The Reason Trump Isn’t as Perturbed by Rising Oil Prices as You Are

The president has fashioned the U.S. into a petrostate, in which all roads to his own enrichment.

Many of us who remember the 1970s energy crisis are experiencing right now a strong sense of déjà vu. I acquired my California driver’s license in January of 1974, three months after the Arab petrostates imposed an oil embargo against the United States for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. At its peak, the price of gas at the pump rose about 40 percent to today’s after-inflation equivalent of $3.51 per gallon. At the moment, that looks like a bargain, with the national average a whisker under $4 per gallon.

The oil embargo’s effect on me was to accept steep gas prices and long queues at the gas station as a normal fact of life. Its effect on the United States was more severe. The embargo brought an abrupt end to the unmatched prosperity of the post-World War II era; accelerated the decline of labor unions; reversed a three-decade trend toward fairer income distribution; and initiated dismantlement of the New Deal consensus. When historians try to pinpoint when the confident assumptions behind Henry Luce’s American Century began to falter, they tend to gravitate toward my high school days behind the wheel of my parents’ dark green Mustang.

The current runup in gas prices won’t likely stop at $4 per gallon, raising the question of whether we’re about to experience societal transformation comparable to that of the mid-1970s. The general consensus is that it won’t, a significant reason being that the United States is now itself a petrostate. But with congressional Republicans reduced to saying things like “What we’re paying at the gas pump is a small price to pay,” gas prices ought to help Democrats win back the House, and maybe even the Senate.

When the 1970s oil embargo hit, the United States was importing more than one-third of its oil. Today the United States is a net oil exporter. We still import plenty of oil, but more of it is from Canada and less from the Persian Gulf. This ought to make oil a less urgent consideration in the formulation of foreign policy. But President Donald Trump thinks about oil all the time. Partly that’s because his brain never left the 1970s (“Y.M.C.A.,” Trump’s signature rally song, was released in 1978) but mostly it’s because Trump wants to control the global oil market in general, and Middle East oil in particular.

When Trump looks at the oil industry, he doesn’t see an energy........

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