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Why the US wants to protect Iran’s oil and gas

The Mideast energy truce is breaking down.

The Trump administration’s rhetoric on the war in Iran tends to be heavy on words like “lethality” and “obliteration,” so it was notable that the president seemed almost apologetic on Wednesday, when discussing an Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field, which prompted Iranian retaliation against natural gas facilities in Qatar and sent global energy prices skyrocketing.

“The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. (Israeli officials say the US was informed ahead of time.) He added that “NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field” unless Iran launched more attacks against Qatar.

Trump’s reluctance to get drawn into a tit-for-tat energy war with Iran makes sense: it’s an escalation scenario guaranteed to drive up the global economic costs of this war.

The imperative of keeping global oil flows moving has already led to some fairly drastic steps. Last week, the administration temporarily lifted the sanctions meant to prevent countries like India from buying oil from Russia, upending the US strategy to pressure the Kremlin into a peace deal in Ukraine.

Now, the US is considering unsanctioning Iranian oil that’s already on the water, or as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it in an interview with Fox Business, “In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against the Iranians to keep the price down for the next........

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