Tag Archives: US

Doha Converted Gas Revenue Into Global Influence and Marketed Itself as the Supplier That Delivers Even During Turbulence Qatar reads Iran-U.S. tensions through the blunt logic of self-preservation. Doha worries less about “regional instability” than about losing the conditions that let it build an liquefied natural gas empire with limited regional contestation. …

Reports in major outlets that Tehran has floated a “commercial bonanza” to the Trump administration should be understood less as an investment roadmap than as a survival strategy. As Donald Trump’s 10-to-15-day deadline for a “meaningful” deal with Iran enters its decisive phase, Iranian officials appear to be reframing diplomacy …

Changes in One Producer’s Political and Economic Conditions Can Ripple Across Global Energy Markets On February 10, 2026, Bloomberg reported that traders shipped Venezuelan crude oil to Israel’s Bazan Group, the country’s largest refinery operator in Haifa. The cargo marks the first Venezuelan delivery to Israel since mid-2020, when Israel imported approximately …

Importers Benefit, but Transparency Suffers, and Price Gaps Widen with the Spread of Cheap Sanctioned Oil China’s independent refiners, known as “teapots,” increasingly are replacing Venezuelan crude with Iranian oil. This shift shows how sanctions pressure, commercial reality, and geopolitics now shape global oil flows more than formal rules. As U.S. enforcement …

President Donald Trump’s response to Iran’s recent unrest appears to reflect a strategy of gunboat diplomacy: the use of military pressure, rhetorical escalation, and economic coercion to extract concessions without committing to war or formal regime change. Iran’s currency plunge in late December 2025 sparked nationwide protests that quickly escalated …

The Gap Between Potential and Performance Does Not Stem from Sanctions Alone Iran sits atop one of the world’s largest proven natural gas reserves, estimated at roughly 1,200 trillion cubic feet, second only to Russia. On paper, this should make Iran a major energy exporter and a consequential player in regional gas …

Iran’s Sanctions-Evasion Infrastructure Has Become Systematic Rather than Improvised In early February 2025, President Donald Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 2 (NSPM-2), formally reinstating his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. The directive sought to deny Tehran any path to nuclear weapons, constrain its ballistic missile program, and dismantle support for regional proxies by …

Unlike in the Past, This Time the Regime Did Not Sever Access but Instead Degraded Internet Function The Islamic Republic of Iran’s internet blackout against the backdrop of the January 2026 protests is fundamentally different from the shutdowns Tehran imposed during earlier rounds of protests in 2019 or 2022. Unlike in the …

Syria Holds an Estimated 2.5 Billion Barrels of Oil and 8.5 Trillion Cubic Feet of Gas but Reserves Do Not Guarantee Recovery Syria’s oil and gas sector once anchored state revenues and energy security. Before 2011, the country produced roughly 380,000 barrels per day of oil and about 25 million …

The Project That Once Balanced Russian Expertise with Iraqi Sovereignty Now Exposes the Fragility of This Set-up Western sanctions have reshaped Iraq’s oil sector. In October 2025, the United States and United Kingdom targeted Lukoil and Rosneft’s overseas operations to curtail Moscow’s war financing. Lukoil promptly declared force majeure at West Qurna-2, which …