Republicans take a shot at Opec

摘要

Opec is again a target of the US Republican party platform, which also singles out Iran and Islamist group Isis as key threats. The Republicans’ latest foreign policy document, unmoored from many of its usual stances, is an amalgam of the views of their presidential candidate Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. The platform adopted on 18 July promises to counter “market manipulation” by Opec and state-run oil firms-the first reference to Opec since 2008. US imports from Opec members of 2.9mn b/d last year were down by 51pc from 2008, while US output almost doubled to 9.43mn b/d in the same period. But neither this nor Opec’s adoption in 2014 of a competitive strategy based on unlimited output, to drive higher cost non-Opec oil production out of the market, is deterring Trump’s Republican allies in the House of Representatives. They have proposed a bill to investigate Opec’s “anti-competitive involvement” in oil markets.