When the U.S. seized an oil tanker last week, global oil markets yawned.
Geopolitical conflicts tend to cause price shocks, or at least a notable uptick in oil prices. Instead, the price of crude has dropped since President Donald Trump ordered the capture of a sanctioned oil tanker laden with 2 million barrels of Venezuelan oil.
Brent crude prices have hovered at just above $60 a barrel since the strike, even falling slightly as of Monday.
“This is an optimal time for the Trump administration to apply this pressure,” said Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. “And of course, they can sort of fine tune how much pressure they want to put in terms of the potential impact on the market.”
