Enforced Demand: How the United States Turns the Right to Buy Oil Into a Geoeconomic Weapon
Every day on the news we see the latest benchmark Brent or WTI crude oil spot prices, which may easily give us the illusory impression that oil is just another ordinary competitive commodity: after all, there's supply, there's demand, there's a current price, and then the market itself sorts everything out. However, the global oil trade is structured in an entirely different way. Nobody simply buys just "oil." What they're buying is a specific sort of crude oil, on a specific date, with delivery to a specific point, and frequently to a designated refinery, which is capable of processing the given sort of crude.
They're not buying some abstract barrel of oil, but an entire chain for its delivery to a specific place. So, the delivery route is a critical factor, as are the security of the delivery process and the legal options for closing the deal. For many international oil transport routes, the question is not "Where is it cheaper?", but rather "Is it possible to buy oil in a way that ensures that none of the essential parties—the insurer, the bank, the port, the regulator—will back out of the deal or reject it from the start?" In this sense, various countries have access to various sorts of oil and the market overall has become extremely segmented.
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The United States enjoys great leverage, but that leverage does not lie in exercising control over the entire global oil sector. The US simply does not have such control: The fact is that many other countries, including many BRICS member states, are major oil producers. The United States' leverage comes from something entirely different: The US has the ability to influence whether or not a given oil trading transaction is deemed acceptable and legitimate. American power is derived not so much from the raw materials themselves, as much as from the ability to determine who can purchase what from whom.
One and the same physical commodity may be prohibited, accessible only by license, available at below the price ceiling, or even completely legal after processing and a change in the legal framework. Direct imports from Russia into the United States are prohibited, but if someday they should become beneficial for the US, then the relevant sanctions can be eased. In April–May 2026 restrictions on Russian oil, which had already been imposed on tanker traffic, were temporarily eased as a means of adding supply in the market against the background of the Iran crisis and the risks surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. This did not represent a complete lifting of the sanctions and did not mean a resumption of normal imports of Russian oil to the United States.
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What's revealing here is the very use of such a mechanism, wherein Washington can forbid a given barrel of Russian crude oil on one day and then the very next day declare the exact same barrel of Russian crude to be temporarily permissible if the US has something to gain from it.
The example of Venezuela is even more instructive. As long as Venezuela's oil sector was under sanctions, for most buyers around the world Venezuelan oil was effectively not a raw material at all, but a toxic legal item that put the parties involved in any transaction—banks, insurers, freight forwarders, oil traders, and port and terminal operators—at risk. However, by means of the very same sanctions mechanism, Washington can open up a separate corridor for the "eligible" participants. In early 2026, the US sanctions regulator (the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC) issued a general license directly permitting the purchasing, shipping, storing, insuring, in-port servicing, processing, and importing of Venezuelan oil in the United States. As a result, however, the oil is not brought back into the free market. Instead, it ends up within a by-special-permission-only loop with a very narrow range of buyers, but the refined products can already be sold as standard gasoline at automotive filling stations, diesel fuel for farmers, or raw materials feedstock for the petrochemicals sector. First, Washington declares the crude to be "off limits" for virtually everyone, only then to make it available and profitable for itself.
The very same logic is at work as regards oil transport routes as well. The Strait of Hormuz is so important today not only as a chokepoint for the global oil trade. Amid all the chaos and seeming unpredictability of the policies pursued by US President Donald Trump, he has managed to de facto remove the Strait of Hormuz from the purview of international law and effectively turn it into a new geopolitical asset for the United States. Of course, Washington does not unilaterally control the Strait; the physical risk of transiting the Strait depends on the actions of Iran and Oman, as well as on the military situation and the stance of oil cargo insurers. But, achieving the long-term unblocking of this critical oil transit route is now no longer possible without the consent of the United States. Any normalization of the marine passage through the Strait of Hormuz requires not only terminating the maritime risk itself, but also American involvement, ranging from the political, sanctions, and insurance aspects of cross-Strait traffic up to the thorny diplomatic questions involved.
