Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan told Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin by phone on Friday that Turkey was maintaining contacts with all parties to stop the Iran war spiralling more out of control, Erdogan’s office said. It cited Erdogan as telling Putin that Turkey does not approve of the attacks against Iran, nor does it endorse Iran’s retaliation against regional countries.
A US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter has been shot down over Iran, prompting a frantic US search and rescue effort for its two-strong crew, in the first such incident since the start of the five week long war. Iranian state media released images of a tail fin and other debris early on Friday accompanied by an initial claim that a US F-35 had been hit by a new air defence system over central Iran and the pilot probably killed. Aviation experts said the wreckage pictured was in fact from a F-15E, from the US air force’s 494th squadron, based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK, though it could not at first be confirmed when and where the pictures were taken. US officials familiar with the situation later confirmed off the record that an F-15E had been brought down and the Pentagon was scrambling to find the crew before the Iranians. There was no official comment from the US military about the incident. One crew member was reported as having been rescued as the situation developed, in what is likely to have been a high-risk operation with rescue aircraft probably exposed to fire from the ground. It was not immediately clear if the jet had a full crew of two. Subsequent footage filmed in Iran showed a US C-130 Hercules and HH-60 Pavehawk helicopters flying low and at one point refuelling together, amid fresh Iranian speculation that the plane crew may have ejected and survived. Justin Bronk, an aviation expert from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said the use of the specialist helicopters “suggested a combat search and rescue mission is under way to locate and extract the two aircrew from the F-15E”. No US troops have so far been taken prisoner by Iran. A total of 13 American service personnel have been killed and 300 have been wounded during a campaign in which more than 12,300 targets in Iran have been bombed by the US alone. A social media account claiming to be linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards posted a picture of an ejector seat in a desert landscape, which appeared to be consistent with the ACES II type used in F-15Es. Bronk said: “If genuine, it would suggest that at least one of the two aircrew did eject safely.” The presenter on an Iranian TV channel urged residents to hand over any “enemy pilot” to police and promised a reward for anyone who did. That channel is based in Kohkilouyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, a mountainous region in the south-west of the country. Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported that the pilot of the jet – still incorrectly describing it as an F-35 – had been taken into custody, contradicting Tehran’s initial claim that the pilot had probably died in the incident. Overnight, the US Central Command, which is leading the attack on Iran, had denied Iranian claims that another F-35 jet had been downed over Qeshm Island in the strait of Hormuz. “All US fighter aircraft are accounted for,” it said at the time. Up to now no US fighter jets had been lost over Iran during the five-week-long conflict, though three F-15Es were shot down by a Kuwaiti air defence system in a dramatic friendly fire incident on 1 March. An F-35 fighter reportedly had to make an emergency landing at a US airbase in the Middle East after sustaining damage from the ground. A US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft was destroyed at the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia on 27 March in an Iranian strike. The total cost to the US air force of lost and damaged aircraft has been roughly estimated at more than $3bn (£2.2bn) by the specialist newsite Airforce Technology, which also includes 16 uncrewed Reaper drones. An F-15E cost $31m when delivered in the late 1990s; newer models cost closer to $100m.
