There is much that Republican and Democratic party leaders alike in the United States could do about this, but they are not.
We would ask U.S. President George W. Bush and his would-be successor, leading GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to restrain Israel and look to ease global fears that there will be a U.S. or Israeli air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities within the next few months. Those fears are doing more to boost global oil prices than anything else.
We would also recommend to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the Democrats' front-runner, that he refrains from his hardline rhetoric bashing the major oil companies and vowing to crack down on energy speculators. Those "speculators" are largely rational investors who reflect the hard realities of soaring global hunger for oil and insufficient available production and refining capabilities.
We also note that prominent Democrats have been bending over backwards to deny that there is a critical shortage of oil refining capacity in the United States, or they have argued it isn't such a big problem. But it is a big problem. Republicans and Democrats alike have been complacently negligent about it for more than three decades.
If Obama wants to start a really serious and constructive dialog with the major U.S. oil companies about what they could do to ease the current crisis, getting some serious action going on expanding U.S. domestic refining capacity would be a good place to start.
In the past, we have taken the position that soaring energy prices will invariably help Obama rather than McCain at the ballot box this November. But McCain has certainly been fighting his corner hard in the election campaigning so far. Unlike his Senate colleagues, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996 or Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who was defeated by Bush in 2004, McCain is fighting his corner hard.
Now McCain may have found a chink in the Democrats' armor in his call to increase U.S. domestic oil production, especially with offshore drilling, as soon a possible.
Nevertheless, when all the obsessions of Republicans and Democrats alike in the U.S. policy debate have been exhausted, the underlying fact remains that global demand for oil is soaring and will continue to do so while global production is near its natural limits for the foreseeable future.
A solution in Iraq that could genuinely stabilize that unhappy country would help a lot. So would a widespread confidence that the United States or Israel was not going to attack Iran in the next few months.
Even those developments would only buy a few years breathing space to bring major new oilfields on line and to search for alternatives to oil where ever they could be found. But such sensible measures and realistic hard thinking are essential to solve the real problems that exist. Demonizing the Saudis or the oil companies will not work.