Trump claims US is 'totally independent of the Middle East.' He's overlooking how global energy markets work.

“We don’t have to be there — we don’t need their oil, we don’t need anything they have.”

These sentiments — which Trump has expressed many times in recent weeks — are a window into his worldview and his aim to make a clean exit from the war in Iran in two to three weeks.

But his assertions that the fate of the US won’t be impacted by disruptions to Middle East oil supply overlook key goods that come from the region and global energy interdependence, which anyone who has filled up a gas tank in the last month is all too aware of.

Trump is correct that the US doesn’t “need” oil from the region, as the US is a net exporter of both crude oil and natural gas.

But Americans will feel the effects of a global supply shortage no matter what.

The global nature of oil markets means that a shortage anywhere translates into rising prices not just in Asia, where most oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz is sent, but around the world. Around a fifth of the world’s supplies pass through the 21-mile-wide waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

Net exporter status “has essentially no impact on the prices Americans pay at the pump,” Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told PolitiFact in a recent fact-check of the Trump administration’s contentions around this issue.

Americans are now paying an average of $4.08 for a gallon of gasoline, according to the American Automobile Association, a jump of more than a dollar since hostilities began.

Trump is also overlooking that while the US is a net exporter of crude oil, it remains an importer of refined gasoline in many regions.

Ben Werschkul · Washington Correspondent