Dan Sullivan: Biden helps Iran, hits Alaska

Editor’s note: This opinion column first ran in the Wall Street Journal.

We are living in one of the most dangerous times since World War II, as Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran attempt to undermine the free world. Yet rather than maximize our nation’s strengths and weaken our adversaries, the Biden administration is doing the opposite.

Consider its policy on Iran. Under sanctions pressure from the Trump administration, Iranian oil exports in 2020 were at about 200,000 barrels a day, leaving Tehran with about $4 billion in foreign reserves, a small pool relative to the country’s size.

In an effort to appease the mullahs, however, the Biden administration hasn’t enforced comprehensive sanctions since 2021. As a result, Iranian oil exports today are at nearly 1.6 million barrels a day and its regime has been enriched by more than $70 billion. Iran uses this windfall in part to fund its terrorist proxies, including the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah. Iranian oil development also allows the regime to deepen its ties with China, which buys about 80% of Iran’s oil exports.

Meantime the Biden administration is doing the reverse at home—weakening America’s domestic energy production by restricting development on two important sites, the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and Alaska’s Ambler Mining District.

These measures are suicidal—and lawless. In 1980 Congress directed the interior secretary to “conduct an expeditious program of competitive leasing” in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The Biden administration is dramatically reinterpreting this law so it can treat those 13 million acres it is locking up as de facto federal wilderness.

The decision, ironically, ignores the desires of many in the Alaska Native community. Elected indigenous leaders from the North Slope of Alaska eight times have requested a meeting with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to express their opposition to the administration’s new rule. Each time, they’ve been denied. It seems that the Biden administration listens to people of color and indigenous communities only if they align with the administration’s extreme antidevelopment policies.