Several ships have now passed through the strait of Hormuz, according to reports, as shipping companies and international leaders scramble to get vital cargo through the waterway. A container ship owned by the French shipping company CMA CGM had sailed out of the Gulf, the Financial Times reported, citing the tracking data analyst MarineTraffic. It is believed to be the first ship owned by a western shipping line to have made the journey through the strait, which in normal times carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies and has been effectively closed since the start of the war in Iran in late February. The CMA CGM Kribi ship, which sails under the flag of Malta, is reported to have switched on its transponder near the coast off Dubai on 28 March before passing through the strait with cargo. The vessel then reportedly went around Larak Island, near the coast of Iran, which has become a popular route for ships making the transit. The blockade has pushed up oil and gas prices around the world, and concerns are growing about food security, as a third of the global trade in raw materials for fertiliser normally passes through the strait. Three tankers linked to Oman had also sailed through the channel, the FT said, without taking the northern route next to the Iranian island. One of them was a liquefied natural gas tanker co-owned by the Japanese company Mitsui OSK Lines. The Sohar LNG tanker, which sails under the flag of Panama, has made the journey, according to a statement made to Reuters. Mitsui OSK declined to disclose when the vessel had crossed the strait and whether it had made any negotiations to do so. This week the UK’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said coordinated action was needed to pressure Iran into reopening the strait, after a virtual meeting of more than 40 countries. She also said that Britain would “comprehensively reject” any attempt to charge ships multimillion-dollar fees to pass through the strait, which has been nicknamed “Tehran’s tollbooth”. One option being considered by the UN is whether a humanitarian shipping corridor can be opened to ensure fertiliser gets through, to prevent food shortages in poorer countries. International leaders are expected to meet next week to discuss whether it may be possible to clear sea mines and rescue trapped ships in the strait of Hormuz. Donald Trump claimed on Friday that the US could “easily” open up the strait but that doing so would require “a little more time”. The US president wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE. IT WOULD BE A “GUSHER” FOR THE WORLD???” A spokesperson for CMA CGM declined to comment.
Of all the countries being pulled into the US-Israeli war on Iran, it is Iraq – a country that still bears the emotional and physical scars of the last time the Americans tried to reshape the region by force – where the conflict has exposed some of the deepest rifts. The war is dividing those who see the attacks on Iran as a way to end Tehran’s longstanding influence over Iraqi politics from the self-declared loyalists of the Islamic republic, and cutting through state institutions, armed forces and Shia Islamist parties. Exacerbating tensions is the fact that the war has struck during a precarious power vacuum in Iraq after the caretaker leader Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, whose coalition won the largest share of seats in November’s parliamentary elections, stepped aside. Hours after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei at the start of the war, factions from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella body of Iran-backed armed groups, vowed to drag the US into a long war of attrition that would “leave no American presence in the region generally, especially in Iraq”. The group has claimed responsibility for scores of drone and missile attacks on targets in Iraq and neighbouring countries, such the US base in Erbil and the city’s international airport, Camp Victoria near Baghdad international airport, and compounds of US oil companies in Basra and northern Iraq, forcing the country to suspend production in big oilfields. In response, unclaimed airstrikes that have been widely attributed to US and Israeli forces have hit positions across the country, including in Jurf al-Sakhar, south of Baghdad, a stronghold for Kataib Hezbollah, one of the main pro-Iran factions, as well as other resistance forces’ bases in the south and north of the country, killing half a dozen commanders and scores of fighters. In Mosul, videos purported to show attack helicopters firing on checkpoints, while Iraqi army units were struck by as yet unknown forces in the western desert, killing one soldier and wounding three. In another sign that Iraq is being dragged further into the war, the US embassy in Baghdad’s green zone has been attacked repeatedly and it warned on Thursday that pro-Iran armed groups in Iraq might attack other parts of the city in the coming days. Kataib Hezbollah is also suspected to have been responsible for the abduction of a US reporter, Shelly Kittleson, late on Tuesday. The frequency of attacks had declined in recent days after Kataib Hezbollah declared a pause. But the group did not announce an extension on Wednesday night when the pause expired. The Iraqi government had sought to pursue an “Iraq first” policy, largely staying out of the post-7 October wars convulsing the region and trying to project an image of security services in control. As the conflict expands, Iraqi leaders have been trying to continue their balancing act, on one hand denouncing the killing of Khamenei and sending official condolences, while on the other rejecting attempts by Tehran to drag Iraq into the conflict, calling on security forces to go after those who threatened “diplomatic missions and oilfields”, and even going as far as firing a number of military and intelligence officers. But this balancing act is complicated by the fact that pro-Iran groups are also members of the PMU (Popular Mobilisation Units), a