Post #5425

Treasury just quietly admitted what the headlines won’t: Trump’s “maximum pressure” war on Iran is now so costly that Washington is considering unsanctioning Iranian oil to keep the global economy from seizing up. The administration is scrambling to plug a crisis it helped trigger. After US–Israeli strikes on Iran and Iran’s retaliation across the Gulf, attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG terminal, refineries in Kuwait, export infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and gas sites in the UAE have pushed Brent to around $118 a barrel and sent European gas prices up as much as 30 percent in a day. Qatar’s energy chief says almost a fifth of the country’s LNG export capacity is offline and could take three to five years to rebuild. In response, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is now talking about “unsanctioning” roughly 140 million barrels of Iranian oil already afloat and tapping US reserves again — a public U‑turn from punishing Iran’s barrels to begging them into the market. At the same time, the Pentagon has dropped a 200‑billion‑dollar funding request for the Iran war on the White House, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shrugging that “it takes money to kill bad guys” and adding that even this number “could move.” Last week, the US already lifted sanctions on Russian oil currently at sea and allowed Iranian‑linked tankers and companies to carry and sell that Russian crude to help ease prices — effectively outsourcing part of the energy fix to the very networks it claims to be fighting. Iran, for its part, is done pretending this is limited. Its foreign minister Abbas Araghchi is promising “ZERO restraint” if Iranian energy infrastructure is hit again, while Tehran keeps firing back across Gulf facilities and watching panic ripple through markets. Yet from the Pentagon podium, Hegseth insists the US is “winning decisively and on our terms,” refuses to give any timeline for the war’s end, and leaves the impression of a superpower that has to buy its way out of the energy blowback it unleashed. So the picture is brutally simple: every new strike on oil and gas sites adds another dollar to the barrel, another line to a 200‑billion‑dollar war tab, and another twist in the logic that says America must keep bombing Iran while quietly putting Iranian and Russian barrels back on the balance sheet to keep the lights on. #IranWar#Trump#oil#gas#energyCrisis#Hormuz#Qatar#Russia#sanctions#warCost 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