A group of Republican senators chastised Saudi Arabian officials for flooding the global oil market in a fight against Russia.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz joined eight Republican colleagues on a conference call in which they demanded Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, to push the Saudi regime into curbing its oil production, Cruz told CNBC.
“The Saudis and the Russians chose to take advantage of [the coronavirus pandemic] by flooding the market and driving the price of oil way, way down,” Cruz said in a Monday interview.
Russia and Saudi Arabia have been flooding the oil market and tanking oil prices since early March.
Thirteen GOP senators, including Cruz, sent a letter to the Saudi government last week, urging it to ease oil production and let the global rates stabilize. Nine of those senators followed up on the letter in the conference call.
Cruz said that the Saudi official blamed Russia for the trade war to which he and other senators responded by threatening U.S. economic and foreign policy action against Saudi Arabia.
“We quite frankly unloaded on her,” Cruz said. “We said, ‘Listen, there are a whole series of steps we can take to escalate foreign policy pressure — and we outlined a number of them — if you continue engaging in economic warfare against the United States trying to drive down the price of oil in order to exploit this coronavirus crisis to drive a bunch of American producers out of business.'”
Russia and Saudi Arabia engaged in a price war after Moscow broke an agreement with the Saudi regime to cut oil production. Riyadh began boosting its own oil production in response.