sprawling institution that is in theory part of the official army and under the authority of the commander-in-chief, but in reality operates according to its own agenda. These factions claim resistance legitimacy when attacking US targets, then denounce the strikes on their PMU brigade bases as attacks on Iraqi sovereignty. This contradiction exposes the weakness of the state, and the absurdity is not lost on Iraqis, with a joke circulating that while the US and Israel were attacking Iran, and Iran was attacking Israel and the Gulf countries, only Iraq was being bombed by everyone: Israel, the US, Iran, and Iraqis themselves. Though Washington and Baghdad have claimed to “intensify cooperation” to prevent attacks and ensure Iraqi territory is not used to launch assaults against US facilities, the US has blamed the Iraqi government for failing to prevent “terrorist attacks in or from Iraqi territory”. “Iran-aligned terrorist militia groups may claim to be associated with the Iraqi government,” the US embassy said. The Pentagon has said helicopters have carried out strikes against pro-Iran armed groups in Iraq during the war. Washington has strongly denied claims it has targeted Iraqi security forces. Furthermore, a looming financial disaster hangs over Iraq as a consequence of the crisis over the strait of Hormuz and the loss of oil revenue, which accounts for more than 90% of the country’s budget. Even before the latest escalation, US pressure and the threat of sanctions had forced some members of the pro-Iran Shia alliance in Iraq’s parliament, known as the Coordination Framework, to distance themselves from the more militant factions, fearing US economic and financial sanctions that could restrict the Iraqi state’s access to dollars – which in turn would cripple its ability to pay salaries and threaten the fragile post-2003 order, to say nothing of jeopardising the vast fortunes that the parties’ leaders have accumulated over the past two decades. As the US was building up its forces in the region, leaders from the Coordination Framework bowed to American pressure and withdrew the nomination of the former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is seen as close to Iran, to return to the top job. This followed a humiliating direct intervention by the new US envoy Tom Barrack, and indeed Donald Trump himself, who wrote in a social media post: “Last time Maliki was in power, the Country descended into poverty and total chaos … Because of his insane policies and ideologies, if elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq.” An aide to a senior political leader said of the Shia alliance: “After the killing of Khamenei, they are trying to further distance themselves from the factions. Some of their statements recently feel as if they were issued by the director of a humanitarian NGO, and not the head of a militia that built its legitimacy on fighting the Americans.” *** Many of the fighters and commanders of the resistance factions came of age in the aftermath of the US occupation of Iraq. Back then, Iran pursued a dual strategy: cultivating political and economic influence among Iraq’s new rulers, many of whom had spent years in exile in Tehran, and training and equipping a younger generation of men to help in their fight against American occupation forces. In the sectarian warfare that swept across the region after the failed uprisings of the Arab spring, Iran rallied its allies and all the forces it had cultivated over previous decades: young Afghan men whose fathers had fought in Iran’s wars, Iraqi militias whose commanders had splintered from larger and older Shia organisations to form the resistance factions, the Houthis in Yemen, and, crucially, Hezbollah, which had played a significant role in building the military capacities of these various forces. While the majority of these forces were Shia, not all pledged religious allegiance to Khamenei. Some shared Tehran’s goal of expelling foreign powers from the region, while others sought Iranian support to fight their local wars – against jihadists, western-backed militias or, in the case of Yemen, the Saudi-Emirati coalition. A few were opportunistic mercenaries who floated across the war-scarred region. Collectively, these forces are known as the “axis of resistance”. The axis suffered its most serious defeat after the 7 October attacks when Israeli jets dropped more than 80 large bunker-buster bombs on a block of residential buildings in the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut, killing Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and several senior commanders. “The killing of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah affected the Iraqi resistance factions more than that of Sayed al-Khamenei,” said an insider close to the pro-Iran factions. “Yes, Sayed al-Khamenei is the leader, but Sayed Hassan had a direct appeal to many of the commanders. He and Hezbollah combined fighting prowess with a discourse and a political vision. This is very much lacking for the Iraqi factions.” The insider added: “This is why if you look at their activities on the ground now, you will see it is just a reaction. They don’t have a local Iraqi strategy; they don’t have political depth. They follow events, and once the attacks on Iran stop, they will stop.” Yet the impact of the recent war went far beyond the resistance factions’ drones, he added. The fact that a major Shia leader was killed, followed by assassinations in Iraq and elsewhere, has shaken the country’s streets, especially in the south where massive demonstrations erupted spontaneously after the killing of Khamenei. The US and its air force have been pounding Iraqi cities, sometimes frequently, often continuously, for more than 30 years since that first wave of long-range bombers lit Baghdad’s skies with explosions in the early hours of the Gulf war back in 1991. For Iraqis, then, the images coming from Iran are all too familiar: people walking through streets strewn with debris inspecting the previous day’s destruction, searching for groceries, checking on loved ones; families cowering at home, listening to the not so distant explosions, windows rattling. Mothers weeping over dead children. The anxiety, the fear, the great balls of fire rising into the sky. Even the black acid rain that followed the burning of massive fuel storage depots had its mirror in Iraq. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has reported on Iraq for the Guardian since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003
