The Price of Oil Now Is Getting Super Weird
Oil hit $128 a barrel in April. Then crashed ten percent in one afternoon on a peace rumor that turned out to be false. Then went back up when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz again the next day. And now it’s open, but it’s closed, but there’s a ceasefire, but they’re shooting.
Here’s what nobody is explaining. Every time you’ve filled up your car for the last thirty years, you were paying dictators. There was no way around it. Global oil demand doesn’t care about your politics — the world runs on 103 million barrels a day, and a massive chunk of that supply has always come from Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. You can’t separate the cheap gas from the regimes that produced it. That’s why we still have these Cold War-era bad guys in 2026. Taking them out means taking their oil offline — and that hits everyone on earth.
Trump is now doing what nobody wanted to do: pulling the plug on Iran and Venezuela simultaneously, while keeping Russia’s oil in the market as a pressure valve to prevent global economic shock. This is what dismantling a petro-dictatorship axis looks like from the inside. It was always going to be bumpy.
Eric Garland is a strategic intelligence analyst with 30 years of experience in geopolitical forecasting.
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SOURCES
Oil price data, January–April 2026 — Fortune / AAA
Brent crude daily prices including April 2 spike and April 17 crash — Trading Economics / Barchart
EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, April 2026 — U.S. Energy Information Administration
Global oil demand (103 million barrels per day) — EIA STEO April 2026
Strait of Hormuz carries 20% of global seaborne oil — Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, March 2026
2026 Strait of Hormuz Crisis timeline — Wikipedia, aggregating CENTCOM, Reuters, Iranian state media
Iran declares strait open; ships turn back — CNBC, April 17, 2026
Iran closes strait again — Al Jazeera, April 18, 2026
Trump sanctions Rosneft and Lukoil — U.S. Department of the Treasury / OFAC, October 22, 2025
Trump relieves Russian oil sanctions amid Iran price spike — Corporate Compliance Insights, March 2026
40% of Russia’s oil export capacity offline — Reuters / Moscow Times, March 25, 2026
U.S. crude exports surging toward net-exporter status — Bloomberg, April 2026
