No. of Recommendations: 11
Israel doesn't want a deal with the current regime.
So what? Trump cares very little about what other people want. Perhaps moreso than any other person who has ever held that office. Israel doesn't want a deal with the current regime - Trump doesn't care. Virtually every country in Europe and Asia wants Trump to cut a deal with the current regime - Trump doesn't care. The other Gulf states that Trump very much wants to keep in his good graces because they will personally enrich him far more than the oil companies will all want Trump to get the Strait open as soon as possible and get Iran to stop attacking their infrastructure - and Trump doesn't care. None of their "wants" are going to matter much to Trump. Israel has the ability to directly attack Iran which complicates the deal-making process, of course, but at the end of the day Trump doesn't care whether they want a deal or not.
The oil companies allegedly paid Trump a $1B bribe to make them richer. Reopening the Strait, and restoring oversupply to the market would work against their profit interest.
Who cares that they already made $1B in campaign contributions to Trump to get elected? Not Trump. He already got elected. He already gave them their money's worth 10x over with all of the regulatory and executive actions he took long before this current misadventure. That's not going to weigh the least bit in his calculations.
And of course that's inconsistent with what we see in the markets - if Trump was trying to help the oil companies at the expense of his own political interests (hah!), he'd signal to them (either privately or publicly) that the long-term strategy is to keep oil prices elevated so they could increase their production and make more money. Instead, we've seen virtually no change in supermajor production - indicating that they do not see increased oil prices as anything other than a short-term thing. Which is probably why the oil majors' stocks (like XOM and CVX and SHEL) are trading at around where they were right before the war started. A few months of high oil prices is a bit of a nice windfall, but there's no expectation that Trump is aiming to keep the Strait closed for beyond the very short term.
