Oil Prices Today: Brent Nears $96 After Trump Iran Post
Oil prices today climbed sharply after President Donald Trump said the United States no longer needs an agreement with Iran, a statement that cooled hopes for a diplomatic end to the eight-month war in the Middle East and pushed traders back toward pricing in a longer conflict. Brent crude, the international benchmark, settled more than 3 percent higher on Thursday and held near 96 dollars a barrel in early trading on Friday, while the American benchmark also rose, reversing a slide that had carried prices down for much of November.
The move was fast and direct. Within hours of the president’s post on his Truth Social platform, the market’s reading of the war changed. For weeks, investors had been betting that a settlement was getting closer, and that bet had been pulling prices lower. The president’s words took that bet off the table, at least for now, and the risk premium that had been draining out of crude came rushing back in a single session.
Brent crude futures for January delivery settled 3.3 percent higher on Thursday at 95.82 dollars a barrel. West Texas Intermediate, the American benchmark, gained 2.6 percent to settle at 88.74 dollars a barrel for its December contract. In early Asian trading on Friday, Brent was changing hands at about 95.95 dollars a barrel, holding just below the 96-dollar mark, while West Texas Intermediate traded just under 89 dollars. The gains came after both benchmarks had spent the first part of the week moving in the opposite direction, and they left oil on course for a second straight weekly loss even after Thursday’s jump.
Brent Crude Jumps as Trump Rules Out an Iran Deal
The trigger was a post the president published on Thursday on Truth Social, his own social media platform. In it, he dismissed the idea that Washington still needed to reach an agreement with Tehran, and he framed the American position as one of strength rather than negotiation. “We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!” he wrote.
The reference to the strait was to the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula through which a large share of the world’s seaborne oil passes every day. Control of that passage has been one of the central stakes of the war since the United States and Israel launched their surprise attack on Iran on February 28. The president’s claim that Washington now holds the strait was read by traders as a signal that the administration sees little reason to trade away its leverage at the negotiating table.
The post cut directly against the direction of American policy only days earlier. On Monday, November 9, the president had met with the prime minister of Qatar, a mediator between Washington and Tehran, and said he did not expect airstrikes on Iran to be necessary for the time being. Earlier in the week he had also said that further American military action appeared unlikely while efforts to resolve the conflict continued. Thursday’s message pointed the other way, suggesting the war could end without any agreement to cap Tehran’s nuclear weapons programme, even though the president had repeatedly argued that the programme was the reason the United States and Israel began their attacks in the first place.
Markets reacted to the shift in tone before they reacted to anything else. Brent crude had touched a six-month high at the end of October, but it had since slipped as oil flows from the region recovered and as traders grew optimistic that the Democrats’ victory in the midterm elections would speed up an end to the conflict. Thursday’s rally reversed part of that slide in a single day, even though the broader trend for the month remained downward: West Texas Intermediate was down around 16 percent in November, and Brent had fallen nearly 20 percent over the same stretch, despite crude futures still being up nearly 60 percent so far this year.
JD Vance News: The Chief Negotiator Is Moved Off the File
The same post carried a second message that mattered just as much to the market, and to the diplomacy. The president said he had told Vice President JD Vance to turn his attention away from Iran and toward domestic issues instead, directing him to focus on what the president described as corruption and crime in cities and states run by Democrats. Vance had been Washington’s chief negotiator with Tehran, and the instruction removed the administration’s lead diplomat from the file at the very moment the talks were at their most delicate.
Vance was widely seen as one of the more pragmatic figures in the administration on Iran, and Tehran had come to view him in the same way. He had led the negotiations that produced a memorandum of understanding in June, an agreement that briefly paused the war and allowed shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to resume before it collapsed. He was backed in those talks by the president’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, and as recently as late October he had written a letter to Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, as regional mediators redoubled their efforts to bridge the gaps between the two sides.
Analysts said the reassignment carried two signals at once. The first was aimed at home. Nasser Hadian, a professor of international relations at the University of Tehran, said the president was mainly signalling a confrontation with the Democrats after their sweeping victories against the governing Republican Party in the midterm elections. The second signal was aimed at Tehran: reaching a deal is no longer a priority, and the person known to have a relatively softer stance on Iran has been redirected to other issues. Decision-makers in Iran are now weighing what that means, and analysts said the change could increase the chances of renewed conflict, because the main channel for a negotiated settlement has been weakened just when it was needed most.
