenance and refueling support.
U.S. arms sales are not simply a financial deal or a jobs program; they represent a strategic advantage of the United States. Countries want U.S. Weapons because they are the best. That gives us connections, influence and, yes, leverage over these countries. That’s how arms sales have always worked, until Trump flipped the script.
“The White House seems to be saying that Trump Doctrine is that the U.S. will ignore your human rights abuses, assassinations or war crimes as long as you buy things from us. He’s got it totally and completely backwards,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me. “What’s the point of being a military superpower if we lose leverage when we do business with another country?”
“What the president doesn’t realize is that this makes him look weak and small. World leaders will now know they can act with impunity so long as they are buying American weapons. That’s an insane message to send,” Murphy said. “The United States should never be boxed in because of who we sell weapons to -- countries who buy U.S. weapons should feel enormous pressure to stay on our good side.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made a similar point Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper.
“Arm sales are important, not because of the money, but because it also provides leverage over their future behavior,” he said. “You know … they will need our spare parts. They will need our training. And those are things we can use to influence their behavior.”
Trump has said repeatedly he doesn’t want to halt -- or even threaten to halt -- U.S. arms sales to the Saudi regime because (he says) it would cost U.S. jobs and hand over a sweet contract to Moscow or Beijing.
“They are ordering military equipment. Everybody in the world wanted that order. Russia wanted it, China wanted it, we wanted it. We got it,” Trump said on “60 Minutes” Sunday. “I don’t want to hurt jobs. I don’t want to lose an order like that.”
Set aside that Trump’s claim of $110 billion of arms sales to Saudi Arabia as announced last year is hugely exaggerated, considering that number mostly refers to deals struck during the Obama administration and new deals that haven’t yet materialized. The significant arms-sales relationship we do have with Saudi Arabia gives us enormous leverage over them, leverage Trump should use to pressure King Salman to reveal what his regime knows about Khashoggi’s disappearance.
Saudi Arabia’s military is already built around U.S. and British defense platforms, meaning they can’t easily switch to Russian or Chinese systems. Riyadh is especially dependent on U.S. arms right now because their bloody war in Yemen requires a constant flow of U.S. munitions, not to mention U.S. intelligence, maintenance and refueling support.
U.S. arms sales are not simply a financial deal or a jobs program; they represent a strategic advantage of the United States. Countries want U.S. Weapons because they are the best. That gives us connections, influence and, yes, leverage over these countries. That’s how arms sales have always worked, until Trump flipped the script.
“The White House seems to be saying that Trump Doctrine is that the U.S. will ignore your human rights abuses, assassinations or war crimes as long as you buy things from us. He’s got it totally and completely backwards,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me. “What’s the point of being a military superpower if we lose leverage when we do business with another country?”
“What the president doesn’t realize is that this makes him look weak and small. World leaders will now know they can act with impunity so long as they are buying American weapons. That’s an insane message to send,” Murphy said. “The United States should never be boxed in because of who we sell weapons to -- countries who buy U.S. weapons should feel enormous pressure to stay on our good side.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made a similar point Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper.
“Arm sales are important, not because of the money, but because it also provides leverage over their future behavior,” he said. “You know … they will need our spare parts. They will need our training. And those are things we can use to influence their behavior.”
Trump has it ‘totally and completely backwards’ on Saudi arms sales
The US is not dependent on Saudi oil. Just the contrary. Oil production in the US is on course to produce “OPEC's worst nightmare”:
In less than a decade, U.S. companies have drilled 114,000 [oil wells in the Permian basin of West Texas and a slice of New Mexico]. Many of them would turn a profit even with crude prices as low as $30 a barrel.
OPEC’s bad dream only deepens next year, when Permian producers expect to iron out distribution snags that will add three pipelines and as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day.
“The Permian will continue to grow and OPEC needs to learn to live with it,’’ said Mike Loya, the top executive in the Americas for Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil-trading house.
The U.S. energy surge presents OPEC with one of the biggest challenges of its 60-year history. If Saudi Arabia and its allies cut production to keep prices higher, shale will thrive, robbing them of market share. But because the Saudis need higher crude prices to make money than U.S. producers, OPEC can’t afford to let prices fall.
Cartel Squeezed
So the cartel finds itself squeezed between the-sky’s-the-limit U.S. output and softer demand growth. The 15 members, and allies including Russia, Mexico and Kazakhstan, will discuss the possibility of their second retreat from booming American production in three years when they gather Dec. 6 in Vienna.
