Biden’s energy policy is empowering the West’s enemies

The story of how the Biden administration crippled American energy production is well known, as are the disastrous consequences of those actions. Yet those same energy policies have also played a critical, albeit much less known, role in advancing the president’s foreign policy.

As soon as he was elected, President Joe Biden declared that the climate ideology of the Left would dominate his administration. His advisers and officials condescendingly dismissed concerns about jobs and inflation as complaints coming from a part of the political spectrum, and from parts of America, they considered irrelevant. They immediately began canceling and suffocating vast swaths of U.S. energy infrastructure, contributing to energy shortages and hyperinflation that threaten to destroy American prosperity for years if not decades.

That same approach to energy policy has also focused, from Day One as well, on elevating America’s traditional enemies and undermining our traditional allies.

And now, citing the very global energy shortages that its policies created, the Biden administration has said it has to turn to the fossil fuel industries of America’s rivals and enemies, including Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, to supply us and our allies.

In spring 2021, the Biden administration waived congressional sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline at the behest of Germany, which said it needed Russian natural gas to keep the lights on. Those waivers became politically impossible to sustain after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, but at the same time, expectations were sky-high that another Iran deal was about to be announced. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced that buying oil from Iran was “on the table.” Now that the Iran deal again appears to be politically tricky because of the regime’s massacres of protesters, multiple outlets are reporting that the United States is considering easing energy sanctions on the Venezuelan regime.

This is merely the flip side of the same policy, which doesn’t just boost hostile actors but a global bloc. Venezuela is Iran’s closest ally in Latin America, and the two work together to evade U.S. sanctions and keep their oil flowing to markets, including through ship-to-ship transfers of crude and condensates and helping Venezuela to convert its heavy crude. In June, Iran and Venezuela signed a 20-year strategic partnership during President Nicolas Maduro’s visit to Tehran. The agreement includes cooperation on oil and petrochemicals. Iran has also sent three Iranian-built tankers to Venezuela, which, in 2020, had been left with only one. Since 2020, Iran also has supplied Caracas with gasoline and equipment for repairing its run-down refineries.

In the Mediterranean, the Biden administration has managed to strong-arm a pliant lame-duck government in Israel, weeks before a general election, to forfeit its claim to an entire piece of territory that had been claimed by Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon — the justification being, of course, that nothing is more critical than immediately starting fossil fuel production. In late August, Biden called the Israeli caretaker prime minister and told him in no uncertain terms that concluding the deal was of great importance to the U.S. and that it should be done within weeks. A White House official would call it a “key priority” of the administration. At Lebanon’s demand, the deal Washington forced on Israel even included giving up a small section outside the disputed area, entirely within Israel’s waters, that makes up part of a hydrocarbon prospect. Hezbollah demanded Lebanon retain full ownership of the entire prospect, with compensation for the section inside Israel’s waters to come from French energy giant TotalEnergies.

The role of France and TotalEnergies, actors that were notoriously hostile to the Trump administration’s policy in the region, is worth mentioning. In 2018, the head of TotalEnergies desperately tried to dissuade then-President Donald Trump from withdrawing from former President Barack Obama’s disastrous Iran deal. The French company had signed a deal the year before to develop Iran’s South Pars field with an initial investment of $1 billion. It had to withdraw when sanctions were reimposed.

Now France is the actor most invested in cheerleading and explicitly amplifying the administration’s policy with Iran and Venezuela, as well as the excuses about self-made shortages that justify that policy. In June, shortly after Iran and Venezuela signed their agreement, French officials said that Iranian and Venezuelan oil need to be brought to market. Of course, the French have been pushing for the successful conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action talks with Iran in order for sanctions to be lifted and for Iran’s doors to be open for France’s TotalEnergies.

France’s eagerness to develop Iran’s fields intersects with, and reinforces, French interests in the Islamic Republic’s regional holdings. In addition to a major, albeit since delayed, deal signed with Iraq last year, TotalEnergies signed in 2018 two exploration and production agreements with the Lebanese government to drill offshore Lebanon. TotalEnergies executives were just in Beirut to work out exploration after Team Biden pressured the Israelis to make a deal. Revealingly, in 2019, TotalEnergies’s chief executive commented that investing in Israel was “too complex” and the stakes there not big enough to warrant the risks. However, that calculation never dissuaded TotalEnergies from entering Lebanon: a terror pseudo-state run by the long arm of Iran, in the form of its proxy Hezbollah.

While the decadelong maritime boundary dispute between Israel and Lebanon did not affect Israel’s ability to develop and draw investment into its energy industry, eventually turning Israel into an exporter of natural gas, investors long shied away from Hezbollah-run Lebanon. The Obama administration sought to impose a settlement, but the effort went nowhere until the Biden administration successfully strong-armed the Israelis. To no one’s surprise, French President Emmanuel Macron intervened strongly with Israel to get the deal done, adding to American pressure.

For the Biden administration, the deal was a “key priority” precisely because it was a deal with, and to the benefit of, Iranian equity. The public framing of the deal underscores this point. The White House described the deal as furthering the agenda of “regional integration,” a euphemism for stabilizing and investing in Iranian regional holdings, which lies at the heart of the Obama doctrine of realigning U.S. interests with Iran.

And how is the deal being sold? Advocates say it is important to help secure Europe’s energy needs as it looks for alternatives to Russian energy. Leaving aside the fact that the numbers don’t add up, the argument here is that forcing Israel to relinquish resource-rich waters, under threat of attack, to an Iranian terror satrapy, in order to solidify French and other European investments in a de facto partnership with Hezbollah, is preferable to unleashing American energy production and export.

Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he focuses on Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria, and the geopolitics of the Levant. He tweets @AcrossTheBay. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.