The reassignment does not end the contacts between the two sides. Mediated contacts are continuing, and the president’s envoys Witkoff and Kushner remain involved in the diplomacy. But Vance was the official who carried the file day to day, and his departure leaves the negotiation without its most visible American face. Some analysts noted that he could return to the file if progress appears. Vance himself has blamed the war, and the economic disruption it caused, for the Republicans’ sweeping losses in last week’s midterm elections, and he told the CBS programme 60 Minutes that he was not looking to escalate the war.
Iran War News: The Conflict Behind the Market Move
The market’s reaction cannot be understood without the fighting that sits behind it. The war has now run for more than eight months, and its pressure on oil shipping has been building again in recent weeks. Late on Thursday, attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure escalated, and shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz threatened global oil flows. Attacks by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels have also intensified, adding to the sense that the conflict is widening rather than narrowing.
The scale of the threat to shipping is visible in the numbers. Risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft counted 36 confirmed attacks on commercial vessels in October in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman alone, the highest single-month tally since the war began. Each attack adds to the insurance costs and delays faced by tankers moving through the region, and each one reminds traders that the route carrying a large share of the world’s oil is not safe. When the president said the United States holds the strait, the market heard both a claim of control and an admission that the strait remains the centre of the contest.
Tehran, for its part, has set out terms that Washington has so far not accepted. Iran has maintained that the United States must lift its naval blockade and lift economic sanctions before direct peace talks can take place, and it has laid out seven conditions for a ceasefire, including an end to the blockade, the lifting of sanctions, and an explicit announcement that the war is over, along with a clear sequence for concessions on both sides. Those demands have been relayed through Qatari mediators. So far, the gap between what Tehran is asking for and what Washington is prepared to offer has not closed, and the president’s latest post widened it further.
Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said in an interview with Al Mayadeen television that Iran will not remove enriched nuclear material from its territory, underlining how far apart the two sides remain on the nuclear question itself.
Oil Prices Today: The Wider Market Picture
Thursday’s rally in crude did not happen in isolation. The same session that lifted oil also pushed American government bond yields higher, as traders priced in the inflationary effect of more expensive energy. The yield on the ten-year Treasury note rose 11.4 basis points to 5.102 percent, while the policy-sensitive two-year yield climbed 13.7 basis points to 4.862 percent and the thirty-year yield traded 8.4 basis points higher at 5.433 percent. Gold, which often moves in the opposite direction to risk appetite, plunged 2.6 percent on Thursday to settle at 3,886.16 dollars an ounce, and European natural gas surged 10.3 percent to 95.60 euros per megawatt-hour.
The rally also ran against the grain of the week’s American supply data. Figures from the United States Energy Information Administration showed that American crude inventories rose by 4.7 million barrels last week, the largest weekly build since early August, a number that would normally weigh on prices. Oil pared its gains during the session after that report, then moved higher again as the president’s post took hold, a sign of how much the political news outweighed the supply data on the day.
Analysts were split on how far the rally can run. Ryan McKay, a senior commodities strategist at TD Securities, said Brent crude remains within the bank’s measure of fair value, and that some risk premium could be priced back in if prospects for a deal deteriorate further and tanker attacks continue. Goldman Sachs recently raised its oil price forecasts, citing the growing risks to global supplies, and warned that Brent crude could climb to 140 dollars a barrel in 2027 if oil production across the Gulf region remains significantly below its 2025 average.
That forecast is a reminder that the market’s recent optimism about a settlement was itself the exception, not the rule. For most of this year, crude has traded with a war premium built in, and the premium only began to drain away in November as traders bet on diplomacy. The president’s post has put some of that premium back, but not all of it: even after Thursday’s jump, both benchmarks remained on track for a second consecutive weekly decline.
What Happens Next
The next test for the market will be whether the diplomacy revives or stays frozen. The envoys Witkoff and Kushner remain engaged, and the Qatari mediators are still carrying messages, so the channel has not closed entirely. But the president has now said publicly that a deal is not needed, and he has taken his chief negotiator off the file, which makes any near-term breakthrough harder to imagine. If the mediated contacts produce nothing, and if attacks on shipping continue at October’s pace, traders will keep adding risk premium to the price of every barrel that has to pass through the Gulf.
The other test is on the water itself. The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint that ties this war to the price of petrol, heating oil and jet fuel around the world, and the 36 vessel attacks recorded in October show how exposed it is. A further escalation there would push prices higher faster than any statement from Washington, while a quiet week would let the market drift back toward the supply picture, where American inventories are building and Gulf flows have been recovering. For American consumers, the effect is modest but real: oil near 96 dollars a barrel sets the floor from which petrol prices move, and it feeds into the inflation figures the Federal Reserve watches when it sets interest rates.
Source: The Wall Street Journal