US Issues 30-Day Global Waiver for Stranded Russian Oil After Hormuz Closure

Washington’s volte-face echoes the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1973 Arab oil embargo, when Western powers also relaxed political taboos to secure barrels once chokepoints shut and prices spiked. Structurally, the decision reveals the limits of sanctions as a long-term coercive tool: when 20 % of world supply is trapped by the Strait of Hormuz war, energy security eclipses geopolitics, even if it hands Moscow a marginal windfall. It also underscores a decade-long trend toward a fragmented, bargain-seeking oil market in which swing demand—from India, China and assorted “permit countries”—can quickly reroute Russian flows outside the G7 price-cap system. A century from now this episode may be viewed as another data point in the waning ability of any single power to police commodity flows, and in the gradual decoupling of security alliances from energy trade, much as the collapse of the Bretton Woods gold peg in 1971 signaled an irreversible monetary realignment.