On Thursday, President Donald Trump posted to his social media website a headline from the Wall Street Journal: “More oil is now coming out of the Persian Gulf than before the Iran War.” While this is indeed what the Journal used as a headline in a recent story, the president did not link to the article or give more info beyond that. As the report reads, “Middle East oil flows, including shipments through Hormuz and alternative routes across the region, averaged more than 24 million barrels a day in the week through Oct. 18, surpassing prewar levels of 23.3 million, according to ship tracker Kpler.”
Those details reveal a difference of roughly 700,000 barrels of oil, which is a lot of oil to be sure, but only 3% more than the 23.3 million before Israel and the U.S. launched a war against Iran on Feb. 28. So we’re basically back to where things were before the fighting started.
Regardless, it doesn’t appear that this 3% increase is going to bring down oil prices any time soon. On Friday, the price of Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, reached more than $117 a barrel, the highest level since April, and close to the highest levels since the war began, according to the New York Times. This is in spite of Trump desperately trying to bring down the cost of diesel, which averaged an all-time high of $6.52 per gallon on Sept. 22 and as of Friday, sits at an average of $6.31 per gallon. Regular unleaded is averaging about $4.29 a gallon.
Among other moves, Trump has slashed rules for truckers, offered farmers $8 billion in relief and struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to ease fuel sanctions, a move critics have said may be illegal. On Friday, the first shipment of Russian oil departed on a tanker headed to the U.S.
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None of this is predicted to change the cost of oil any time soon, according to experts. “The president tends to discount long-term losses over short-term gain, and I am skeptical if there is any short gain to be had here,” said Chris Borick, a pollster and political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, told Reuters Friday.
Meanwhile, fighting in the Middle East continues, with at least seven commercial oil tankers damaged by either Iranian attacks or naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz on one night alone, which may possibly be the largest single-day number of vessels damaged in the waterway since the war started.
Yet there seems to be no close end to the war. In fact, the U.S. could still be stuck in a stalemate with Iran a year from now, according to Mike Waltz, Trump’s U.N. ambassador to the UN. In an interview with the Financial Times published Friday, Waltz said “the president and the U.S. Navy can maintain this blockade [on Iranian ports] for the foreseeable future,” he said, adding that the Trump administration is “tightening” its economic pressure on Iran. “I’m not going to put out hypotheticals. One would hope that they’ll come to the table in a meaningful way before that,” Waltz said.
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