Does anyone even pay attention?
We are now in the fifth year of the most destructive war in Europe since the Second World War. It involves not only a former superpower, but one of the three largest oil producers on Earth.
At the same time, the war involving Israel continues to produce an almost unprecedented disruption around the Red Sea, making one of the world’s most important transport routes more difficult, more expensive and more dangerous to use.
We are also months into the war involving Iran, with the conflict threatening to close, or at least severely restrict, one of the planet’s major arteries for the movement of oil and gas.
And these are only the largest events.
There is a long list of lesser conflicts, political crises, sanctions, disruptions and geopolitical pressure points scattered across the world. By almost any reasonable measure, 2026 is becoming one of the most crisis-ridden and war-ridden years in recent history.
And yet the oil price barely moves.
Brent and WTI remain below $90 a barrel.
Not $150.
Not $200.
Not even three digits.
Below $90.
That is remarkable.
And it becomes even more remarkable when we remember that we are looking at nominal prices in an environment of substantial inflation. In real terms, therefore, today’s oil price is considerably less impressive than the headline number suggests.
Yet despite wars, disrupted shipping routes, sanctions, geopolitical confrontation and the repeated threat of supply interruptions, the market refuses to push oil through the psychologically important $100 threshold.
This tells us something.
We should probably listen.
There is a tendency to interpret every geopolitical crisis through the assumption that energy supplies must therefore become scarce. A refinery is attacked, a tanker route is threatened, an oil-producing country becomes involved in a war, and the immediate conclusion is that oil prices must inevitably explode.
But markets do not price fear.
They price supply and demand.
And if the price refuses to rise substantially despite this extraordinary accumulation of geopolitical risk, then perhaps the underlying physical market is telling us something that the political narrative does not want to hear.
There is simply a great deal of oil available.
Perhaps more than the world actually needs.
If global oil supply were genuinely approaching a structural shortage, this is precisely the sort of environment in which we would expect prices to react violently. A combination of major wars, threats to production and transport, and uncertainty surrounding some of the world’s most important energy corridors should produce an unmistakable supply premium.
It doesn’t.
That does not mean supply disruptions are irrelevant. They can still create regional shortages, temporary spikes and severe problems for particular consumers.
But there is a difference between disruption and structural scarcity.
And the oil price is increasingly suggesting that the latter simply isn’t there.
In fact, there is a rather simple thought experiment.
If oil were genuinely becoming scarce, $200 a barrel would not look extraordinary under these circumstances. It might even look conservative.
Instead, we are struggling to get sustainably beyond $100.
At some point, we have to stop explaining this away.
The oil market may be telling us something remarkably simple:
The world has more oil than it really needs.
And perhaps that is why, despite everything happening around it, the price refuses to panic.