President Biden has spent much of the past few years turning Saudi Arabia into an adversary. During the campaign he promised to turn the Middle Eastern country into a pariah state in retaliation for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and as president he continued to pummel Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) as a tyrant.

This didn’t work out so well for him as oil prices soared and Saudi Arabia cozied up to American adversaries. What Biden had missed was that our “friendly” relations with the Gulf state were never based upon shared values, but were purely transactional. We needed the oil, and they needed our military power as a counterweight to Iraq and Iran. (If Jimmy Carter hadn’t messed up Iran and handed it to the Ayatollahs our dependence on Saudi Arabia for oil would be much less).

Oil prices rose so high that it was killing Biden at the polls, so he reversed course in July and bent his knee to MBS in a visit to Saudi Arabia. He begged for mercy.

It didn’t work. It looks like OPEC is cutting oil production, and the Administration is rightly panicking. They will be cutting production by 2 million barrels a day–twice the predicted cut.

The Biden administration has launched a full-scale pressure campaign in a last-ditch effort to dissuade Middle Eastern allies from dramatically cutting oil production, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

The push comes ahead of Wednesday’s crucial meeting of OPEC+, the international cartel of oil producers that is widely expected to announce a significant cut to output in an effort to raise oil prices. That in turn would cause US gasoline prices to rise at a precarious time for the Biden administration, just five weeks before the midterm elections.

For the past several days, President Joe Biden’s senior-most energy, economic and foreign policy officials have been enlisted to lobby their foreign counterparts in Middle Eastern allied countries including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to vote against cutting oil production.

Members of the Saudi-led oil cartel and its allies including Russia, known as OPEC+, are expected to announce production cuts potentially up to more than one million barrels per day. That would be the largest cut since the beginning of the pandemic and could lead to a dramatic spike in oil prices.

Some of the draft talking points circulated by the White House to the Treasury Department on Monday that were obtained by CNN framed the prospect of a production cut as a “total disaster” and warned that it could be taken as a “hostile act.”

“It’s important everyone is aware of just how high the stakes are,” said a US official of what was framed as a broad administration effort that is expected to continue in the lead up to the Wednesday OPEC+ meeting.

“How high the stakes are.” No kidding. The world is facing an energy crisis that will likely surpass the 1970s crises, and that crisis was entirely the making of the Europeans and President Biden.

Europe chose to rely upon Russia for its natural gas while cavalierly eliminating other sources such as coal and nuclear, and President Biden has worked hard to undermine US energy production while attacking the most powerful entities in OPEC. You may have noticed that Russia is a member of OPEC+, and thus works closely with Saudi Arabia?

In the push for higher oil prices, the Kremlin may be using OPEC’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, whose ministers want future cooperation from Moscow on energy matters, to make it more costly for the West to take measures against Russia.

“To the extent that prices rise, it will make it that much more challenging for Europe to proceed with its sanctions on Russian oil in December,” said Bhushan Bahree, an executive director of S&P Global Commodity Insights.

While panicking is never a good strategy, the White House is absolutely correct to be doing its utmost to prevent this utter disaster. The world is on the brink of an economic crisis that, if not managed properly, could turn into a worldwide great depression. It really is that serious.

The White House is “having a spasm and panicking,” another US official said, describing this latest administration effort as “taking the gloves off.” According to a White House official, the talking points were being drafted and exchanged by staffers and not approved by White House leadership or used with foreign partners.

In a statement to CNN, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said, “We’ve been clear that energy supply should meet demand to support economic growth and lower prices for consumers around the world and we will continue to talk with our partners about that.”

So is Biden worried about the possibility of a depression? Or is he worried about the political consequences? Call me cynical, but I suspect it is the latter. The timing of an OPEC production cut certainly hurts him politically. First, because of the midterms, and secondly because the resulting economic damage will extend into 2024.

For Biden, a dramatic cut in oil production could not come at a worse time. The administration has for months engaged in an intensive domestic and foreign policy effort to mitigate soaring energy prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That work appeared to pay off, with US gasoline prices falling for almost 100 days in a row.

But with just a month to go before the critical midterm elections, US gasoline prices have begun to creep up again, posing a political risk the White House is desperately trying to avoid. As US officials have moved to gauge potential domestic options to head off gradual increases over the last several weeks, the news of major OPEC+ action presents a particularly acute challenge.

I am not going to summarize the rest of the CNN story, because you should read the whole thing.

The real point I would like to make is that this is yet another example of just how destructive the Biden Administration has been. If there is a rational policy they choose the opposite. It really is uncanny how every choice they make is destructive to average Americans and to the stability of the world. They are the George Costanza of policy makers. They should just do the opposite of anything they believe should be done.

It’s hard to imagine a less competent administration.