Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, 03 May 2020
U.S. President Donald J. Trump has temporarily reduced the bleeding by engineering a timeout in an oil price war that pitted Saudi Arabia against Russia and Russia and Saudi Arabia against the United States. Even so, the timeout failed to tie up the loose ends of the suspended price war. Within days of the suspension, Trump was considering a ban on import of Saudi oil in a bid to force the Kingdom to reroute tankers carrying some 40 million barrels of crude to the United States.(1) He explained “The problem is no one is driving a car anywhere in the world, essentially. ... Factories are closed, businesses are closed. We had really a lot of energy to start off with, oil in particular, and then all of a sudden they lost 40%, 50% of their market.”
