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Author: Daniel Whitmore, Daily Dose Wire. 18 September, 2026 – 11:24 AM
I’ve been trying to write about this war for weeks and kept putting it off, mostly because every draft was out of date within about four days.
That’s the nature of it. Six months in, the Iran war has settled into a rhythm of escalation, brief lull, escalation again — and the oil market lurches along with it. Prices spike. Everyone panics. Then something gets repaired or reopened, and prices ease back. Just not all the way back.
Here’s where things actually stand in mid-September 2026, and what it means for the rest of us.
A quick recap of how we got here
The war began on 28 February. The conflict was initiated by the United States and Israel, and the opening strikes took out much of Iran’s senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, triggering hundreds of retaliatory missiles and thousands of drones.
There have been attempts to stop it. The US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire in April and signed a memorandum of understanding in June, but conflict resumed in July when Iranian forces began attacking commercial shipping deemed noncompliant with Iranian demands.
That pattern — deal, collapse, deal, collapse — is the single most important thing to understand about the oil price right now. Markets have stopped believing in ceasefires.
The Strait of Hormuz is the whole story
If you only take one thing from this article, make it this. The war matters to global energy almost entirely because of one narrow stretch of water.
In 2025, roughly 25% of the world’s maritime trade in crude oil and petroleum products, along with about 19% of liquefied natural gas, passed through the Strait. That’s not a supply route you can reroute around in a hurry. There isn’t a spare one sitting idle.
Soon after the conflict began, the number of tankers going through the strait dropped near zero.
Traffic has recovered since, but nowhere near normal. Over one recent ten-day stretch, an average of just ten commodity ships a day crossed the chokepoint, according to data analytics firm Kpler.
What Iran is actually trying to do
This part gets misreported a lot. Iran isn’t simply trying to shut the strait — it’s trying to own it.
Despite the June memorandum, Iran has sought to assert control over the strait and eventually collect fees on ships passing through, repeatedly warning vessels to use preapproved routes and follow protocols set by the regime. Iranian leaders have claimed, without precedent, a right to control shipping through the entirety of the Strait.
It’s a sovereignty play dressed up as a security measure. And it’s why the fighting keeps restarting even after agreements are signed.
September: the tanker war
The last few weeks have been particularly ugly, and specifically aimed at oil.
CENTCOM struck three Iranian vessels including a tanker off Kharg Island — the hub through which Iran exported 90 percent of its crude before the war — plus another near Jask and an unladen vessel in the Gulf of Oman. By 8 September, American forces had struck five oil tankers linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper was unusually blunt about the logic: “If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost — taking out three of yours.”
Iran responded in kind. The IRGC announced its navy had targeted two US Navy vessels, eight oil tankers and ten other ships in retaliation.
When both sides start treating oil infrastructure as the primary target, the market notices.
Yemen made everything worse
Here’s the bit I think has been underappreciated. The Hormuz problem produced a workaround — and the workaround has now been attacked too.
Saudi Arabia increasingly relied on the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea to export oil as conditions in Hormuz deteriorated. Sensible move. Except the Houthis launched a campaign to control Bab al-Mandab, and on 10 September seized the town of Mocha and its port.
Then came the land route. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, which provides an alternative route around the Strait of Hormuz, was damaged in drone attacks.
Sea route blocked. Alternative sea route contested. Backup pipeline hit. You can see why traders got nervous.
Houthi attacks on oil infrastructure and Saudi tankers have piled pressure on the world’s top oil exporter, already beset by blockades on two key straits.
So where are prices?
Volatile is the honest answer.
Brent pushed to around $97 a barrel in early September — up 9 percent in five days and 19 percent over the month, then climbed above $100 as the tanker exchanges intensified.
As of this week it’s easing. Brent fell toward $102 a barrel on Thursday after Saudi Arabia indicated it could restore around half of the damaged East-West pipeline’s capacity within days and full operations within six weeks. Riyadh is also offering extra crude cargoes to Asian refiners through ship-to-ship transfers near Oman.
Note what “easing” means here, though. A hundred-dollar barrel is now the relief scenario. That tells you how far the baseline has moved.
One energy analyst made an observation I keep thinking about — Arif Gasilov of the Gasilov Group told Al Jazeera the market has been cycling up and down repeatedly, and warned there “might eventually see an inflection point… where a ceasefire doesn’t move the market at all, maybe by just a dollar or two.”
That’s the grim version of this story. Not a spike, but a permanently higher floor.
