The week in energy: The oil chokepoint | Financial Times

The week in energy: The oil chokepoint | Financial Times:

When Hillary Clinton was trying unsuccessfully to win the Democratic party’s presidential nomination in 2008, her campaign ran a famous ad that asked: “It’s 3am, and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” After his last-minute decision to call off planned strikes against Iranian targets on Thursday evening, we now have a bit more of a sense of how President Donald Trump responds in that kind of crisis.

As the president described it on Twitter on Friday morning, US forces were “cocked and loaded” — with aircraft reportedly already en route towards their targets — when he asked how many people were likely to be killed in the strikes. When he was told that it was 150, Mr Trump said, he stopped the strike 10 minutes before it was scheduled to go ahead, because it would not have been “proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone”.

Despite the president’s decision not to escalate the situation, tensions are still running high after a US reconnaissance drone was shot down by Iran over the Gulf on Thursday. Oil prices have been rising, with Brent crude ending the week up about $4 a barrel at just over $65, reflecting fears that the confrontation could turn into a conflict that will disrupt crude flows out of the Gulf.