Mr. Clemens on the President’s diesel deal with Moscow
A letter to the editor, from the desk of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, lately of the river, now of the fuel pump
To the Editor:
Sir —
I spent the better part of my youth on the Mississippi, where I learned one rule above the rest: a pilot who tells you he commands the whole river will, within the hour, be asking you to lend him a lantern.
I am reminded of it by the news from Washington. The President has announced, in capital letters of the sort a man uses when he fears the point may not carry on its own, that America enjoys “TOTAL CONTROL” of the Strait of Hormuz. In the very same breath, and I mean the very same post, he announces that Russia will be sending us diesel.
I have turned that over a good many times, sir, and I cannot make the two halves meet. A man who commands the river does not generally go to the neighbor across it, the one who has spent four years burning the neighbor’s barn, and ask for the loan of a bucket. If we control the strait, why do we require the Kremlin? And if we require the Kremlin, I would humbly suggest the control is of a more modest and ceremonial character than the capitals imply.
Let me be fair to the gentleman, for fairness is a habit I formed late and have found expensive. Diesel stands at roughly $6.28 a gallon at this dat, and the American trucker, the farmer, and the housewife who buys what they carry all feel it. A man has every right to go looking for relief, and I would not deny him a bucket from any quarter. I only observe that the quarter in question is the one the whole Western world agreed to stop buying from, in the matter of a war.
The arrangement, as I understand it, is this. Russia will release three hundred thousand tons at once, which is about two and a quarter million barrels, with five hundred thousand more in November and a million after that. The Treasury has obligingly relaxed the sanctions through April to make it legal. A fellow who studies these matters for a living tells me the first shipment is less than America burns on its roads in a single day, and that the effect at the pump may be ten or twenty cents. I do not wish to be uncharitable, but I have known men to rearrange a whole foreign policy for less change than that.
There is a further difficulty, which is that the Russians are not known to have the diesel. They have forbidden its export since July, I am told, because Ukraine keeps setting their refineries on fire, which has cut their output by nearly a third. So we are to ease our principles in order to receive a shipment from a seller who may not own what he is selling. I have seen this transaction before. It was conducted on a riverboat, and the buyer was a Methodist.
The Senator from Connecticut, a Mr. Blumenthal, who helped write the very sanctions law the President signed only last month, says the decision makes us complicit in Putin’s war. I should put it more gently, being dead and past the age of picking fights. I would say that a country which signs a sanctions bill in September and a sanctions waiver in October has demonstrated great range, and that the bill-signing ceremony ought perhaps to have been postponed until the weather was settled.
The Ukrainians, for their part, have responded with a dignity I did not expect. Their President says they will stop burning Russian refineries the moment Russia stops destroying Ukrainian power stations. It occurs to me that the whole affair has now been reduced to a very plain proposition: the nation that was invaded is offering to put out its fires, and the nation that did the invading is being invited to sell us fuel.
I make no prediction about the price at the pump. I only say that when a man tells you he has total control of the river and then buys his oil from the fellow upstream, the sensible thing is to keep one hand on your lantern.
I remain, sir, as ever,
Mark Twain
(deceased, but still able to tell a river from a puddle)