President Donald Trump has complained loudly about what he has said are unfair international trade practices that hurt the U.S. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Trump picks a new international fight by poking at OPEC

President Donald Trump on Friday pinned the recent rise in oil prices on OPEC, a fresh target for the president’s international commerce complaints that have dominated his rhetoric in recent months.

Trump accused the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, meeting this week in Saudi Arabi with other, non-member oil-producing states, of artificially booting oil prices. The president said those prices “will not be accepted.”


“Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!” the president wrote on Twitter, without elaborating on what any consequences may be.

Oil prices in the U.S. hit a three-year high earlier this week but dipped somewhat on Friday amid the meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where OPEC members and non-members, including Russia, were gathering to discuss continuing efforts to reduce the global oil supply. Prices dipped further on Friday after the president’s tweet. Nonetheless, should they remain relatively stable through Friday, it would mark the second straight week of increased oil prices.

Since January 2017, OPEC and other oil-producing nations have worked to reduce the global oil supply, according to Bloomberg, with member-state adherence to the agreement hitting 164 percent last month. Non-member state adherence to the supply-reduction agreement hit 85 percent last month, Bloomberg reported.

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OPEC, whose member states cumulatively control a massive share of the world’s oil reserves, has long perplexed and often frustrated politicians in the U.S. and around the globe. The cartel’s practice of quota-setting can push the price of oil and related products like gasoline up or down with significant implications for economies worldwide.

Through his first 15 months in office, Trump has prioritized U.S. energy resources, championing coal and natural gas production and reducing regulation at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere. He has done decidedly less to bolster the types of alternative energy sources that former President Barack Obama backed aggressively and have gained steam globally in recent years.

Trump has also complained loudly about what he has said are unfair international trade practices that hurt the U.S., although his rhetoric to date has largely focused on China, on which he has threatened to impose significant tariffs, and multilateral trade deals like NAFTA, which he has threatened to pull the U.S. out of.

While Trump has been mostly mum on OPEC through his first 15 months in office, he has had harsh words for the oil cartel in the past. In one of his frequent pre-presidential attacks against Obama, Trump in 2011 accused his predecessor of weakness in dealing with OPEC, remarking that “we have nobody in Washington that sits back and said, you’re not going to raise that fucking price,” according to a Mother Jones report.

And in a May 2016 campaign speech outlining his energy agenda, Trump declared that "we will become and stay totally independent of any need to import energy from the OPEC cartel,” under his administration. "We don’t deal with them. We’ll handle them just fine.”

But while the president has expressed his discontent with OPEC, he has fostered warm relations with the cartel’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia. Trump has spoken fondly of his trip last spring to Saudi Arabia, where he, Saudi King Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi posed for a photo at a counterterrorism center with their hands on a glowing globe.

During a White House visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last month, Trump called Saudi Arabia a “great friend” and heralded the cooperation between the two nations. The U.S. president wrote on Twitter last November, amid an apparent purge of Saudi royals led by the crown prince, that he had “great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. They know exactly what they are doing.”