Min Aung Hlaing, the military general who plunged Myanmar into conflict and economic chaos when he took power in the 2021 coup has been appointed president, months after widely condemned sham elections. Min Aung Hlaing, who is wanted by the prosecutor of the international criminal court for crimes against humanity against the Rohingya Muslim minority, was voted president by lawmakers on Friday. Myanmar’s parliament is dominated by the pro-military party, which won a landslide in one-sided elections earlier this year. Min Aung Hlaing has long sought the role, say analysts, but for years his ambitions were thwarted by the electoral success of the hugely popular Aung San Suu Kyi. The former de facto leader no longer poses a threat, however. The 80-year-old has been detained since the 2021 coup, when her government was ousted from power. Her party was banned from contesting recent elections, which were held across three phases from December to January. The election, which the military’s proxy Union Solidarity and Development party (USDP) won by a landslide, was widely condemned as a sham that sought to give a veneer of legitimacy to military rule. It is not expected that the changes in leadership will ease the political crisis or the deadly conflict that continues to rage across the country. Min Aung Hlaing was already Myanmar’s acting president, and it is likely he will install loyalists in key positions, said International Crisis Group in recent analysis. “He will not trust anybody [enough] to take orders from [them] – he would want to deliver the orders,” said Yanghee Lee, a former special rapporteur for Myanmar, who added that Min Aung Hlaing is seen as a paranoid, suspicious person. The general, 69, was born into a family from Dawei, in south east of Myanmar. He studied law at university in Yangon, but longed to join the military and on his third attempt was admitted to the Defence Services Academy, the country’s elite institution for training officers. Myanmar’s military has been likened to a state within a state, siloed from the rest of society with its own banks, companies, news outlets and hospitals. It considers itself the protector of Myanmar as a Buddhist Bamar nation– Bamar referring to the majority ethnic group. He was appointed commander-in-chief in 2011, but assumed the role at a time when Myanmar was embarking on a fragile transition to democracy. The military remained extremely powerful during this period, even after Aung San Suu Kyi won a sweeping victory in 2015. Under the military’s model of “disciplined democracy”, it was granted a quarter of parliamentary seats, and the power to appoint key cabinet positions. The uneasy power-sharing arrangement broke down after the 2020 election, which Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD again won by a landslide. Min Aung Hlaing accused her party of widespread voter fraud, without evidence, and seized power on 1 February 2021. The coup triggered mass protests that spiralled into a civil war. Min Aung Hlaing has been accused of presiding over repeated atrocities and human rights abuses. In 2009, while overseeing operations in border areas of the north-east, his troops were accused of driving tens of thousands of ethnic minority people from their homes. Such brutality would be repeated on an even greater scale in violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state in 2017, which is now the centre of a genocide case at The Hague. Since the coup, UN investigators have accused Min Aung Haling’s regime of indiscriminate airstrikes killing civilians, “mass killings of detainees, dismemberment and desecration of bodies, rape and the deliberate burning of entire villages”, describing such crimes as “a manifestation of an organisational policy”. Myanmar has denied the accusations of genocide, and the military says its post-coup operations are targeted at terrorists it accuses of destabilising the country. In recent months, Min Aung Hlaing had stepped up his international trips, attempting to clamber back from his status as an international pariah. His diplomatic style has been mocked by his critics – particularly a visit to Moscow last year, when, while heaping praise on Vladimir Putin, he said the friendship between Myanmar and Russia had been prophesied by the Buddha thousands of years ago when the Russian president was a “rat king” in a previous life. It is not clear if Putin understood the obscure reference. Richard Horsey, a senior Myanmar adviser to Crisis Group, said the junta leader presented himself as a politician rather than a “soldier’s soldier”, and even in the midst of a post-coup fight was often photographed inspecting infrastructure and factories, rather than visiting the frontlines. “It’s well known that he’s long coveted the presidency,” Horsey added. Min Aung Hlaing is also a deeply superstitious figure and keen to present himself as devoutly religious, added Horsey. He has frequently commissioned and renovated pagodas and religious sites, including a huge Buddha statue in the capital Nay Pyi Taw. “I don’t think he sees that as [being in] contradiction with his role as a brutal leader,” said Horsey. At home, Min Aung Hlaing is unable to travel to large areas of Myanmar that have been seized by opposition groups or are in the midst of fighting. However, with backing from his ally China, the junta chief probably hopes the recent election will allow him to reverse his isolated status abroad and reassure pro-military voices who have criticised his failure to suppress opposition since the coup.
