Obama's hypocrisy

U.S. Warning To India On Iran Oil Reeks Of Hypocrisy

Diplomacy: Secretary of State Clinton urged India to buy less oil from Iran or else. It's a sour note to India. As State stalls the Keystone XL pipeline, the U.S. is buying up more oil than ever from India's own suppliers.

One wonders what India's officials must have thought as Hillary Clinton arrived in Delhi with a warning that unless they buy less Iranian oil — now at 550,000 barrels a day, or 9% of its oil imports — they face punishing U.S. sanctions on their banks by June 28.

To be sure, Clinton is focused on a serious issue. Cutting off Iran's oil money is critical to halting Iran's illegal nuclear program that menaces global security. It has to be done.

But something's off about the U.S. asking India to make sacrifices in shifting its oil suppliers without any corresponding U.S. effort to shift its own suppliers to give India more options.

The fact is, the U.S. is now buying record amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia, which is the most logical substitute supplier for India, leaving less for India to buy. This is notable because U.S. oil imports from Saudi Arabia soared 38% this year to an average of 1.4 million barrels a day, according to a March 16 Dow Jones Newswires report.

This is happening because the Obama administration is halting domestic energy production, both in refusing to drill offshore and in rejecting the U.S.-Canada Keystone XL pipeline, which Clinton's own State Department has a major role in blocking.

This shows the administration's stubborn focus on domestic politics to please campaign donors is undercutting U.S. diplomacy and global security.

While Clinton praised India for making some shifts, she said India has "work to do."

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"Saudi Arabia and others are putting more oil into the market," she told reporters in Calcutta.

But that isn't the whole story: Last March, the Saudis did announce they would raise oil output from 9 million barrels of oil a day to 12 million barrels a day to ease the lot of oil buyers shifting sources from Iran. They managed to get it up to 10 million.

But guess who bought the extra output? Not India, but the U.S., Europe and Africa.

Yet India is the logical buyer of Saudi oil, not the U.S.

Oil travels by tanker from Saudi Arabia to Indian ports in 10 to 12 days. By contrast, it takes 30 to 85 days to reach U.S. ports. More Saudi oil to the U.S. means less oil for India. At the same time, Iran is offering India cut-rate and barter deals on its oil. India will pay up for oil, while hurting decades of good relations with Iran.

The U.S., too, has a logical supplier for its energy needs right next door: Canada. It takes just two to six days to transport oil to U.S. refineries.

On Monday, TransCanada reapplied to build a pipeline to supply the U.S. with 1.7 million barrels of oil a day by 2030. That could eventually cut U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil imports by 40%, Keystone's operator TransCanada said in a statement.

But the Obama administration is dead-set on stalling Keystone to please its environmentalist political allies.

And it seems not to care that it's forcing India — which imports 70% of its oil — to get oil from somewhere other than Iran, without providing them any alternatives.

Clinton's telling India to stop buying oil from Iran has a hollow ring. Maybe India's government will treat it as a crisis as soon as she does.