Trump’s jawboning helps keep oil prices in check—but markets may test it soon

Give credit where it’s due. Despite all the setbacks, Donald Trump is right that the US-Israeli war in Iran war hasn’t triggered the oil price super-spike many feared—at least not yet. “I thought it would be worse, much worse,” the American president said last week, and it’s hard to disagree.

Trump, wearing his social media poster-in-chief hat, is a key reason why crude isn’t much higher. Call it the art of oil-market jawboning.The White House is, so far, winning the fight over the oil market’s narrative—periodically raising the prospect of an end to the conflict even as the bombing carries on unabated. Three and a half weeks into the war, prices remain well within historical ranges, and far away from the thresholds associated with a full-blown ‘energy crisis.’ But verbal volleys don’t keep refineries running, no matter how well timed.

Jawboning will soon lose its potency in a longer war.Since the US attacked Iran on 28 February, Tehran has tried to impose an intolerable economic cost on Trump by shutting the Strait of Hormuz, a critical transit point for crude oil, and attacking energy infrastructure across the Persian Gulf. The US has responded by tapping its own Strategic Petroleum Reserve and easing oil sanctions on Russia and Iran. But the most successful tool has been Trump’s interventions via his own Truth Social website.

It helps, of course, that the president has a history of flip-flopping. If markets believe that “Trump always chickens out,” (“TACO”) it’s because he has done so many times before. TACO is a lesson Wall Street learned the hard way in 2025 when he regularly announced punitive trade tariffs, only to backtrack later.And this time the president doesn’t need to actually U-turn to get energy prices to