Opinion: Biden’s fist bump turned slap in the face

Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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So much for cozying up to the Saudis – President Joe Biden’s much-hyped fist bump with Mohammed bin Salman during a trip to the Middle East back in July has turned into something of a slap across the face from the crown prince.

This week’s OPEC+ announcement that it would be slashing oil production by 2 million barrels per day – engineered, by most accounts, by Saudi Arabia and Russia – is already provoking a cascade of toxic geopolitical shifts.

A host of issues all converge here at this epiphanal moment. There’s the European Union, which is suddenly having to work out how it might still implement its price cap on Russian crude.

There’s oil producer Venezuela, which with OPEC’s one stroke is looking to the US more like an attractive trading partner than a hemispheric pariah.

There’s the prospect of a resurgence of coal as a fuel and its impact on our entire planet.

And then there’s the jump in oil prices, a source of new revenues Russia so desperately needs to continue its war in Ukraine, where a lightning counteroffensive is hurting President Vladimir Putin on the battlefield and at home.

For now, the most immediate fallout will be on oil prices and revenues. Designed to spur a reversal of the trend that has sent oil prices plummeting to $80 a barrel from just over $130 a barrel in March, the impact on prices at the gas pump and on inflation in the United States on the eve of mid-term elections is already being felt.

Oil monitor Platts pegged the crude price at $93.73 a barrel on October 4, up 11% from $84.63 on September 26, when rumors of an OPEC cut first began circulating. But that’s still down from a June 14 peak of $132.06 a barrel.

Morgan Stanley analysts lifted their…