People in Burkina Faso should forget about democracy as it is “not for us”, the military president, Ibrahim Traoré, told the country’s state broadcaster. Traoré took power in a coup in September 2022, toppling another junta that had taken power just nine months earlier. He has since stifled opposition and in January banned political parties outright. A transition to democracy had originally been planned for 2024, but that year the junta extended Traoré’s rule until 2029. “We’re not even talking about elections, first of all … People need to forget about the question of democracy … We must tell the truth, democracy isn’t for us,” Traoré said in an interview on Thursday with the state broadcaster Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina (RTB). Democracy was “false”, the 37-year-old said, adding: “Democracy, we kill children. Democracy, we drop bombs, we kill women, we destroy hospitals, we kill civilian population. Is that democracy?” Traoré has won fans across Africa with anti-French and anti-western rhetoric that often invokes the legacy of the revolutionary Burkinabé leader Thomas Sankara. Sankara, a Marxist, was president of Burkina Faso, which he renamed from Upper Volta, from 1983 until his assassination in 1987. However, Traoré has failed to stem a jihadist insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives since 2014 and had displaced 2.1 million people, about 9% of the population, when official data was last released three years ago. More than 1,800 civilians had been killed by the military, allied militias and al-Qaida-linked Jama’at Nusrat al‑Islam wa al‑Muslimin (JNIM) since 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released on Thursday. The group accused all sides of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes. It alleged the junta and allied militias had ethnically cleansed Fulani civilians that it accused of supporting JNIM, carrying out targeted killings and forcibly displacing communities. In April 2024, HRW accused the military of executing 223 civilians in a day two months earlier. The government denied this and banned the group, along with several international media outlets that had reported it, including the Guardian.