What it feels like at ground level
Crude prices are abstract. Fuel prices aren’t.
The average US price for a gallon of petrol reached $4.15 nationally in early September, up from $4.08 a week earlier, and oil-product exports through Hormuz have recovered too slowly to prevent a surge in fuel prices squeezing consumers worldwide.
Travel costs too. Ahead of the US Labor Day weekend, AAA forecasts showed a 20 percent increase in flight costs compared with the same weekend last year.
And there’s a knock-on almost nobody talks about: fertiliser. Up to 30% of internationally traded fertilisers normally transit the Strait of Hormuz. That flows into food prices with a lag of months. It’s the delayed bill from this war, and it hasn’t fully arrived yet.
Who’s exposed, and who isn’t
The pain is unevenly spread, which explains a lot of the diplomatic positioning.
Asia is most exposed. In 2024, an estimated 84% of crude shipments through the strait went to Asian markets, with China receiving a third of its oil that way. China has been managing it, though — Beijing has moved to insulate itself by turning to domestic sources, and it holds substantial reserves.
Europe’s issue is gas more than oil. Europe gets 12% to 14% of its LNG from Qatar, through the strait.
Some countries have done very well out of this. A New York Times analysis found that the biggest beneficiaries of the market shift were the United States, with a revenue increase of about $50 billion, and Russia, with more than $15 billion. Uncomfortable, but that’s how energy shocks work. Someone’s crisis is someone else’s windfall.
Why this hasn’t been a 1973-style shortage
Worth being precise here, because “oil shortage” gets thrown around loosely.
What we’ve had is a logistics crisis more than a production one. The oil largely exists. Getting it onto a ship and through a contested waterway is the problem. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said 18 million barrels of crude and petroleum products passed through Hormuz in one recent week.
Military escorting has helped. Admiral Cooper said the US Navy had helped nearly 1,500 commercial vessels carrying some 750 million barrels of oil pass through in recent months — still far below prewar levels.
Still below normal. But flowing.
There’s also the insurance angle, which quietly does enormous damage. Even before the war started, war-risk premiums for the strait rose from 0.125% to between 0.2% and 0.4% per transit — an increase of a quarter of a million dollars for a very large tanker. That cost lands in the price of everything eventually.
Does it end?
I’d love to offer a confident answer. I can’t.
The structural problem is that neither side can afford to look like it blinked. Sina Azodi of George Washington University put it plainly to Al Jazeera: neither side will “cave in” because it “will not look good on them, so the only option is to escalate”, and he argued the war continues absent a political settlement.
Both sides are also hurting. Iran’s currency hit a record low, with traders in Tehran exchanging 2.20 million rials for a dollar — a 10% jump from the previous week’s record. On the American side, less than five months into the war the US was already running out of ammunition against a middle-tier adversary, and the Congressional Budget Office has said rebuilding interceptor stocks “will probably take at least five years.”
Crisis Group’s Hamidreza Azizi described the situation in terms that stuck with me — neither side can stay indefinitely between full-scale war and a truce, and “at some point, one of the sides may see a need to escalate in order to break this cycle.”
There’s a political clock ticking too. The war has spiked oil prices, roiled the global economy and created increasing problems for Trump’s Republican Party ahead of November midterms, with just 17 percent of Americans approving of his handling of the economy in one recent poll.
Elections have a way of concentrating minds.
What I’d watch from here
If you’re tracking this — as a business, an investor, or just someone tired of the petrol bill — these are the indicators that actually matter:
- Daily transit counts through Hormuz. More reliable than any headline. Ships moving means oil moving.
- The East-West pipeline repair. Wright said the outage should be resolved within days, though independent analysts expect repairs could take longer. Take the under on official timelines.
- Bab al-Mandab. If the Houthis consolidate control there, Saudi Arabia runs out of alternatives.
- War-risk insurance premiums. The quietest and most honest signal in the whole market.
- Anything after the November midterms. Trump has publicly floated the war ending after the election.
My take
Six months in, this looks less like a short sharp shock and more like a new operating environment. Oil above $100 has become the normal-ish state of things rather than the emergency.
The thing I find genuinely worrying isn’t the spikes. It’s the erosion of the assumption that these waterways just work. Global shipping was built on that assumption. Rebuilding confidence takes far longer than clearing mines.
For most people, the practical advice is unglamorous. Budget for higher fuel and freight through the rest of 2026. Expect food costs to follow with a lag. And treat any ceasefire headline with the scepticism the last six months have earned.