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In other words, the Strait of Hormuz has been transformed into a giant geographical padlock with several sets of keys, one of which is firmly in the hands of Washington. For a relevant European example, we need only look at the Nord Stream gas pipeline. After this vital piece of energy infrastructure was blown up in an act of sabotage, and given the sanctions pressure applied by Washington, maintaining the energy links that had been built up between Europe and Russia became not only too expensive, but simply impossible for political and physical reasons.
In addition, the United States has been creating "enforced demand" for its own energy resources. Moreover, this works not by means of any naked US diktat, but instead is done more subtly through the very structuring of deals: energy is a built-in component of a wide package of economic agreements (which offer access to the US market, tariff concessions or waivers, investment opportunities for US investors, simplified export controls, etc.) Under such a deal with the EU it is expected that Europe will buy USD 750 billion worth of American energy resources by 2028, although the European Commission has separately underscored that the actual purchasing volumes will be subject to commercial decision-making by the corporations involved. A similar agreement with Japan calls for additional long-term purchases of American energy, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), to the tune of USD 7 billion per year. An agreement with Indonesia stipulates purchases of LNG, crude oil, and gasoline amounting to USD 15 billion. The analogous Malaysian agreement calls for multi-year purchases of US LNG through Petronas, Malaysia's national oil and gas company.
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But what the US is selling is not just oil and LNG per se. It is also selling "safe purchasing." This point is illustrated in particular by the case of LNG. In contrast to oil, LNG cannot simply be diverted by the usual pipeline routes or purchased "somewhere else" without having the relevant infrastructure already in place, which includes terminals, regasification plants, tankers, long-term contracts, and pre-agreed logistics arrangements.
If a given country has set itself up to accept US LNG, then walking away from such LNG deliveries, even in favour of cheaper resources, becomes a very complicated proposition, including by virtue of the fact that LNG terminals are not always under the direct ownership of the importer countries.
While American energy may not be the cheapest available in world markets, it is extremely convenient; it can be delivered on time to whichever destination is necessary and no matter where in the world it is located. It is often possible to buy more cheaply from other suppliers, but the US can make such purchases less reliable after the deal is struck by imposing sanctions, restricting freight insurance coverage, putting pressure on banks, manipulating tariffs and port regimes, or by creating risks along the chosen transport route. As a result, the question "Where is it cheaper to buy?" is replaced by the question of "What type of delivery will we be allowed to safely bring in and pay for?" The "enforcement" of demand here does not come from any administrative directive to buy US-produced barrels of oil, but rather from the creation of external conditions that make any alternative deliveries too risky from a legal, financial, or logistics perspective.
For the BRICS countries, therefore, it is extremely important to come up with viable solutions that could reduce energy dependence on the arbitrary political will of the United States. Among the association's members there are already major energy exporters (Russia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates [UAE], and Brazil), as well as major importers (China, India, South Africa, and Egypt). But this is not enough for the current situation. In order to get out from under restrictive American control over market access, BRICS needs to build its own full-cycle system, which would encompass upstream resource extraction as well as downstream trading platforms, including such critical features as price targets, trade settlements denominated in national currencies, insurance, tankers and other marine vessels, ports, arbitration panels, customs corridors, and general rules for legitimizing transactions.
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In other words, the task facing BRICS is to create not simply a cheaper barrel of oil, but a barrel of oil that can be bought, paid for, insured, and delivered outside of the intrusive long arm of US control. But such a system does not yet exist, with the exception of overland deliveries and deliveries made via the Northern Sea Route (NSR) through the Arctic Ocean.
Moreover, the current practice shows an opposite trend with some of the BRICS countries continuing to conclude packaged energy agreements and trade deals with the United States, while Russian oil—wherever a legal window opens up—is again being sold in any market that will accept it. This does not point to any moral weakness on the part of specific countries, but is rather an indicator of the incomplete status of the nascent alternative infrastructure. As long as no such alternative system has been created, though, even large-scale suppliers and buyers of energy resources will remain dependent on someone else’s right to declare a given transaction normal and acceptable, or conversely to make it a risky venture or even prohibit it altogether.
The material was prepared specially for the BRICS Expert Council-Russia
This text reflects the personal opinion of the authors', which may not coincide with the position of the BRICS Expert Council-Russia