President Donald Trump may be pledging a quick end to his war on Iran — but the political fallout will persist long after the fighting stops.
Trump administration officials are downplaying the spike in oil and gasoline prices resulting from the disruption of crude shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway.
“The recent increase in oil and gas prices is temporary, and this operation will result in lower gas prices in the long term,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday, referring to the attacks on Iran. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Monday that price perturbations would last “weeks, not months” as tanker traffic continues snarling in the strait.
But analysts say the disruption is already baked into oil and gas prices, threatening to prolong higher gasoline prices further into the midterm elections.
Here are five reasons high oil prices might persist:
It’s physical
The war on Iran has already disrupted the Gulf region’s energy markets so significantly that a quick recovery is no longer possible, said Anas Alhajji, a global energy markets expert. A mounting backlog of tankers on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively shut down for more than a week, will take at least two weeks to clear. Then there will need to be a return to oil and gas production in a growing number of Middle Eastern countries that have now been shut down, including Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Some of the damage from Iranian attacks, such as those on Qatar’s natural gas facilities, cannot be easily repaired, he said.
“Ending the war does not mean ending the crisis,” Alhajji said. “We have countries that literally shut down production because their storage is full. To bring back that oil to a pre-crisis level takes time. For [liquefied natural gas] in particular, it takes a very long time.”
It takes two to tango
Trump may have started the war — but he doesn’t have the power to unilaterally end it. The Iranians have not publicly stated that they will quickly agree to stop their attacks. In the last week, they have increasingly targeted the region’s energy infrastructure, which could cause a major jump in oil prices and a longer period of uncertainty if they persist.
In response to Trump’s comments, Revolutionary Guard spokesperson Ali Mohammad Naini on Tuesday told Iranian state media that “Iran will determine when the war ends.”
Iranian officials are keenly aware of the political pressure Trump faces at home as long as gas prices at the pump remain elevated. Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, said the spike in global oil prices showed that the regime would not capitulate if the U.S. and Israel continued to target oil infrastructure.
“9 days into Operation Epic Mistake, oil prices have doubled while all commodities are skyrocketing,”he wrote on X. “We know the U.S. is plotting against our oil and nuclear sites in hopes of containing huge inflationary shock. Iran is fully prepared. And we, too, have many surprises in store.”
It could get worse
On Tuesday, evidence emerged that Iran was beginning to place mines in the Strait of Hormuz, a significant escalation that greatly could complicate efforts to resume the 20 percent of daily global energy shipments that traverse the region, CBS News reported.
The potential mining of the strait, along with all of the damage to infrastructure and stalled production, means it could be a long time before the energy markets return to normal, said Rory Johnston, an oil analyst who writes the newsletter “Commodity Context.”
“This crisis will continue to get worse until normal traffic through the Strait resumes, and, at this stage, even if the conflict ended today and tankers ramped back up to 100% Hormuz flow, it would still take months to return to anything resembling normality,” he wrote on X.
The longer the strait is effectively closed, the greater the chance the world tips toward a “deep recession,” said Greg Priddy, an expert on energy market disruption who worked at the U.S. Energy Information Administration in the George W. Bush administration. He said it would take more than a month to get back to normal if the war were to stop today, but that there will not be “normal tanker traffic as long as Iran has weapons to throw at tankers.”
Priddy, who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Center for the National Interest, said keeping the current volume off the market for another seven weeks would cause a major global economic contraction so severe that it would create “probably the worst recession that anyone has seen since the 1930s.”
It’s not just mines
The attacks on energy infrastructure from Iran and potentially other groups are widening by the day and have the potential to create lasting damage.
On Wednesday, Iran attacked and destroyed a major oil storage facility in Oman. Three ships were hit near the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, including a Thai-flagged container vessel that the Iranian government took credit for attacking because it was “illegally insisting on passing through the Strait of Hormuz.”
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that oil tankers should start transiting the narrow opening despite the risks.
“I think they should use the strait,” Trump said. “Look, we took out just about all of their mine ships in one night.”
Democratic senators who attended a classified briefing on the war Tuesday said the administration has no plan to reopen the strait.
“Right now, they don’t know how to get it safely back open,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy wrote on X. “Which is unforgiveable, because this part of the disaster was 100% foreseeable.”
It’s not just Iran
While the administration is threatening the Iranian government with severe consequences if they attack ships moving through the strait, they are not the only hostile actors in the region that can effectively block the shipping route.
There are multiple splinter groups in the region that are not affiliated with the Iranian government but who are incensed that their leader has been killed and want revenge, noted Alhajji, the energy market expert.
The late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not just the leader of Iran, but also for Shia muslims in general, and had supporters across the region, including in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Afghanistan and more, he noted.
That has created a wider network of groups that are willing to attack oil interests in the region, he said, and there is evidence that they may already be preparing attacks. Cheap drones could be used to damage multimillion-dollar oil tankers.
“They are angry because their leader got killed,” Alhajji said. “The technology in the last 15 years has advanced to the extent that to cause multimillion-dollar damage with $500 is very possible.”
