HOURS AFTER announcing that America would be taking the extraordinary step of banning imports of Russian fossil fuels over its invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden was disembarking from Air Force One on a pre-planned visit to the energy-producing state of Texas. “Do you have a message for the American people on gas prices?” a reporter on the runway asked him. “They’re going to go up,” Mr Biden said. “What can you do about it?” followed up the reporter. “Can’t do much right now,” the president replied. “Russia’s responsible.”
It is a line of questioning Democrats had better grow comfortable with. American voters are unusually cantankerous about petrol prices, and more than a little vindictive to the party in power when they go up. That augurs poorly for Democrats. Even before the war, prices had risen by 39% in the year since Mr Biden took office. Since the conflict began, government surveys have recorded an exceptional spike from $3.53 per gallon to $4.10—their costliest level, after adjusting for inflation, since 2008.
That is why even though Mr Biden quickly imposed severe sanctions on Russia after its invasion—including freezing assets of close allies of Vladimir Putin, breaking important high-tech supply chains, barring Russian banks from the SWIFT system allowing international transfers and even crippling the trading ability of country’s central bank—it largely refrained from stanching the flow of precious hydrocarbons. For a petrostate, that is a large exemption. An embargo on Russian petrol has become a recurrent favour sought by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s indefatigable president, in his entreaties to Western congresses and parliaments. Doing so, he argued, would be “even more powerful than SWIFT” sanctions. There are two reasons Mr Zelensky got his wish on March 8th.
First and foremost, America is more easily able to quit Russian petrol than its European allies. Only 8% of petrol imports in 2021 were from Russia—slightly less than from Mexico. In Germany, by contrast, where Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, has ruled out any immediate ban, Russian petrol makes up 30% of imports. Britain has pledged to wean itself off imported Russian oil by the end of the year. The European Union wants an even more gradual tapering, slashing imports of Russian natural gas by two-thirds by the end of 2022, and becoming fully abstemious “well before 2030”. Thus far, the West has kept an unexpectedly united front against Russian aggression. America will not break that by bullying about an embargo. “We recognise that not all of our allies and partners are currently in a position to join us,” the White House wrote in its policy announcement.
Second, Mr Biden is enjoying an unexpectedly united front at home. In Congress, Democrats and Republican lawmakers have been tripping over one another to demonstrate greater support for Ukraine. While the president initially vacillated over the decision, leaders in both parties readied a prospective sanctions package that would have suspended normal trade relations with Russia, raising tariffs considerably, and banned Russian oil. This forced the president’s hand. “At every step of the way, we’ve had to drag the administration to do the right thing, where the right thing is defined as what bipartisan majorities in Congress overwhelmingly want,” says a disgruntled Republican congressional aide. Nor is that pressure going to subside soon. A forthcoming emergency funding package for humanitarian relief and military funding for Ukraine has ballooned in size—from an initial $6.4bn to an intermediate $10bn and finally to $14bn. A bipartisan bunch of senators are readying a bill that would crack down on Russia’s ability to buy and sell gold, which can be a route to evade sanctions.
Satiating Congress does not mean that the president will be free of headaches. With his latest action, Mr Biden is fast nearing the maximum economic pressure that America can exert on Russia. There is no indication that this has daunted Mr Putin or meaningfully changed his calculus. The Russian president seems to be making a bid to join the pantheon of great leaders in Russia, like Alexander Nevsky and Joseph Stalin, necessitating victory even at very great cost to both his people’s living standards and his armed forces. Some worry that the sanctions have no deeper telos than punishment, and may thus disappoint. “Russia will not change its performance on the battlefield because of sanctions. The sanctions will hit the people of Russia very hard…I think in a few months, a lot of people will ask what have we achieved?” says Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank.
Because Americans are unused to self-sacrifice in the cause of foreign policy, domestic politics will become tricky, too. Despite encouraging the import ban on Russian oil, Republicans will have little hesitation in savaging the president and his party for high gas prices (and general inflation) in the mid-term elections to be held in eight months’ time. Branding the punishment at the pump as “Putin’s price hike”—the phrasing currently being tried by the White House—may prove unpersuasive. That is why the administration is now attempting to rebrand itself as a booster of domestic fossil-fuel production (the clean-energy revolution has become more of a long-run concern) and seeking rapprochement with oil-rich states like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela as a means to boosting global supply. The next time a reporter quizzes Mr Biden on what he can do about gas prices, he may have a more detailed answer at the ready.
Our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here