Don’t Blame Ukraine for High Gas Prices

Trump's Iran War Is the Reason for High Gas Prices, Not Ukraine

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Analysis:

Don’t Blame Ukraine for High Gas Prices

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Analysis

Don’t Blame Ukraine for High Gas Prices

Kyiv’s energy war on Russia may hurt on the margins, but the real culprit is Trump’s war on Iran.

By **Keith Johnson**, a staff writer at *Foreign Policy* covering geoeconomics and energy.

!A large ship is seen on the water at sunset.

*A large ship is seen on the water at sunset.*

Vessels transit the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of southern Iran on Sept. 5. Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images

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September 11, 2026, 12:24 PM

In recent interviews, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has blamedUkraine for higher energy prices, saying that its drone and missile strikes on Russian refineries are the main reason U.S. drivers are paying record prices at the pump.

But the rapidly metastasizing war in the Middle East has made clear exactly where the true and fundamental cause of higher energy prices lies. And it isn’t in Kyiv.

In recent interviews, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has

blamedUkrainefor higher energy prices, saying that its drone and missile strikes on Russian refineries are the main reason U.S. drivers are paying record prices at the pump.

But the rapidly metastasizing war in the Middle East has made clear exactly where the true and fundamental cause of higher energy prices lies. And it isn’t in Kyiv.

Some brutal numbers: Global benchmark crude prices blew past $100 a barrel again and are currently around $105. U.S. average

gasoline pricesspiked to $4.29 a gallon (up a dollar from a year ago), while the much

more importantprice of diesel reached $6 a gallon for the first time ever. U.S. President Donald Trump, at a

party conventionin Dallas, offered voters

$5,000in cash if they vote Republican in the November midterm elections—the equivalent of 830 gallons of diesel, or about 25 fill-ups for a Ford Super Duty F-250 pickup truck.

Just to break this down. The United States and Israel launched a war six months ago on Iran, in the most energy-important part of the world. That war has messed up the entire global energy trade, which formerly worked pretty seamlessly.

There is a very

entertaining debate—one in which Wright has

taken part—over how open or closed the Strait of Hormuz is. That is the chokepoint just under Iran that, before the war, saw 20 million barrels of crude oil and refined products transit every day. U.S. officials

maintainthat the strait is open and that incredible volumes of crude are flowing out of the waterway. Independent

tanker trackers, which count individual ships, their loadings, ship-to-ship transfers, and those ships’ final port calls, put the number at closer to 8-9 million barrels a day, on average. That low number and the slow pace of recovery are

exacerbatedby the tendency of the Iranian armed forces to

blow upthe odd tanker that dares to run the gauntlet. (A

single tankerleft the Persian Gulf on Thursday.)

But it gets more complicated because the bypass that Gulf countries, led by Saudi Arabia, created to evade the perilous strait is itself getting bypassed. Overland pipelines, such as the Saudi East-West pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, have been operating at full blast and were shipping out about 5 million barrels of oil a day. But they, too, are now under threat.

The Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group in Yemen, have begun

seriouslyattacking shipping in the Red Sea, and this week they made advances in southwestern Yemen, seizing positions

on the coastand even taking a few islands. Those islands are key pieces of real estate for a group that wants to disrupt shipping, and the Houthis seem to want to do that.

“My understanding is that they have also taken control of the Hanish Islands and Zuqar and may soon take Mayun \[Perim Island], the key island in the strait itself,” said Maged al-Madhaji, a co-founder of the Sana’a Center, a think tank in Yemen. “Together, these positions would give the Houthis—and by extension, Iran—far greater scope to influence shipping movements, insurance premiums, and the cost of transporting energy and other commodities.”

But the Houthis have apparently escalated even further, with reports Friday of multiple attacks on the East-West

pipeline itself. That coupled with continued attacks on tankers staging

near Yanbu, the Saudi port on the Red Sea, could well discourage use of the one real workaround to the Hormuz blockage.

All of this comes at a time of escalation in the actual war between the United States and Iran. Iran keeps taking shots at U.S. ships and U.S.-escorted tankers in the region, so the U.S. military has begun to

blow upIranian-owned and Iranian-linked tankers. By the latest

estimates, 12 of the roughly 60 tankers in the Iranian fleet have been crossed off.

That is less of a problem for Tehran than it first seems, though, because due to the U.S. naval blockade, the country is

hardly exportingany crude or refined products. That is worrisome news for a country with a moribund economy, runaway inflation, and an unstable and heavily armed leadership, but the Iranian economy has, since 1979, been built to withstand pain and likely can

for a while yet. Trump this week said the Iran war

will continuethrough the midterms, but it is not clear he is running the clock.

---

But to go back

to the first point: Is Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia a source of pain for U.S. and global consumers? It is true that all year, Ukraine has used drones and missiles to

devastating effecton far-flung Russian refineries and other oil installations.