 On March 8th, U.S. President Joe Biden announced a ban on oil imports from Russia in the aftermath of its attack on Ukraine. The move was announced amid speculation regarding whether he would actually go ahead with it, considering that supplies from Russia comprise about 8 percent of U.S. liquid fuel imports. What were the considerations before Biden as he made the decision, and what impact is it likely to have? Eugene Purir of Breakthrough News explains. Yes, and I think that's a great question. And we've heard from President Joe Biden previously that the American people would not be completely insulated from the impact of sanctions. Now, this is a little bit of a change, because prior to the announcement of a ban on the import of oil from Russia into the United States, the Biden administration was putting its main emphasis on trying to keep gas prices down and was, you know, quite frankly, being quite lukewarm at best in terms of any sort of restrictions on U.S. companies being involved with the oil and gas industry in Russia. But there was an increase in pressure, including from the U.S. Congress, as a method to essentially increase the pain against Russia, even if it means increasing the pain among the American people by taking a step like this. But you can see that the Biden administration's game plan does seem to be to try to limit the fallout by only banning the importation of Russian oil into the United States, but not pursuing a full-on embargo of Russian oil and gas internationally all around the world and try to enforce that, which was, you know, in many ways, sort of the nuclear scenario and something that has been called for by many in Congress. But obviously, it seems the Biden administration is ultimately being slightly pushed by events here. I think that their main goal is to try to find some way to not have a heavy impact on gas prices and inflation here. I think that's obviously what's behind the sort of tentative discussions that are happening with Venezuela and the United States, and also what seems to be a real shift by the United States in terms of pushing aggressively for an Iran deal to try to do whatever they can to get more oil and gas onto the market to keep prices down. But I mean, there is an element of this that does seem like the Biden administration is sort of flailing here amidst a range of different pressures and against an extreme tide here in the United States to be quote-unquote tough on Russia and has had to backtrack from its previous statements on this and ultimately now is going to be reaping the, I guess it can't call it benefits, be reaping the negative repercussions, I think, in terms of the increase of the price of gas at the pump in the United States, which is happening quite significantly. Perhaps the most significant impact of this decision will be on inflation. The US has been facing months of high inflation even before the Russia-Ukraine crisis. In the aftermath of Biden's announcement, crude prices kept soaring, and this will affect not only transportation, but sectors across the economy. What kind of inflationary pressures might be felt by the US economy? I think the short-term and the medium-term impact of the increase in gas prices is going to be that it will continue to go up. I think that what we're going to see, I mean, it's frequently said, well, it's only 7%, 8% of the oil coming to the United States is coming from Russia, which, yes, and the big scheme of things is relatively small, but to just immediately lose almost 10% of the oil, then that will have a big impact on the market. We've already seen it in California. You've got certain types of gas already at $6 a gallon. The statewide average in California, which is a state where almost everyone drives, is $5 a gallon. The national average is over $4 a gallon. In fact, earlier this week, it actually exceeded the previous record high for a national gas average from 2008. We are actually in relatively uncharted territory here in terms of gas prices. Of course, it depends on where you get your gas because it's all private companies in the United States. If you're working with BP, Shell, Luke Oil, which is a Russian company, which has many gas stations all around the United States, all these different companies that are depending to a larger degree on Russian oil to make their gas, then I think you're likely to see even a higher rises. Overall, we will see significant increases, I think, in gas prices here. Pretty much no one is pretending that in the US political, pretending anything is different in the US political scene. Now the rhetoric has very much turned towards the fact that, well, yes, it's going to be bad for the average American working class person, but it's just a price that you have to pay for what the government is doing here to help Ukraine. Now, I think the political fallout for that is going to end up being relatively significant. The issue of inflation has been mainly driven by an increase in energy prices and an increase in used car prices. Because of some issues with palladium and neon and computer chips, it's possible that there will be even more disruption to the flow of new cars. In fact, the US actions in terms of sanctions against Russia seem to be actually exacerbating the crisis of inflation in the United States by effectively hitting the two biggest areas where that have been causing inflation. And we certainly know that the Biden administration will probably not be able to pass most of their other proposals to bring down overall cost for working class people. So I think we can expect to see gas prices continue to go up, and that to continue to be a major driver of