No. of Recommendations: 9
Trump the Most Perfect is hinting at reimposing sanctions on Russian oil, but that is not nearly enough to compensate for Hormuz being open, and sanctions on Iran being removed. Where else can he disrupt supply?
He won't. He doesn't want oil prices to be high. He wants them to be low. He wants gas prices to come down so that his party doesn't get wiped out in the midterms. He wants the inflationary pressures caused by high prices for oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and other industrial inputs to go away so that he can finally get the rate cuts he's been longing for the last 18 months. And he's very motivated by his own personal book - he doesn't have any personal interests in oil and he already gave them the world with the changes to U.S. regulatory policy (removing the endangerment finding, disrupting fuel economy standards, killing all the EV credits, etc).
He has nothing to gain from high oil prices, and lots to lose. And while he wasn't smart enough to realize before the war that oil shortages elsewhere in the world can drive up prices for U.S. consumers even though we're a net exporter, he has learned that lesson by now.
If the Administration is going to further indulge their interventionist bent, I think the prediction of Cuba as the next target is probably right. Cuba is weak, close, has a domestic constituency that's important to Trump, and doesn't have the downside of driving up oil prices.
