Bush's Global Failure Tour

Yesterday, President Bush was in Israel [1], and equated speaking with Iran with "the false comfort of appeasement." Today in Saudi Arabia [2], Bush will likely fail (UPDATE: has failed [3]) to persuade the kingdom to pump more oil and help lower gas prices.

The events are related.

Bush's saber-rattling with Iran raises concerns of war [4] and more disruption of oil supplies [5], which prompts speculators to raise prices. [6]

And while Bush ran for president in 2000 [7] with the promise to lower gas prices by "Us[ing] the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot." That was when crude oil was at $30 a barrel. Today it's at $128. [8]

That's in part because Bush's failed foreign policy has depleted our political capital [2] with the Saudis. Energy Wire's Steve Mufson reports: [2]

President Bush pays another visit to Saudi Arabia this week, but the visit isn’t likely to produce new flows of oil from the world’s biggest exporting nation. That's not just a matter of Bush's own diplomatic shortcomings - it's also linked to changes in the U.S.-Saudi relationship and changes in the kingdom’s view of its self-interest.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman told me before I visited Riyadh last fall that years ago, the U.S.-Saudi relationship was based on a perceived exchange of U.S.-provided security for Saudi-exported oil. Nowadays, Saudi Arabia questions whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq enhanced the kingdom’s security and the region’s stability. And the Saudi royals also wonder whether the giant U.S. military can really protect the kingdom’s oil infrastructure from terrorist attacks. On the U.S. side, many analysts believe that Saudi Arabia, by cutting its oil output on several occasions over the past nine years, helped drive prices up to their current peak.

Of course, Bush's failure in foreign policy wouldn't hurt us at the pump as badly if he implemented an energy policy that made renewable fuels and energy-efficient cars widely accessible and affordable. But instead, he and his fellow conservatives protected subsidies to Big Oil, blocked investment in renewable energy and perpetuated the oil addiction.

We were already painfully aware of Bush's twin failures [7] in foreign policy and energy policy. Apparently, Bush wanted to take the failure show on the road and give it the spotlight of the world stage.