One of the most effective ways the United States could respond to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s act of war in Ukraine is to sabotage and cut off Russia’s energy exports. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden has made this impossible.
Biden announced on Thursday that the U.S., joined by several other Western powers, will unleash sweeping sanctions against major Russian banks and oligarchs. Noticeably, Biden said nothing of sanctioning Russia’s oil and natural gas industry, which drives the Russian economy. He even admitted the sanctions package is “specifically designed to allow energy payments to continue.”
When asked why the U.S. would allow such a critical part of Russia’s infrastructure to go untouched, White House deputy national security adviser Daleep Singh more or less admitted that we cannot afford to cut off Russia’s energy exports without severely damaging our own economy as well.
“Our measures were not designed to disrupt, in any way, the current flow of energy from Russia to the world,” he said.
It makes sense the Biden administration is concerned: Gasoline prices here in the U.S. are already the highest they’ve been in years, and inflation continues to prove a growing threat to Biden’s poor approval ratings. But neither problem would be as big of a concern right now if Biden had not outsourced much of our own energy production to Russia and other parts of the world. He has spent the past year shutting down vital energy production projects in the U.S., including the Keystone XL pipeline, that would have made it easier to access cheap energy quickly. He ordered a ban on all new oil and gas permitting on federal property, and he passed a number of environmental policies to crack down on the fossil fuel industry.
The result is that we are unable to flood the market with cheap oil and gas as quickly as we need to and therefore are unable to give more than a half-hearted attempt at keeping Putin at bay.
And make no mistake: Putin knows just as well as Biden that the U.S. is in no position to cut off Russia’s energy exports. That’s part of the reason he decided to invade Ukraine now. He knows that no matter how hard we try to squeeze his economy, he can do some of the same to ours.
The U.S.’s hands are tied. But it wasn’t Putin who tied them — it was Biden and his merry band of environmentalists.
Kaylee McGhee White is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
