Why Oil Prices Are Still Climbing Despite Trump’s Intervention

The White House has rolled out a small parade of price-cooling ideas, from emergency stockpile coordination to sanction relief. The oil market, meanwhile, keeps sending the same blunt reply: none of that fully matters if the Strait of Hormuz stays choked.

Oil rose again Monday as the war involving Iran continued to disrupt production and shipping across the Middle East. By 0903 GMT, Brent crude was up $2.30, or 2.2%, at $105.44 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate gained $1.29, or 1.3%, to $100. Both benchmarks have surged more than 40% this month and are trading at their highest levels since 2022.

That climb has come even as President Donald Trump and his advisers look for ways to cool the market before higher fuel costs seep further into the U.S. economy. Reuters reported that the administration has weighed easing some oil sanctions, including on Russia, coordinating additional sales from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, waiving certain federal taxes, relaxing Jones Act shipping rules, and even considering intervention in oil futures markets. Trump also said the U.S. was lifting sanctions on some countries “until the Strait is up,” though he did not provide details.

The problem is that traders appear focused less on Washington’s toolkit than on a very physical bottleneck: the Strait of Hormuz. The International Energy Agency said export volumes of crude and refined products through the strait are running at less than 10% of pre-conflict levels, after the war that began on February 28 impeded flows through one of the world’s most critical energy corridors. In 2025, an average of 20 million barrels a day of crude and oil products transited Hormuz, about 25% of global seaborne oil trade.

That is why even headline-sized policy responses have struggled to calm traders for long. The IEA’s 32 member countries agreed on March 11 to make 400 million barrels from emergency reserves available to the market, the agency’s largest coordinated oil-stock release ever. The IEA said supplies from Asia and Oceania would begin flowing immediately, with Europe and the Americas following by the end of March. Yet prices have kept climbing, a sign that emergency barrels can soften the blow but not magically reopen a blocked artery.

The administration is also trying to shape the narrative around what comes next. Reuters reported that Peter Navarro, who leads the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, circulated a report arguing that Iran-related geopolitical risk has added a $5 to $15 per barrel “terror premium” to oil prices for decades and that prices could eventually settle well below $60 a barrel if that risk disappears. Energy economist Ed Hirs of the University of Houston disputed the premise, saying he knows of no verifiable evidence for such a premium and noting that U.S. producers generally need higher prices to break even.

The market right now seems to be siding with the skeptics. Reuters reported that a White House-backed plan to provide naval escorts and insurance support for tankers using Hormuz had not significantly boosted shipping traffic. In that light, Trump’s measures look more like sandbags than a dam: useful at the edges, but not enough to stop a flood driven by lost flows, damaged infrastructure, and fear that the conflict could widen further.

For consumers, the political risk is easy to understand. Trump has made lower fuel prices central to his economic message, and Reuters noted that a prolonged spike in oil and gasoline costs could ripple through transportation and broader consumer prices ahead of the November midterms. Oil traders, for their part, are watching a simpler scoreboard. Until more crude moves safely through Hormuz, policy gestures from Washington may keep making headlines while prices keep climbing anyway.