The Trump administration’s rhetoric on the war in Iran tends to be heavy on words like “lethality” and “obliteration,” so it was notable that the president seemed almost apologetic on Wednesday, when discussing an Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field, which prompted Iranian retaliation against natural gas facilities in Qatar and sent global energy prices skyrocketing.
“The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. (Israeli officials say the US was informed ahead of time.) He added that “NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field” unless Iran launched more attacks against Qatar.
Trump’s reluctance to get drawn into a tit-for-tat energy war with Iran makes sense: it’s an escalation scenario guaranteed to drive up the global economic costs of this war.
The imperative of keeping global oil flows moving has already led to some fairly drastic steps. Last week, the administration temporarily lifted the sanctions meant to prevent countries like India from buying oil from Russia, upending the US strategy to pressure the Kremlin into a peace deal in Ukraine.
Now, the US is considering unsanctioning Iranian oil that’s already on the water, or as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it in an interview with Fox Business, “In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against the Iranians to keep the price down for the next 10 or 14 days, as we continue this campaign.”
On paper, it seems very strange for the US to take steps to make it easier for the country it’s currently at war with to export oil, particularly as the biggest customer for Iran’s oil is China, another US rival. But it speaks to the strange role oil plays in modern warfare, one in which countries sometimes paradoxically want their adversaries to keep selling energy.
An energy truce breaks down
One might think that when fighting an adversary, such as Iran, that relies on energy exports as the lifeblood of its economy and the primary funding source for its armed forces, that those resources would be the first thing attacked. In practice, economic stability and the desire to keep the lights on and avoid voter backlash often take precedence over military expediency.
The war in the Middle East, and Iran’s effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, have obviously roiled global energy markets, and there have been some previous strikes against oil facilities. But until now there appeared to be an unspoken agreement against major attacks on energy infrastructure in either Iran or the Gulf.
“It’s common, when warfare is happening, to have different stages of escalation, with certain things that start out as off-limits,” said Rosemary Kelanic, an analyst at Defense Priorities and expert on the geopolitics of oil. Until now, Kelanic says, “it was a good balance. We didn’t hit these Iranian energy sites, and then they didn’t hit the many more energy sites in the Gulf states.”
In recent days, however, that truce appears to have broken down. The Iranian attacks on Qatar knocked out 17 percent of the emirate’s natural gas production capacity, causing an estimated $20 billion in lost revenue and disrupting supplies to Europe and Asia. Natural gas is extracted from fewer sites globally than oil and the technical process is more complex, meaning the costs are likely to be higher than attacks on oil facilities. On Friday, Iran followed up with an attack on an oil refinery in Kuwait.
If the truce has broken down, that’s bad news politically for a US administration already concerned about the impact of rising oil and gas prices. But it’s not the first war in which they’ve faced this dilemma.
The Trump administration’s desire to keep oil off-limits in this war in some ways mirrors the Biden’s administration’s approach to Ukraine. In 2024, the Financial Times reported that the White House had urged Ukraine to refrain from long-range strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure out of concern that it would drive up global energy prices and provoke energy retaliation by Russia.
When the war broke out, the US had considered sanctions to disrupt Russia’s seaborne oil exports, but held back after estimates suggested this could drive oil prices to over $200 a barrel. Instead, US and European officials devised a complex “price cap” to force Russia to sell its oil at a discount. This would, as one Treasury official put it, “limit Kremlin profits while maintaining stable energy markets.”
The most extreme example of keeping oil off-limits may be that Ukraine continued to maintain and repair the network of pipelines on its soil used to export Russian oil and natural gas to Europe, even as the war raged. The concern was that cutting off these supplies entirely would alienate the European allies Ukraine relied on for economic and military support and doom the country’s aspirations for EU membership. The gas exports were finally shut down at the beginning of 2025, but Ukraine is currently under pressure from European countries to repair a pipeline used to carry Russian oil.
While there is evidence that a pro-Ukraine group destroyed the controversial Nord Stream pipeline carrying Russian gas to Europe under the Baltic Sea, the Ukrainian government has consistently denied involvement, perhaps due to the sensitivity of the target among its allies.
Destroying Iran’s oil, or taking it?
There may be another reason why Trump is reluctant to destroy Iran’s oil industry: he’d rather take it over. The president has been talking about grabbing Iran’s oil fields since first considering a run for office in the 1980s. During this conflict, he has said it’s too soon to talk about seizing Iran’s oil industry but hasn’t ruled it out, and has linked the operation to the recent US intervention in Venezuela, where a more pliant leader is now willing to give US firms a role in the country’s struggling oil industry.
Trump’s desire to keep Iran’s oil industry intact, whether to play a future role in managing it or just to avoid driving prices up any further, could put him at odds with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Bibi wants to wreck Iran’s economy and decimate its energy infrastructure. Trump wants to keep it intact.” one US official told the Washington Post this week.
But it seems increasingly unlikely that Trump will be able to fight a war in which energy targets on both sides of the Gulf are kept out of bounds.
