OPINION:
President Biden went to Europe at the end of last week and gave a speech about how free peoples need to win the generational war against autocracy to close the visit.
Unfortunately, for Mr. Biden and his administration, the speech was just words. Their actions concerning the interlocked problems of energy and the Russian invasion of Ukraine continue to exacerbate both problems.
Let’s go through a quick list of what the president has not done with respect to the war in Ukraine.
He has not imposed secondary sanctions on those who do business with Russia. He has not sanctioned or even spoken harshly to any European country that continues to import energy from Russia (looking at you, Germany). By paying hard currency for Russian energy while at the same time providing arms and materiel to Ukraine, the EU nations are essentially funding both sides of this war.
If Mr. Biden understood any of that during his formulation of this conflict as one between free people and autocrats, he didn’t let on.
The absurd didn’t stop there. He managed to make it through the entire trip without committing to additional weapons or even assisting in transferring a few dozen aging MiGs from Poland to Ukraine; he left that up to other countries. So much for the struggle against autocracy.
This epic struggle between freedom and autocracy will apparently not involve those NATO members (France, Spain, Italy) who have yet to commit to meet the alliance’s defense requirements (2% of annual GDP).
Mr. Biden’s confusion also reached into the energy world. On Friday, the United States and the EU announced an agreement under which the EU will buy 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas from the United States to replace gas from Russia. That’s less than 10% of the amount of natural gas that the EU imported from the Russians just last year.
What is not in the agreement — or in anything publicly considered by the EU — is the idea that the Europeans should produce oil and natural gas from their own lands.
Of course, the statement also referenced the usual propaganda about the mythical energy “transition” and “our shared net-zero goal.” Team Biden and the Europeans can’t seem to understand that no one will invest in oil and natural gas as long as policymakers keep talking about this nonsense like it’s legitimate.
At the same time, back in the states, Team Biden managed to introduce even more uncertainty into the permitting of pipelines, and the SEC proposed an entirely new and expansive disclosure regime requiring companies to guess what sorts of horrible things the government is going to do to them in the name of addressing climate change.
Mr. Biden’s energy policy, such as it is, would empower communist China, which currently owns or controls about 80% of the materials needed to make batteries for electric vehicles and solar panels. That should make you wonder about the whole freedom versus autocracy theme.
Mr. Biden is an oratorical dumpster fire. On this trip alone, he made three material misstatements — telling the 82nd Airborne they would soon go into Ukraine, saying that a Russian chemical weapons attack would be met with an “in-kind” response, and creating new policy in announcing that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”
That said, he was right in his speech at Warsaw when he said: “It’s not enough to speak with rhetorical flourish, of ennobling words of democracy, of freedom, equality, and liberty. All of us, including here in Poland, must do the hard work of democracy each and every day.”
Mr. Biden should start that hard work by focusing his team and the Europeans on winning the war in Ukraine and constructing true, meaningful and lasting energy independence both on the continent and here in the states.
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