Donald J. Trump / @realDonaldTrump
07/02/2022 10:06:09
Truth Social: 108578129156298298

Out-to-lunch Joe Biden has the worst G7 summit since Jimmy Carter

This week’s G-7 meeting in Germany brings to mind the apocryphal Mark Twain quip that “History doesn’t repeat itself — but it rhymes.” Or swap out if you like Santayana’s familiar (and authentic) axiom: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

This G-7 has to be judged the worst G-7 meeting since the one in Japan in 1979 that also took place amid a global energy crisis and rising inflation. The other factor these two summits, 43 years apart, have in common: an out-to-lunch American president.

Both the 1979 meeting and this week’s meeting attempted to create an oil buyers’ cartel to limit oil imports but with opposite targets in mind. In 1979, the G-7 wanted to limit imports from the Middle East (the attempt failed immediately). Today the G-7 wants to limit imports from Russia (through the indirect means of a “price cap” that amounts to the same thing as a quota) while begging the Middle East, and especially the dominant producer Saudi Arabia, to increase oil exports to the West.

As in 1979, when the other G-7 leaders were harsh toward President Jimmy Carter at the summit, this week France’s Emmanuel Macron tried gently to talk sense into President Biden, who seems to be trying to emulate all of Carter’s policy mistakes. On the eve of Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia to grovel for more oil production, Macron advised him that the Saudis and other top Persian Gulf producers are close to current maximum capacity and as such aren’t able to bail out Biden even if they wanted to.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan intervened to spare Biden what was about to become a public embarrassment, since the subtext of Macron’s advice was that the United States needs to get its act together, starting with looking to our own oil resources for relief.

France, it should be noted, is serious about energy, unlike its neighbor Germany, which faces the real risk of running out of natural gas next winter. Unlike Biden, France’s government doesn’t make demagogic attacks on its giant oil companies and recently announced its intention to build a new generation of nuclear power plants.