Everybody in the room May 17 at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing in Washington, D.C., knew perfectly well the United States is never going to stop buying Saudi Arabian “dictator oil,” and why.
It’s as simple as Geopolitics 101, and even Alberta’s premier knows the score.
To give the man his due, Jason Kenney may be a college dropout, but Canada’s former defence minister is not a complete Canucklehead, so he certainly knows a thing or two about geopolitics even if he never got credit for the course.
So everyone understood the entire premise of the Alberta premier’s sermon to the Senate energy committee choir about how the United States should be buying its oil from brotherly Alberta instead of the OPEC baddies in the Middle East wasn’t connected to reality.
The reason has to do with the preservation and enhancement of America’s superpower status and the economic and military system that ensures the United States remains the top global dog. Saudi Arabia is at the strategic crossroads of the world, and no one controls the planet without controlling the Middle East and its oil.
Absolutely everyone in Room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building got it that the good ole USA will never stop buying “dictator oil,” even if the day ever comes that isn’t what the energy industry wants or the United States establishes a national oil company the government can actually tell where to buy crude.
Much the same goes for Kenney’s unfavourable remarks about Venezuela – a convenient source of heavy oil right across the Gulf of Mexico from the refineries of the Texas Gulf, notwithstanding its irritatingly uncooperative government smack in the middle of the American sphere of influence as defined by President James Monroe in 1823.
Kenney’s homily prompted knowing nods all round, but it likewise has zero chance of influencing American intentions of getting the rebellious South American country back on side shipping bitumen Stateside again one way or another.
Kenney’s high-school-thespian-style performance was aimed entirely at his audience back here in Wild Rose Country, showing the rubes their leader hobnobbing with the mighty in Washington as if he has a personal membership in the Senate Mutual Admiration Club, and getting a few shots in at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Government in Ottawa while he had an obviously sympathetic audience.
Similarly, the Republican members of the committee know that once back in the White House, their guy, whoever he turns out to be (and I use that gendered pronoun advisedly), will cozy up to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its unsavoury theocracy just as the Democrats across the aisle from them do now.
In the meantime, there are points to be scored with their own home audiences. The same thing goes for the committee’s Democratic chairman, Kenney BFF Joe Manchin, who seems determined to bring down the Joe who’s the president, perhaps because the Senator for West Virginia is a Democrat in Name Only (DINO).
As for why the hell the handful of Democrats on the energy committee who showed up yesterday took part in the charade with almost as much enthusiasm as their Republican brethren, that’s a mystery you’ll need an expert on U.S. politics to figure out.
Maybe it’s because the whole lot of them have sold their souls to the energy industry. Whatever it is, they seem to disdain Joe Biden and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, both Democrats, almost as much as Kenney and his Republicans pals do.
In the meantime, the Senators and Kenney had fun tut-tutting unkindly about Biden’s decision to shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day in office and Whitmer’s concerns about the aging Line 5 Pipeline submerged beneath the Straits of Mackinac.
Now there may be some who think it might not be the smartest possible move for a Canadian provincial politician to make a spectacle of himself assailing the current tenant in the White House.
“Is it fair to say that President Biden’s decision to kill the Keystone pipeline increased costs, harmed the environment, and added to our supply chain troubles?” the ranking Republican on the committee, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, asked tendentiously.
“I think that’s a reasonable conclusion,” Kenney responded with obsequious piety.
I know, I know … everyone reckons Biden is doomed to be a one-term president, and he may well be. Kenney is obviously willing to bet that he is, just like he was ready to bet $1.3 billion of our money on the proposition Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020 was a sure thing.
Well, Kenney’s big day in Washington certainly put the performance back in geopolitics.
Don’t imagine for a minute it will have any impact on the way the global hegemon practices petroleum politics.
Meanwhile, today will be another big day for Kenney. With the UCP leadership review vote counted and theoretically ready to be announced, he’ll need to keep his wits about him whatever the result is.
If he gets only a lukewarm endorsement, he’ll need to keep his increasingly disunited party from falling apart. If UCP members vote to issue him his walking papers, he may have to come up with some kind of autogolpe to remain in power. And if the vote endorses his leadership strongly, he’ll need to work a miracle to persuade party members it wasn’t a fraud.
Whatever happens, Battle of Alberta sports metaphors are inevitable.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
