By Paul Sankey
Published on March 29, 2026 at 8:19 PM
Greetings, The situation in Gulf War III is actually normalizing. The problem however, is that the “new normal” is total Iranian control of both the Strait of Hormuz, and likely the Bab El Mandeb. There is increasing recognition that with Netanyahu strengthened in Israeli domestic politics by Gulf War III (war approval is ~85%), and President Trump weakened — facing a 59% overall disapproval rating and 64% disapproval on his handling of the conflict—the main …
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By Paul Sankey
Published on March 8, 2026 at 7:56 PM
Well, that was quite a week. And there it is, oil through $100/bbl on the Tokyo open. It is blatantly clear that the Trump Administration had zero, nada, nothing, as contingency plan for Iran declaring the Strait of Hormuz shut to transit. Even now, their $20bn insurance knee jerk response has been completely ineffective. We are facing the largest overall oil & gas volume outage of my career, which started in 1990, Gulf War 1. …
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By Paul Sankey
Published on March 7, 2026 at 3:44 PM
We covered Qatar in a note & conference call in this first week of Gulf War III. Who controls the Strait of Hormuz? Iran within the China axis, with Russian support. As of today. Arguably the US needs boots on the ground to control the Iranian side of the Straits. On Friday the head of QatarGas and Qatar energy minister Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi went front page in the Financial Times to highlight the sustained outage …
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