The current political condition of the world does not guarantee the U.S. or Europe’s unconditional supremacy but it even makes their supremacy fully fragile and even the tiniest country in the world is looking for a pretext to skirt the U.S. policies in any part of the world. Although the U.S. and especially the White House and Donald Trump’s gang are trying to increase the U.S. oil sale at the expense of imposing sanctions on Iran and Venezuela by frightening the countries but this trick is not effective any long today for two reasons: First, majority of the world, namely around 70%, are against the U.S. hegemonic power and accepting such a process and decision by considering it as some sort of voting for dictatorship; Secondly, the oil and energy price is not able to ignore a producer like Iran which is and has been an active member of the OPEC and it cannot tolerate it. Cutting Iran’s oil production can be considered as a move to create capacity for a hike in the U.S. oil production because currently the U.S. oil production has increased from 8.2m to 12.5m barrels per day and the amount will reach 13.4m barrels next year. It means the increase of 5.2m barrels of oil in four years which was actually predictable.

IRAN NEWS NATIONAL DESK

The economic policy of Trump for compensating the decline in the economic growth in recent years signifies that the U.S. oil sale should reach its full capacity. To this end, it is necessary that exports of some countries should be cut. Consequently, some countries have been sanctioned like oil exporting countries of Iran and Venezuela. If we have a glance at the statistics of oil shipments, we find out that the U.S. oil and gas exports to South Korea have quadrupled in 2018.

These statistics show that the U.S. oil sale to South Korea has jumped from $1.5b in 2017 to $6.75b in 2018. It is expected that South Korea’s imports from the U.S. in the early months of 2019 to reach 18m barrels of oil and 900,000 tons of gas. This amount is almost four times more than South Korea’s imports in 2018.This increase of oil and gas exports to South Korea is because Donald Trump intends to compensate trade deficit of the U.S. with its major trade partners and to this end, it will export to those countries more than what it imports. Oil and gas exports is the major part of this strategy. The 14-billion-dollar trade surplus of the U.S. with South Korea in 2018 has been the lowest one since 2010 and declined around 22.5 percent comparing to the preceding year which was $18b. This decline in the trade balance of the U.S.-South Korea has been because of zeroing oil exports of Iran to South Korea while the U.S. replaced Iran. So it is evident that all political pressures on the countries for materializing the U.S. demand is an economic pressure rather than a political one. The most important reason that world people even countries do not tolerate these sanctions is that they consider the U.S. as a “liar and hypocrite”.

Hamid Reza Naghashian