Appalling trade deal with Putin over diesel. Trump is more slippery than Nixon; no, his better analogy is Édouard Daladier…
Daladier, taken in by Hitler’s duplicity, signed what he thought was a non aggression pact, “the Munich Agreement”. Indeed, our own Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain naively referred to this as, “peace for our time”.
22 days after signing the the Graham act, Trump’s appeasement of Putin is astonishing. The “Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026” signed into law on September 18, dramatically shifts U.S. economic statecraft. Rather than solely penalizing Russia, it directly targets third-party nations buying Russian energy, by threatening devastating import tariffs on all goods they export to the United States.
The geoeconomics and geopolitics of this are both complex and deeply interlinked – particularly as they combine elements of the Ukrainian and Iran wars.
Closure of the Strait of Hormuz, (though unofficial sources indicate roughly 2/3 of pre-war oil flow are now getting through), has reduced the volume of crude oil onto the world market. However with these recent increases, and simultaneously concerted and successful efforts by the Ukrainians to damage or destroy Russian refineries, the volume of refined oil products – particularly diesel, which lags petrol in its production capacity – now likely outstrips the supply of crude oil available to refine it. Timelags to market are not insignificant.
Whatever the politics, demand and supply tells us that simply more supply will have an impact on market prices. Yet, 100, 000 barrels of diesel from Russia represents roughly 0.3% of 30 million barrels used by the world each day. Also it’s not known whether Russia actually has the capability to produce this amount on an ongoing basis, given these continued Ukrainian strikes on refinery infrastructure.
President Zelenskyy arguably now has far greater incentive to up these attacks. I would. Meanwhile, Trump’s act of appeasement to one of the world’s great modern tyrants illustrates appalling hypocrisy, 3 weeks after the death of his political mentor, Lindsey Graham. At $6.20 a gallon of diesel even this amount of oil onto world markets is unlikely to bring the price much below $6. Whether or not this has a turnaround effect for the Republican Party in the midterms remains to be seen.
What is fairly clear though, is Trump’s tarnishing of US political legacy now reaches new historical lows.
France fell to Germany not long after the Munich Agreement and was run by a collaborationist regime. I’m actually not suggesting the same will happen from Putin, but it’s not a good look for Trump.
EconomicStatecraft #Appeasement #GrahamAct #Diesel #History
