#加密市场观察 Oil market outlook: multiple parties’ interests converge—only one path remains to break the deadlock downward

Oil has rapidly fallen back from above $94, and is currently ranging around the $80 level and looks increasingly unstable—validating the earlier judgment: the uptrend in oil prices driven by Middle East geopolitical conflict can no longer be sustained, and rapid pullbacks have become the market’s choice.

From a global perspective, the current standoff over shipping lanes has reached a predicament where all sides lose: continued lane deterrence and de facto navigation being obstructed no longer provide positive returns for any participant.
1. For the United States: In the initial phase of the conflict, a controllable level of tension and rising oil prices were tools for the U.S. to reshape the global order—using high oil prices to pressure industrial economies such as those in Europe, Central Asia, and Japan, while driving safe-haven capital and industry to return to the U.S., thereby consolidating its economic advantages. But the dividends from this strategy have already been fully realized, and further pushing up oil prices can hardly attract incremental capital. At the same time, the backlash from high oil prices is beginning to show: higher domestic consumption and logistics costs, suppression of residents’ demand, rising inflation, limiting the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut rates—oil prices staying high will also impact people’s livelihoods and public sentiment, bringing political pressure. The Iran conflict and high oil prices have gradually shifted from usable strategic leverage to net negative assets.
2. For Gulf oil-producing countries: Even if oil prices are higher, with navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Mand Strait restricted, oil tankers don’t dare to sail, and crude oil cannot be exported and sold smoothly. There is demand without volume, and actual export revenue is instead harmed. Long-term lockdowns are effectively the same as voluntarily locking up their own sources of funds.
3. For Iran: Long-term standoffs over shipping lanes will further increase pressure on the domestic economy; a blockade can only serve as a short-term bargaining chip and cannot be a long-term survival solution. The longer the conflict drags on, the more internal livelihood pressures keep rising.
4. For energy-importing economies such as the European Union and Japan: High oil prices directly raise imported inflation, forcing expectations of further rate hikes to warm up, which further weakens already fragile real economies and increases the risk of an economic downturn.

With all parties’ interests damaged and incentives converging, it means the old game plan of “maintaining tight shipping lanes and continuously stoking panic over blockades” has already failed, and the situation has entered a phase where the deadlock must be broken.

In the future, only the most realistic one-way path remains: gradually easing the standoff and reopening navigation through the straits. The geopolitical risk premium will continue to be squeezed out, and oil prices will enter a downward channel. Of course, in the short term there will still be news that brings shock pulses, but the medium- to long-term trend is already clear: when the conflict brings more harm than good to everyone, the optimal solution to the game is to lift the blockade and return to normal. $XTIUSD ‌