Good Riddance to OPEC

An otherwise destructive war against multilateralism yields a single good result.

These are hard times for multinationalism. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization lies in tatters, the World Trade Organization is on life support, the World Health Organization is losing its wealthiest member, and I bet you didn’t even know there was an International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg. But just to show that every cloud has its silver lining, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, is coming unglued just as the price of oil heads into the stratosphere. OPEC’s demise can’t happen fast enough to suit me.

The irony here is that OPEC is practically the only multilateral organization that the Trump administration hasn’t been trying to destroy. Yes, Trump denounced OPEC as a “monopoly” near the start of his first presidential term. Most news accounts of the UAE’s departure underscored that fact. But they missed that near the end of Trump’s first term, Trump said he’d grown rather fond of the oil cartel.

“For many years I used to think OPEC was very unfair,” Trump said in April 2020:

I hated OPEC. You want to know the truth? I hated it. Because it was a fix. But somewhere along the line that broke down and it went the opposite way. And we have a tremendously powerful industry in this country now, number one in the world, and I don’t want those jobs being lost.

I hated........

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