In American headlines, “Biden bans Russian oil” to punish “outcast” Vladimir Putin. In the Wall Street Journal, it was accompanied by the financial analysis “You can hear echoes of the 70s.”
“The 1973-74 oil embargo”, he stresses, brought among its effects that “oil prices soared, stagflation took hold and stocks had a fall only surpassed by the collapse of Lehman in 2008”.
To avoid this, the American president has sought to make peace with previous oil villains.
But the Financial Times reports that things are not progressing with Iran and it was necessary to appeal to Qatar as a mediator. And the New York Times reports that Senators Marco Rubio, a Republican, and Robert Menendez, a Democrat, have spoken out against the agreement with Venezuela.
But the biggest bet is peace with the Saudi Mohammed bin Salman or MBS – who according to the US government gave the order for the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, from the Washington Post, and who Biden himself had promised to make a “pariah”, in the campaign. .
He has just been interviewed at length by The Atlantic magazine (above), close to the Democrats and where Biden often writes, as he did shortly after elected. The text describes him as “charming, warm, informal and intelligent”.
As the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, who participated in the interviews, pointed out, MBS says that Khashoggi’s murder “hurt me a lot, from a feelings point of view” (it hurt me a lot, from a feelings perspective). And he makes it clear that he doesn’t want to hear Biden criticize: “We don’t have the right to reprimand you in America. The same goes for the other side.”
It doesn’t matter, shortly after the interview came out, the website Axios published that “Biden’s advisers consider trip to Saudi Arabia for more oil”. He would visit MBS over the next three months “to repair relations and convince him to pump more oil.”
WPost’s little reaction was to publish an article by a friend of Khashoggi’s, also a columnist, questioning the Atlantic for, among many things, not paying more attention to Yemen, a country where MBS is leading a deadlier war than Ukraine, with support American.
ADVANTAGE FOR XI
Covered widely in China and Europe, particularly in Germany, the videoconference by German Olaf Scholz and Frenchman Emmanuel Macron with Xi Jinping was barely reported in the US.
In analysis, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung pointed to a “strategic advantage” for Beijing, which with the war is no longer a target of Washington and gains Moscow as a “dependent partner”.
