Tim’s view
The war in Iran is entering an unpredictable new phase where the risk to energy markets is growing and analysts’ crystal balls are getting murkier.
Conflicting messages are proliferating: On Monday, US President Donald Trump threatened to carry out a fresh “very major attack” on Iran and then withdrew the threat in the same sentence. Tehran said the US had offered to waive sanctions on its oil sector, which a US official then told Semafor was not actually on the table. Meanwhile, oil watchdogs say the market is approaching a tipping point in which prices for crude oil and refined fuels could skyrocket — including in the US, which is exporting record volumes of oil and gas but could soon find that US consumers are paying to compete for their own barrels against the rest of the world.
It’s getting harder to find any reliable signal in all this noise. Despite Trump’s assurance that Tehran’s latest peace proposal offers a “very good chance” to reach agreement on nuclear deterrence, Fernando Ferreira, director of geopolitical risk at the DC consulting firm Rapidan Energy, still puts the odds of a renewed military escalation at about 70%, he told me. That’s based on the remaining distance between the two sides’ negotiating positions, the slow pace at which the US blockade can inflict meaningful pain on Iran’s economy, satellite imagery showing American military assets closing in on the strait, and the emerging pattern — totally unacceptable to the US — of foreign leaders negotiating directly with Iran for safe passage of their tankers through the waterway. Reopening the strait with military force could take weeks, Ferreira said, pushing the most ambitious timeline for resumption of normal traffic well into July.
Others are more sanguine. “Our base case envisions the strait reopens in June,” Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities strategy at JPMorgan, wrote in her most recent client note, arguing that the economic disruption for all sides is already becoming too painful to continue. Brookings Institution economist Robin Brooks, meanwhile, still has faith in relatively low oil futures prices as a safe indicator of where things are headed.
The upshot is the stakes are rising, the strait is neither open nor closed, and there are no concrete signs of progress.
Notable
- New infrastructure projects and trade deals are redirecting the flow of fossil fuels around the Strait of Hormuz, with the UAE saying it is racing to complete a new pipeline by next year that will double its oil export capacity bypassing the waterway.