OPEC helped create the monster that haunts its sleep. After it flooded the market in 2014, oil prices crashed, forcing surviving U.S. shale producers to get leaner so they could thrive even with lower oil prices. As prices recovered, so did drilling.
Now growth is speeding up. In Houston, the U.S. oil capital, shale executives are trying out different superlatives to describe what’s coming. “Tsunami,’’ they call it. A “flooding of Biblical proportions’’ and “onslaught of supply’’ are phrases that get tossed around. Take the hyperbolic industry talk with a pinch of salt, but certainly the American oil industry, particularly in the Permian, has raised a buzz loud enough to keep OPEC awake.
Price Tumble
“You’ve got an awful lot of production that can come in very economically,’’ said Patricia Yarrington, Chevron Corp.’s chief financial officer. “If you think back four or five years ago, when we didn’t really understand what shale could do, the marginal barrel was priced much higher than what we think the marginal barrel is priced today.’’
That shift makes shale resilient to a price tumble. After touching a four-year high in October, West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, has fallen by more than 20 percent.
[. . . ]
By the end of 2019, total U.S. oil production -- including so-called natural gas liquids used in the petrochemical industry -- is expected to rise to 17.4 million barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. At that level, American net imports of petroleum will fall in December 2019 to 320,000 barrels a day, the lowest since 1949, when Harry Truman was in the White House. In the oil-trading community, the expectation is that, perhaps for just a single week, the U.S. will become a net oil exporter, something that hasn’t happened for nearly 75 years.
OPEC’s bad dream only deepens next year, when Permian producers expect to iron out distribution snags that will add three pipelines and as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day.
“The Permian will continue to grow and OPEC needs to learn to live with it,’’ said Mike Loya, the top executive in the Americas for Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil-trading house.
The U.S. energy surge presents OPEC with one of the biggest challenges of its 60-year history. If Saudi Arabia and its allies cut production to keep prices higher, shale will thrive, robbing them of market share. But because the Saudis need higher crude prices to make money than U.S. producers, OPEC can’t afford to let prices fall.
Cartel Squeezed
So the cartel finds itself squeezed between the-sky’s-the-limit U.S. output and softer demand growth. The 15 members, and allies including Russia, Mexico and Kazakhstan, will discuss the possibility of their second retreat from booming American production in three years when they gather Dec. 6 in Vienna.
OPEC helped create the monster that haunts its sleep. After it flooded the market in 2014, oil prices crashed, forcing surviving U.S. shale producers to get leaner so they could thrive even with lower oil prices. As prices recovered, so did drilling.
Now growth is speeding up. In Houston, the U.S. oil capital, shale executives are trying out different superlatives to describe what’s coming. “Tsunami,’’ they call it. A “flooding of Biblical proportions’’ and “onslaught of supply’’ are phrases that get tossed around. Take the hyperbolic industry talk with a pinch of salt, but certainly the American oil industry, particularly in the Permian, has raised a buzz loud enough to keep OPEC awake.
Price Tumble
“You’ve got an awful lot of production that can come in very economically,’’ said Patricia Yarrington, Chevron Corp.’s chief financial officer. “If you think back four or five years ago, when we didn’t really understand what shale could do, the marginal barrel was priced much higher than what we think the marginal barrel is priced today.’’
That shift makes shale resilient to a price tumble. After touching a four-year high in October, West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, has fallen by more than 20 percent.
[. . . ]
By the end of 2019, total U.S. oil production -- including so-called natural gas liquids used in the petrochemical industry -- is expected to rise to 17.4 million barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. At that level, American net imports of petroleum will fall in December 2019 to 320,000 barrels a day, the lowest since 1949, when Harry Truman was in the White House. In the oil-trading community, the expectation is that, perhaps for just a single week, the U.S. will become a net oil exporter, something that hasn’t happened for nearly 75 years.
Texas is about to create OPEC's worst nightmare
When the House of Representatives becomes a Democrat-majority body, the US and the world may be able to learn more about Trump's foreign emoluments and thereby his motivations for his devil's pact with Saudi Arabia. Collusion with the Russians during the election? Obstruction of justice? At the moment, there seems to be nothing more important and pressing than discovering exactly the nature and scope of the unconstitutional foreign emoluments that influence Trump.