The US Oil Industry Doesn’t Want the Iran War Either

It can’t be coincidental, right? In the first two months of this year, US President Donald Trump has attacked two of OPEC’s 12 members, snatching Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January and killing Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. Conspiracy theories and reasonable curiosity have converged on the question of how central oil has been to all this. One senses that the average American thinks military action is now planned in a room filled with 10 oilmen, 10 Israelis, a shirtless Pete Hegseth and Trump letting it rip.

This misreads how strange it is for the US oil business to find itself in war headlines again, with “No blood for oil” protest signs being dusted off. The international state of affairs undercuts one of the industry’s biggest achievements this century: the shale revolution. Modern drilling and fracking techniques not only brought America close to self-sufficiency in energy but also, over time, created an easier, more predictable way to do business. Other oil and gas producers were forced to make room for massively increased American oil and gas volumes. In the political realm, US presidents no longer had to obsess over how an action would affect prices at the pump. In the grandest of American traditions, the rest of the energy world became nonplayer characters.