Trump says oil surge is 'very small price to pay' as crude tops $100 a barrel; hints at when prices could fall
US President Donald Trump seeks to reassure Americans rattled by soaring fuel costs. Crude oil prices have doubled in three months. Major Gulf producers have slashed output amid the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Crude oil prices rocketed past $100 a barrel on Sunday for the first time since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The ongoing US military campaign against Iran has strangled one of the world's most critical energy chokepoints. It has also forced major Gulf producers to dramatically curtail output.
West Texas Intermediate, the US benchmark, surged 17% or $15.32 to $106.22 a barrel by Sunday, while global benchmark, Brent crude, advanced 15% or $14.28 to $106.92. By later in the day, US oil prices had extended gains to more than 23% on the session, trading above $111 a barrel. The milestone means crude has effectively doubled over the past three months from its December low — a pace of appreciation without precedent in the futures market's history dating to 1983.
Trump Says Oil Will Drop 'Rapidly' Once Iran Nuclear Threat Is Eliminated
Shortly after prices breached the psychologically significant $100 threshold at the open of Sunday evening's trading session, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to address surging energy costs and, notably, to offer a timeline for relief.
"Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace," Trump wrote. “ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY! President DJT.”
The post was notable both for its defiant tone and for its implicit signal that the administration views the price shock as temporary and directly tied to the military campaign's duration, framing the energy crisis as an acceptable cost of eliminating what it describes as an existential security threat.
Strait of Hormuz Closure Triggers Historic Supply Shock
The precipitating cause of the price spiral is the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which approximately 20% of the world's oil consumption is exported. Iranian threats against commercial tankers have made insurers and shipping companies unwilling to transit the passage, creating a cascading supply disruption that has left Gulf producers with oil they cannot move and storage facilities rapidly filling to capacity.
The consequences for global output have been severe. Iraq, OPEC's second-largest producer, has seen production from its three principal southern oilfields collapse by 70% to 1.3 million barrels per day from 4.3 million barrels per day before the conflict began, according to three industry officials who spoke to Reuters on Sunday.
Kuwait, OPEC's fifth-largest producer, announced precautionary cuts to both production and refinery output on Saturday, citing what the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation described as "Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz." The corporation did not specify the scale of the reductions.
The United Arab Emirates, OPEC's third-largest producer, said Saturday that it is "carefully managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements," with state energy company ADNOC noting that onshore operations were continuing as normal.
OPEC Producers Running Out of Storage as Tankers Pile Up
Production cuts from Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE are not a strategic choice so much as a logistical necessity. With tankers unable or unwilling to navigate the Strait, oil has nowhere to go, and Gulf storage sites are filling rapidly. The result is a self-reinforcing supply crisis: the longer the waterway remains closed, the more producers are forced to scale back, and the higher prices climb on global markets.
The last time crude oil surged above $100 a barrel, the catalyst was Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That episode proved relatively brief. Whether the current spike follows a similar trajectory depends almost entirely on how quickly, and on what terms, the US-Iran conflict concludes.
Iran Names New Supreme Leader as War Continues
On the Iranian side, the Islamic Republic moved to signal continuity of leadership, with reports indicating that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been named as the country's new supreme leader. The development offered little indication that Tehran is moving towards a diplomatic resolution, even as economic pressure mounts on both sides.
For American consumers and businesses, the trajectory of oil prices in the coming weeks will hinge on whether Trump's prediction, that prices will drop "rapidly" once the Iran nuclear threat is neutralised, proves accurate, or whether a protracted conflict extends the energy shock into a broader economic reckoning.
About the Author
Sayantani Biswas is an assistant editor at Livemint with seven years of experience covering geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations and global power dynamics. She reports on Indian and international politics, including elections worldwide, and specialises in historically grounded analysis of contemporary conflicts and state decisions. She joined Mint in 2021, after covering politics at publications including The Telegraph. <br> She holds an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University (2019), with a specialisation in postcolonial Latin American literature. Her research examined economic nationalism through Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. She also writes on political language, cultural memory and the long shadows of conflict. <br> Biswas grew up in Durgapur, an industrial town in West Bengal shaped by migration, which drew families from across India to the Durgapur Steel Plant. As the only child in a joint family, she spent years listening—almost obsessively—to her grandparents’ testimonies of struggle, fear and loss as they fled Bangladesh during the Partition of 1947. This formative exposure to lived historical memory later converged with her training in Comparative Literature, equipping her to analyse socio-economic structures and their reverberations. <br> Outside the newsroom, she gravitates towards cultural history and critical theory, returning often to texts such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As a journalist, she is committed to accuracy, intellectual rigour and fairness, and believes political reporting demands not only clarity and speed, but historical depth, contextual precision, and a disciplined resistance to spectacle.