inflation here in the United States. Despite the potentially adverse effects on the economy, polls showed that many people in the United States supported the ban on the import of oil products from Russia. Why was this so? Was this merely the success of the propaganda machinery of the state and associated media? Or are there other factors that are not being taken into account? Yes, I think that the mainstream media narrative that Ukraine must be helped at all cost, the comparisons that have increasingly been made between Putin and Hitler, the heavy pressure against authoritarianism, the idea that Russia is trying to destroy Western civilization. All of that has had a huge impact in terms of how people are reacting to this. But you can also see that a lot of it is skin deep. There's a lot of support for no-fly zones now in terms of the polling. But then when you look at a lot of the same polls and they say, do you want American troops to be involved in any sort of war in Ukraine, there's almost no support for it at all. So obviously, there are a lot of people who aren't fully connecting the idea of a no-fly zone to the idea of the possibility of war between the US, other NATO powers in Russia. And when you raise it to that level, people want to back up. Similar, you see a lot of support for Biden sending troops to Poland and other things like that. But then in the same polls, they'll be asking, well, do you think that the US should send troops to Ukraine to fight Russians? And there's almost no support. So I think similarly with the gas prices, what we will see is that a lot of people say, yeah, that sounds good. Let's take out the Russian oil and gas industry and the media saying this is the biggest industry in the country and that this will cripple Putin and so on and so forth and perhaps somehow further the cause of peace. But I think the more we see gas prices going up, the more likely we are going to see people start to say, well, wait a second, this is not what we were told in terms of there being limited impact. And of course, Biden did say in the State of the Union they were going to go to great lengths to prevent the gas prices from rising significantly. So if they do, I think that will change a lot of people's calculation. You can already see the Republicans just, you know, insanely cynically because they of course are supporting aggressively sanctions against the oil and gas industry and won't Biden to do more. But you can already see Republicans are putting out social media videos and things like that, criticizing Biden over the rising gas prices. So certainly they can already foresee and feel that this will be an issue that they'll be able to make some hay about in the elections because people will be very upset. So I do think that the propaganda apparatus has been very successful in the United States during the first 14 days or so of conflict in Ukraine. But I do think you see that a lot of it is skin deep and a lot of it is based on really not a full understanding of the implications of many of these actions, which of course the US government is not going out of their way to lay out for people. And finally, the impact on the economy might have a disastrous effect on the chances of the ruling Democratic Party as well. The Democrats are already staring at defeat in the midterms to be held later this year, as many of the promises they made have not been achieved. How will the war in Ukraine have an impact on Biden and the Democrats? Will the Republicans benefit from the war? Yeah, I think that what's happening now could end up being a major blow to the Democratic campaign in the midterm elections and certainly to the Biden administration. As the saying goes in American politics, it's the economy stupid. If there's a recession, if there's continued inflation, the Democrats will be blamed. I would say in many ways they will be rightfully blamed because they did not take any actions in 2021 to try to avert the rise in inflation in many ways that they could have. And in fact, they allowed a handful of members of their own party to hijack an agenda that was broadly popular amongst Democrats, independents and Republicans. So certainly they will be blamed. I think the Republicans will certainly very aggressively say that Biden didn't do enough to counter Russia beforehand and ended up in this terrible situation, that he's doing a bad job managing it and so on and so forth. And even though it'll be hypocritical and cynical, I think they probably will be able to gain some purchase hold with those arguments because I think people will be looking for someone to blame for why the economy seems to be going south. And certainly I think it'll be very interesting to see how the Democrats try to respond because they have been aggressively pursuing these actions against Russia that do have the possibility of tanking the economy. So it's possible they'll be insulated to some degree by the fact that there is sympathy for Ukraine amongst a number of American voters. But I think by and large, this is a shooting in the foot kind of element, but Republicans of course are also implicated. So there is some limit there and perhaps the bounty they're able to reap on this issue. But just going rule of thumb and elections in America are very sort of predictable in many ways. The rule of thumb would tell you bad economy off the midterm election usually goes against the party of the president. Everything stacking up very heavily against the Democrats and they don't seem to have anything lined up in terms of the ability to pass legislation that would lead people to believe that they should keep them in there in a majority.