“ELECTION INTERFERENCE”: OIL PRICE HIKE IS SAUDI ARABIA’S OCTOBER SURPRISE AGAINST BIDEN
WHEN, JUST ONE month before midterm elections, Saudi Arabia announced it would be slashing oil production by 2 million barrels a day, White House officials
called it a “hostile act” and said the administration was “
reevaluating” the Saudi relationship.
Yet experts pointed to the price hikes as more than a geopolitical move. They said it was also a foray by Saudi’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, into U.S. electoral politics: a move by the Saudi-dominated oil cartel OPEC against President Joe Biden and in favor of Donald Trump.
“The Saudis are working to get Trump reelected and for the MAGA Republicans to win the midterms,” Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, told The Intercept. “Higher oil prices will undermine the Democrats.”
MBS’s affinity for Trump is hardly a secret. Trump broke with presidential tradition by paying his first foreign visit to Saudi Arabia’s capital, where he inked a record $350 billion
weapons sale to the autocracy. He also repeatedly defended MBS amid reporting, including by his own CIA, that the crown prince had ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “I saved his ass,” Trump
reportedly said. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone” — referring to three times he vetoed congressional resolutions blocking billions in weapons sales to the Saudis.
EXPERTS SUGGEST THAT MBS’s oil production cut is a targeted attempt to hurt the Democrats’ electoral prospects. “This is MBS’s October surprise,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “This is his election interference. It forces Biden to make a choice: Will he protect America’s democracy and Democratic lawmakers in Congress, or will he triple down on a flawed gamble that says that the U.S. has no choice but to acquiesce to Saudi Arabia to prevent Riyadh from aligning with Russia?”
Khalid Aljabri — son of Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Saad Aljabri, and a frequent commentator on Saudi affairs — also made the comparison to the October Surprise: a term for a late-in-the-game, election-swinging event coined during Ronald Reagan’s successful bid to unseat Jimmy Carter. Aljabri said, “Emboldened by Biden’s no-consequence policy and empty campaign rhetoric, MBS wants to make a Carter out of Biden with OPEC’s October surprise, knowing that high gas prices and inflation influence domestic U.S. politics.”
