“They say they will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s the purpose of what we were doing”
During a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and reporters Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. is ending its bombing campaign against the U.S.-designated Yemeni foreign terrorist organization, the Houthis.
“We had some very good news last night. The Houthis have announced… that they don’t want to fight anymore. They just don’t want to fight. And we will honor that and we still the bombings,” Trump said.
The Houthis began launching coordinated attacks on U.S. ships in the Red Sea in 2023. The Houthis have repeatedly conducted missile and drone strikes on American merchant and war ships since then, aligning themselves with Iranian terrorist groups and citing America’s support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a reason for the attacks.
Through an executive order signed on his second day in office, Trump re-designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization and began an aggressive campaign against them. Former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally included Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal messaging thread containing details of U.S. strikes against the Houthis in March. The administration recently moved Waltz to its United Nations ambassador role and put Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge of the National Security Council. Rubio will hold both positions.
Trump’s administration has repeatedly touted its victories against the Houthis as a sign of its strength, but Trump exhibited a slightly gentler attitude toward the group Tuesday.
“They have capitulated, but more importantly, we will take their word. They say they will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s the purpose of what we were doing,” Trump said.
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Iran has been the target for decades. Biden, Harris, and Clinton—all the Democrats have said that they would attack Iran if given the opportunity. It appears that Donald Trump is attempting to mitigate a potentially irresolvable situation. As he bluntly told reporters: We basically — we have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f‑‑‑ they’re doing.”
A portion of the nation believes Trump acted like a dictator by attacking Iran without Congressional approval. I explained how former President Barack Obama decimated the War Powers Resolution Act when he decided Libya was overdue for a regime change. The War Powers Act, or War Powers Resolution of 1973, grants the POTUS the ability to send American troops into battle if Congress receives a 48-hour notice. The stipulation here is that troops cannot remain in battle for over 60 days unless Congress authorizes a declaration of war. Congress could also remove US forces at any time by passing a resolution.
Libya is one of seven nations that Obama bombed without Congressional approval, yet no one remembers him as a wartime president, as the United States was not technically at war. Over 26,000 bombs were deployed across 7 nations under his command in 2016 alone. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Pakistan were attacked without a single vote. Donald Trump’s recent orders saw 36 bombs deployed in Iran.
The majority of those bombings happened in Syria, Libya, and Iraq under the premise of targeting extremist groups like ISIS. Drone strikes were carried out across Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan as the Obama Administration accused those nations of hosting al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Coincidentally, USAID was also providing funding to those groups.
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was initially implemented to hunt down the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Obama broadened his interpretation of the AUMF and incorporated newly formed militant groups that were allegedly expanding across the entire Middle East. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism believes there were up to 1,100 civilian casualties in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Thousands of civilians died in Syria and Iraq but the death toll was never calculated. At least 100 innocent people died in the 2016 attacks in Afghanistan alone.
The government will always augment the law for their personal agenda. The War Powers Resolution was ignored and the AUMF was altered. Congress was, however, successful in preventing Obama from putting US troops on the ground and fighting a full-scale war. In 2013, Obama sought congressional approval for military action in Syria but was denied. Obama again attempted to deploy troops in 2015 but was denied. Congress has to redraft the AUMF to specifically prevent Obama from deploying troops in the Middle East. “The authorization… does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations.” Obama attempted to redraft the AUMF on his own by insisting he would prohibit “enduring offensive ground combat operations” or long-term deployment of troops. He was met with bipartisan disapproval as both sides believed he was attempting to drag the United States into another unnecessary war.
The United States should not be involved in any of these battles, but here we are. Those living in fear that Donald Trump is a dictator fail to recognize that past leadership had every intention of sending American men and women into battle unilaterally without a single vote cast.
What if they gave an oil price spike and nobody came? That is admittedly kind of a lame play on an old saying about parties, but it’s exactly what has happened over the two weeks since June 12, when Israel launched its initial assault on Iran.
At that day’s close of trading, the domestic U.S. WTI price sat at $68.04 per barrel. As of this writing on June 24, the price stands at $64.50. That’s not just the absence of a price spike, it is the opposite of one, a drop of 5% in just two weeks.
So, what happened? Why didn’t crude prices spike significantly? For such a seemingly complex trading market that is impacted daily by a broad variety of factors, the answer here is surprisingly simple, boiling down to just two key factors.
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Neither Israel nor the United States made an effort to target Iran’s refining or export infrastructures.
Despite some tepid, sporadic saber rattling by Iranian officials, they mounted no real effort to block the flow of crude tankers through the region’s critical choke point, the Strait of Hormuz.
Hitting Iran’s infrastructure could have taken its substantial crude exports – which the International Energy Agency estimates to be 1.7 million barrels per day – off the global market, a big hit. Shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of global crude supplies flow every day, would have been a much bigger hit, one that would have set prices on an upward spiral.
But the oil kept flowing, muting the few comparatively small increases in prices which did come about.
Respected analyst David Ramsden-Wood, writing at his “HotTakeOfTheDay” Substack newsletter, summed it up quite well. “Oil is still structurally bearish. U.S. producers are in PR mode—talking up ‘Drill, baby, drill’ while actually slowing down. Capex is flat to declining. Rig counts are down. Shareholders want returns, not growth. So we’re left with this: Tension in the Middle East, no supply impact, and U.S. production that’s quietly rolling over. Oil shrugged.”
There was a time, as recently as 10 years ago, when crude prices would have no doubt rocketed skywards at the news of both the commencement of Israel’s initial June 12 assault on Iran’s military and political targets and of last Saturday’s U.S. bombing operation. In those days, we could have expected crude prices to go as high as $100 per barrel or even higher. Markets used to really react to the “tension in the Middle East” to which Ramsden-Wood refers, in large part, because they had no real way to parse through all the uncertainties such events might create.
Now it’s different. Things have changed. The rise of machine learning, AI and other technological and communications advancements has played a major role.
In the past, a lack of real-time information during any rise in Middle East tensions left traders in the dark for some period of time – often extended periods – about potential impacts on production in the world’s biggest oil producing region. But that is no longer the case. Traders can now gauge potential impacts almost immediately.
That was especially true throughout this most recent upset, due to President Donald Trump’s transparency about everything that was taking place. You were able to know exactly what the U.S. was planning to do or had done just by regularly pressing the “refresh” button at Trump’s Truth Social feed.
Tim Stewart, President of the D.C.-based U.S. Oil and Gas Association, has a term for this. “The Markets are becoming much better at building the ‘47 Variable’ into their short-term models,” he said in an email. “This is not a Republican Administration – it is a Disrupter Administration and disruption happens both ways, so the old playbooks just don’t apply anymore. Traders are taking into account a President who means what he says, and it is best to plan for it.”
Add to all that the reality that a high percentage of crude trading is now conducted via automated, AI-controlled programs, and few trades are any longer made in the dark.
Thus, the world saw a price spike which, despite being widely predicted by many smart people, didn’t happen, and the reasons why are pretty simple.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)
