> Saudi Arabia is a counter example to your point: Iran has a considerable amount of oil but because of unrelated geopolitical circumstances, it can't easily sell that to the global market like KSA can. That imbalance has little to do the nature of oil and a lot to do with the KSA-United States' petrodollar and arms deals.
It has little to do with oil and much to do with Trump making the Iran deal a campaign issue and therefore doing everything he can to pressure them into renegotiating. The outlier is Iran rather than Saudi Arabia. Russia and Venezuela aren't having any trouble selling their oil either. Moreover, as Iran's production is down, oil prices are up. This, ironically, actually hurts the Saudis too, because it makes oil less competitive against alternatives in the short term, encouraging faster adoption of alternatives that suppress oil prices in the long term.
And Iran's production is only down because of US-led international sanctions, which clearly falls into the category of market power. But they're also the reason the US can't go after the Saudis at the same time, because until we transition away from oil (which takes time), the US economy is still highly sensitive to oil prices, which are already higher due to Iran. The Saudis are actually doing Trump (not to say themselves) a favor by increasing production during the sanctions on Iran.
Trump is not an important player in this saga (yet, maybe after 2 full terms, if he would get reelected, he will have more of an impact). Iran has been sanctioned and prevented from selling their oil to global markets easily (thus crippling Iran's income and economy) for a long time before Trump and through multiple presidents from both parties. Sure, Trump made the Iran deal a campaign issue but this goes decades back.
Trump is clearly the impetus behind the current international sanctions. They had previously been removed by the UN under the Iran nuclear deal in 2016.
Yes but it is continuation of a long trend that goes back decades and many presidencies. The Obama and Iran deal was a deviation from standard US policy of "Iran bad, Saudis good". So I'm just saying Trump has basically returned to normal US policy on this front, it's not some extreme change of direction.
It has little to do with oil and much to do with Trump making the Iran deal a campaign issue and therefore doing everything he can to pressure them into renegotiating. The outlier is Iran rather than Saudi Arabia. Russia and Venezuela aren't having any trouble selling their oil either. Moreover, as Iran's production is down, oil prices are up. This, ironically, actually hurts the Saudis too, because it makes oil less competitive against alternatives in the short term, encouraging faster adoption of alternatives that suppress oil prices in the long term.
And Iran's production is only down because of US-led international sanctions, which clearly falls into the category of market power. But they're also the reason the US can't go after the Saudis at the same time, because until we transition away from oil (which takes time), the US economy is still highly sensitive to oil prices, which are already higher due to Iran. The Saudis are actually doing Trump (not to say themselves) a favor by increasing production during the sanctions on Iran.