He possesses one of the most famous family names in Latin American politics. But when the Brazilian senator took to the stage at a conservative conference in Grapevine, Texas, last weekend it was only his forename that was on people’s lips. “Flávio! Flávio! Flávio!” the audience shouted as the 44-year-old politician announced he would run for president in order to fight the “radical environmental and woke” agendas he claims have made Brazil awful again. “Let me look you in the eyes and tell you: we will win,” the surname-less senator said in halting English, read from a teleprompter machine. The Flávio in question is Flávio Bolsonaro, the oldest son of the disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest after receiving a 27-year jail sentence for trying to overturn the result of the 2022 election. As the younger Bolsonaro seeks to catapult his family back to the pinnacle of Brazilian politics in this year’s contest, many believe he is intentionally downplaying his parentage in an attempt to shake off the baggage of a name many associate with anti-democratic tendencies and a coronavirus catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Political analysts have detected a deliberate strategy to reposition the rightwing politician in voters’ minds by casting him as a supposedly moderate “Flávio”, rather than a key member of the Bolsonaro clan. A campaign jingle played at one recent rally and broadcast on the candidate’s social networks refers to Bolsonaro’s firstborn as simply “Zero Um” (Number One) and Flávio, without citing his family name. Controversially, many Brazilian newspapers have adopted the same style, repeatedly calling the politician only “Flávio” in headlines – something leftwing opponents consider a cynical attempt to camouflage the politician’s hard-right roots. One social media satirist, the journalist Gilberto Porcidonio, took a poke at the Bolsonarian marketing strategy on Threads, joking: – Are you going to vote for Flávio? – Which Flávio? – The one whose surname they got rid of to make him electable! Fabiana Moraes, a columnist for Intercept Brasil who wrote recently about Bolsonaro’s disappearing last name, believed the move was designed to help Bolsonaro sidestep the hugely negative views millions of Brazilians still hold of his father. Moraes saw many reasons for that dislike, including Jair Bolsonaro’s misogyny and the failed coup he plotted after losing 2022’s election to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But perhaps the biggest cause was Jair Bolsonaro’s bungled response to coronavirus, which killed more than 800,000 Brazilians, and his delay in buying vaccines. “Brazil was exposed to such an unthinkable level of suffering [during Covid] … and I think this still reverberates,” Moraes said. Flávio Bolsonaro has not entirely abandoned his surname, which many conservatives still revere. Jair Bolsonaro won 58m votes in the 2022 election, losing to Lula by only 2m. Polls suggest the 2026 vote could be similarly close. “It’s unquestionable that [this surname] is still a real asset – but at the same time it’s also the mirror opposite,” said Moraes, who believed the tactic was aimed at attracting voters who were neither progressives, nor diehard Bolsonaro fans. Moraes feared Brazil’s version of Wall Street, Faria Lima, and parts of the mainstream media had already bought into Flávio Bolsonaro’s attempt to portray himself as a moderate, by playing down his roots and even using gender-neutral language in contrast to his father’s notorious homophobia. She was unconvinced by claims newspaper editors were using “Flávio” in their headlines because it was three letters shorter than Bolsonaro. “Jair is much shorter than Flávio and that wasn’t the name that appeared in the headlines [when he was president], was it?” Moraes said. Supporters of President Lula, whom Flávio Bolsonaro looks set to challenge in October’s vote, have cottoned on to the rightwinger’s rebranding effort. In recent days, they have set about hammering home the candidate’s association with what many see as his family’s toxic name. “It’s Flávio Bolsonaro, not just Flávio. He must carry the surname of the dirtiest family in Brazil,” the congresswoman Luizianne Lins wrote on X. In an interview with the news website Metrópoles, the president of Lula’s Workers’ party (PT), Edinho Silva, urged voters to remember what life was like when the father of the politician formerly known as Flávio Bolsonaro held power. “Flávio Bolsonaro is a representative of the Bolsonaro family … We cannot forget what Brazil was like when it was governed by the Bolsonaro family … [or] what Brazil was like when it was left to fend for itself during the pandemic because of a marketing campaign,” Silva said. Moraes believed Flávio Bolsonaro’s reinvention was also designed to conceal numerous skeletons in his own closet, including longstanding corruption allegations and well-documented ties to a police officer turned hitman called Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, and other members of Rio’s paramilitary underworld. In 2005, when Flávio Bolsonaro was a state legislator, he awarded Nóbrega a medal while he was in prison, and employed Nóbrega’s wife and mother. Nóbrega, who was killed by police in 2020, was alleged to have run what the Rio newspaper O Globo called the city’s “most lethal and secretive phalanx of hired guns”. Bolsonaro paid a similar tribute to Ronald Pereira, a police officer and paramilitary recently jailed for 56 years for involvement in the 2018 assassination of the leftwing politician Marielle Franco. Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied corruption and links to criminal groups but his rivals are expected to exploit such allegations in the six months remaining before the election. Bolsonaro’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering in Texas – in which he questioned Brazil’s voting system and called for foreign pressure to ensure a “free and fair” vote – appears to have undermined his rebranding push. “Like father, like son … Bolsonarista coup-mongering seems to be genetic,” the conservative Estado de São Paulo complained in an editorial, although on five occasions the newspaper referred to its subject by his first name.
