You’ve Been Paying Dictators at the Pump for 30 Years — Now Someone’s Trying to Stop It
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 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. The result? Oil hit $128 a barrel. Then crashed 10% in one afternoon on a peace rumor that turned out to be false. Then went back up when Iran closed the strait again the next day.
This is what dismantling a petro-dictatorship axis looks like from the inside. It’s bumpy. It was always going to be bumpy. Strap in.
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Eric Garland is a career intelligence analyst sanctioned by Vladimir Putin in 2022 alongside three CIA directors. His 2016 Game Theory Thread was named by the New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
Represented for speaking by Executive Speakers Bureau: https://executivespeakers.com/speaker/eric-garland
Substack: https://ericgarland.substack.com
TikTok: @gametheorytoday
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; 89% destined for East and South Asian markets — 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 administration sanctions Rosneft and Lukoil — U.S. Department of the Treasury / OFAC, October 22, 2025
Trump administration relieves Russian oil sanctions amid Iran price spike — Corporate Compliance Insights, March 2026
40% of Russia’s oil export capacity offline following Ukrainian drone strikes — Reuters / Moscow Times, March 25, 2026
Russia fossil fuel export revenues, March 2026 — Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air
U.S. crude exports surging toward net-exporter status — Bloomberg, April 2026