A month has passed since the US and Israel’s war on Iran all but closed the strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil supplies typically flow. Prices have surged, amid fears of sustained disruption to global supplies. Donald Trump argues this is not his country’s problem. “Go get your own oil!” the president urged countries, including the UK, earlier this week. The US has “plenty”, he added. The US is “totally independent” of the Middle East, the president claimed in a prime-time address on Wednesday. “We don’t need their oil.” “Under my leadership, we are [the] No 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet, without even discussing the millions of barrels that we’re getting from Venezuela,” he said. Trump and his allies hail the US as an energy “superpower” after a historic surge in domestic oil production sparked by the fracking boom. For years now, it has produced more oil than the entire country consumes. But the oil market is fundamentally international. Unlike natural gas – another crucial energy source – for which prices can vary drastically in different parts of the world, the oil market is far more interconnected. The US benchmark price for gas, known as the Henry hub, is currently less than $3 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) while the European Dutch title transfer facility (TTF) price trades above $16. A price surge in Europe doesn’t necessarily cross the Atlantic. “Gas, unlike oil, is hard to move around,” Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “You can’t just pour gas into a drum, and then move that drum somewhere else.” Significant oil price movements are rarely confined to a specific region. Brent crude, the international benchmark, has by risen by nearly half since the start of the war, to north of $100 per barrel – and climbed sharply after Trump’s latest address. “Think of it like a giant swimming pool,” said Williams-Derry. “There are waves or ripples, but the whole swimming pool rises or falls. The fundamental level is set by the global market.” “Under current policy, being a net exporter doesn’t do anything to cushion the US from global price trends,” he added. The US does export more oil than it imports. But it still imports millions of barrels per day, and relied on Gulf nations for almost a tenth of those imports last year. Many US refineries are geared up to process heavier crude than the lighter, sweeter stuff primarily produced domestically in the US. The energy supply disruption sparked by the war on Iran goes far beyond oil. Global fertilizer costs have risen sharply, prompting US farmers to reconsider their planned crops, as the strait of Hormuz remains paralyzed. A small but significant share of US fertilizer imports come from the Middle East. Qatar typically supplies about a third of the world’s helium, which plays a key role in the manufacturing of semiconductors. But the country halted output last month – a potentially worrying move for chipmakers and the many industries that rely on them. But for now, oil remains the most visible indicator of the turmoil. Simply being a net exporter “doesn’t differentially protect American households” from higher prices, said Neale Mahoney, Trione director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “Because of the oil [price] increasing, it is going to be beneficial to certain sectors of the US economy – the energy production sectors – and certain states within the US: Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, big energy-producing states,” he added. “While it doesn’t protect the US consumer, and US consumers will be feeling the squeeze, there are winners as well as losers in the US.” But the rally of big oil stocks this year will do little to cheer most drivers filling up at gas stations across the US. Average nationwide fuel prices breached $4 per gallon for the first time since 2022 earlier this week, amid widespread frustration over the increase in costs. “In the US, because we produce oil and gas, when there’s a price spike, consumers are paying more, and producers are making more,” said Williams-Derry. “The talk of ‘energy independence’ has to be seen as a smokescreen,” he added. “For a low-income person, with a livelihood balanced on a knife-edge, they literally cannot afford higher prices at the pump.” High fuel prices, many incumbent presidents and congressional candidates have learned, can scupper political campaigns. With seven months until November’s midterm elections, and Republican control of Congress in the balance, voters nationwide are paying more and more to fill up their cars. Trump’s professed confidence that they won’t feel pain for long is perhaps best distilled into an old adage: what goes up must come down. “When this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally,” he claimed on Wednesday, predicting that fuel prices “will rapidly come back down”. Mahoney, a member of the White House national economic council during Joe Biden’s administration, isn’t so certain of a swift reversal. “There is the famous rockets-and-feathers phenomenon with retail gas and petrol prices, where they shoot up fast and float down like a feather,” he said. “Even if crude prices were to drop pretty quickly, we are likely to see elevated pump prices over the spring, and through the middle of the summer.”